[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 168 (Wednesday, November 19, 2003)]
[Senate]
[Pages S15111-S15123]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




              ENERGY POLICY ACT OF 2003--CONFERENCE REPORT

  Mr. FRIST. Mr. President, at this point, I move to proceed to the 
conference report to accompany H.R. 6, the Energy Policy Act.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report.
  The assistant legislative clerk read as follows:
  The committee of conference on the disagreeing votes of the two 
Houses on the amendment of the Senate to the bill (H.R. 6), to enhance 
energy conservation and research and development, to provide for 
security and diversity in the energy supply for the American people, 
and for other purposes, having met, have agreed that the House recede 
from its disagreement to the amendment of the Senate, and agree to the 
same, with an amendment, signed by a majority of the conferees on the 
part of both Houses.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question is on agreeing to the motion.
  The motion was agreed to.
  (The text of the conference report is printed in the proceedings of 
the House in the Record of November 17, 2003.)
  Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I want to first say to the Senate, a 
little over a year ago the Senate changed committees and I had the 
luxury of moving from the Budget Committee to the Energy Committee--
perhaps not a luxury in everyone's sense but from my standpoint it was, 
indeed, a great opportunity and a tremendous change for me. I took that 
opportunity with a great deal of relish and enthusiasm and decided I 
would do the very best I could to produce an energy policy, broad 
based, for this country.
  The House agreed on that conference report yesterday by an 
overwhelming vote. That means that one body has looked at that 
conference report and, with bipartisan support, said this is a good 
policy for the United States to follow in the future, and it will do 
good things for our people and for our growth and development.
  The United States of America spends annually $440 billion, roughly--
and that is on the low side--on energy. That energy is the underpinning 
of our economy and is a principal component of our quality of life. For 
most Americans, the complex system of energy production and 
distribution is something they take for granted. When they turn on the 
lights every morning, they give absolutely no thought to the turbines 
powered by coal, gas, oil, hydropower, or nuclear power spinning around 
to produce that electricity. Only during hurricanes or blackouts are 
they reminded of how complex the system of transmission lines is that 
brings that power to their homes and to their businesses sometimes 
across many States.

  Americans almost never give a thought to the fact that beyond the 
complex physical system that produces and generates our energy is a 
massively complex system of rules and regulations. These rules and 
regulations govern, one, who pays for power and who pays for the 
powerplants and transmission lines; two, how the emission from the 
plants is regulated; three, who can own them; four, how the fuels can 
be shipped; and five, what costs can be charged and to whom.
  Some of my colleagues are critical of this legislation. Who would not 
expect that to be? This bill is put together by the House and the 
Senate, each with different ideas about what they think is the best way 
to solve our problems, if we can. Clearly, each body has strong 
feelings about certain issues that they match up when we attempt to 
move ahead in some positive direction.
  Some will get up here in the next couple of days and argue about some 
of the provisions in this bill. I say right now to the Senate and to 
the American people, some of the provisions that will be argued I agree 
with. Some of the provisions I don't agree with; that is, some that 
people suggest should be changed in this bill. But I remind everyone 
that we didn't get to this point without giving and taking, without 
putting and taking back, without arguing one way and then not winning 
it and having to go the other way. I suggest that everybody in this 
body knows--and if they don't right now, they will soon--that across 
this land there are millions of farmers, who farm all kinds of 
products, who are either up here on the Hill or on the telephones 
talking about passing this bill because it has a giant provision to 
convert corn and related products of our country over time to ethanol 
which will, in turn, be used in our automobiles in lieu of gasoline 
that comes from crude oil.
  We in the Senate, I say to my good friend, were led in those 
negotiations for ethanol by the distinguished Senator from Iowa, Mr. 
Grassley. He has been a staunch advocate, along with the minority 
leader, Senator Daschle, for a major American ethanol program. I can 
tell my colleagues that in negotiating with the House, they weren't as 
excited about the program, the project, or the size as we were under 
the leadership of Senator Grassley. So to get what we wanted, we had to 
ask them what they wanted. They didn't wait around for us to ask. That 
is sort of a way of saying it. They told us what they needed. In other 
words, they said: You want that, we want something.
  I will tell my colleagues shortly of the numerous provisions they 
wanted that are in this bill that brought us forth today with the most 
significant program for farmers and the production of ethanol to take 
the place of crude oil that we have ever had in this country.
  Let me proceed with my original thoughts and then move over to the 
subject matter which has brought a number of people into a state of 
opposition to this bill. Let me complete a few thoughts.
  The Congressional Budget Office estimates that this bill will cost 
$26 billion over 10 years. Some people have much bigger numbers, but 
what they are talking about in those numbers is not where we have 
obligated the expenditure of funds. They are authorized. They are to be 
funded, if ever, later. They are statements of policy, but not 
statements of policy accompanied by programs that must be paid for.

  What I am talking about is $26 billion that has to do with the taxes 
that are included in this bill. That averages $2.6 billion a year. 
People can talk about

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how much we are spending and who we are giving it to, and I remind them 
one more time, America at work, day by day, spends about $440 billion 
annually on electricity. We, who were charged in our committee with 
making things better for the future, said let's have some production 
tax credits and the like to bring on more energy and cause more 
alternatives. If we took that number of $2.6 billion per year on 
average, and then figure that up against $440 billion a year, it would 
seem to me that some might say: You didn't do enough; you can't move 
this system with that little tiny bit of money.
  I will, before we are finished, calculate this over 10 years. I will 
take $440 billion times 10 and then the little bit we are spending, and 
the number will then be such a tiny number that people will wonder 
whether we can really get much done. I think we can.
  In exchange for that investment of about one-half of 1 percent, in 
summary, for there is time to go into detail, we will diversify our 
resources of electricity to build new, clean coal-burning powerplants, 
solar facilities, relicense our hydropower, and build new geothermal 
plants and, yes, perhaps build some nuclear powerplants.
  For the same one-half of 1 percent, we will impose mandatory 
reliability standards on our transmission systems to ensure that 
blackouts, such as the one in August, will not occur again.
  This legislation will also streamline the permitting process for oil 
and gas production on Federal lands. I want to be clear that this 
legislation does not change the standards. We are not reducing the 
requirements to produce energy on Federal properties, but we require 
Federal agencies to coordinate so that the regulatory process is more 
straightforward. I would think anybody would expect that of us in these 
days when we have shortages and when we have resources of our own.
  This bill did not shy away from controversy. Some of the most 
difficult issues we faced were the regional differences on how to 
regulate electricity generation and transmission. This Nation is 
divided on the issue. If they are not divided, it is because they don't 
know the issue. But if they knew the issue, they would be divided, and 
that is unavoidable.
  As I have said before, if I could have written four different laws, 
cutting our country into four pieces, we could have provided each 
region of the country its own set of laws. But we cannot do that.
  There is one America, not four. We were asked to write a reform of 
the Federal Power Act for the whole country. So without the luxury of 
doing it in pieces, we think we have achieved a fair middle ground.
  In exchange for compromise, all market participants can now conduct 
their business understanding what rules and regulations will be 
applicable. I believe that certainty will allow new capital to enter 
the electricity transmission business and encourage new construction 
and thereby create a more reliable transmission grid.
  In some cases, I wish we could have done more. I think it is known 
that I support the opening of ANWR. I wish we could have had it in 
here, but we know the bill could not have passed with it. In addition, 
I wish we could have inventoried the resources of the Outer Continental 
Shelf, just to know what we own, but the House would not hear of that 
either. However, to the extent possible, the conference report avoids 
those two issues and issues of that type.
  There are some issues this conference report contains that concern my 
colleagues, and I have heard much about them already. I want to take a 
visit to one of those.
  First, there is an issue that is called MTBE. Those provisions were 
not in the Senate bill but the House was adamant about the provision. 
Similarly, the House insisted on an amendment called the bump-up 
provision. They made a case and then they voted again on that case on 
the floor of the House and repeated their support of it overwhelmingly. 
In due course, if we want a discussion of it, we can have it.
  While these provisions are controversial, I am convinced the policy 
behind them is sound, and I will discuss them in detail as we debate 
each provision.
  This bill is not just about producing energy. To the extent we can, 
we try to save energy. Some wish we could have done something more 
radical, such as imposing very high CAFE standards for automobiles. 
That continues to come up when we are asked how much gasoline are we 
going to save and how much oil will we import, how much will that be 
reduced.
  I say, we will do whatever the Senate and/or the House would vote 
for, and everybody knows they will not vote for changes in the existing 
law with reference to automobiles. That is not a question of copping 
out, it is a question of taking the vote and finding there are not the 
votes.
  So for those who would like to say we should have done something in 
that area, I think it is fair to say they either know something none of 
us knows about--they have a secret weapon to get the votes--or they are 
just making a statement to make this effort look less effective.
  We know neither the House nor the Senate has the will to modify the 
CAFE standards to any significant degree. We have done everything else 
we could do short of that. I am a pragmatist, but I believe this bill 
will indicate we will go only so far and then we have to draw a line 
and say that is as far as we will go.
  We did what was politically feasible. We increase efficiency 
standards for appliances, Federal buildings, and we provide tax 
incentives to use fuel-efficient cars and to build energy-efficient 
buildings. Many of these are not new and have been espoused by others 
before me as part of an energy program, including many of them by 
Senator Bingaman heretofore.
  This bill is an investment. It will pay off in affordable, reliable 
energy that will underpin our economy. It will pay through savings we 
are going to enjoy from increased energy efficiency, and this bill is 
one-half of 1 percent investment in our economy and our future. I think 
it is worth it. There is no doubt in my mind that if we do this, the 
country will be much safer, much better off in the years to come. After 
all, if one takes on a job such as this, they can end up saying they at 
least have done that. Much more cannot be asked for.

  I wish to comment on MTBE. MTBE was a product authorized by the 
United States of America years ago to be used in the process of 
oxidation in this country. It was an acceptable product to be used in a 
regulated manner. Many companies did that. Some companies did not use 
it correctly and may have violated rules, may have been negligent, may 
have thrown it around, may have spilled it where it should not be, but 
the House had in mind--and we had no alternative but to agree in order 
to get the rest of this bill--that for those companies that produced a 
valid, legal product and used it validly and legally, they should not 
be liable if there are damages that are forthcoming.
  I might say to the Chair and all Senators, the same thing is going to 
apply to ethanol.
  Now, going back to MTBE, it is a prescribed product. The U.S. 
Government prescribed it and authorized it. This bill says if it is 
used improperly, the companies are liable. If it is used properly, this 
says lawsuits do not lie for damages.
  I have heard many Senators come to the floor and abhor lawsuits that 
seek damages from companies for products they produced that were legal 
and valid but some damage occurred to somebody through no fault of the 
product, of the production of the product or its proper use. I have 
heard Senators on my side of the aisle say it is time we stop those 
kinds of suits; those are lawyers just trying to attack, sue, and gain 
big settlements. In this case, we decided that for using the product 
improperly, lawsuits can maintain; for using it properly, lawsuits 
cannot be maintained.
  I am very sorry there are Senators in this room whose States either 
were or are ready to file lawsuits claiming damages. There is surely 
nothing new about that, for I am sure, just as sure as I am standing 
here, that if this does not become law, there will be hundreds of them 
filed across this land. I do not think they are justified under the 
theory I have expressed and the theory the House expressed to us. 
Nonetheless, it is probably one of the most contentious issues in this 
bill.
  I suggest that it seems to this Senator we ought to look at the 
overall bill. The overall bill--I cannot do justice to it in 8 minutes, 
but I can tell

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you one more time, in summary--will make America stronger, will 
minimize our dependence upon foreign products, in particular should 
make us less and less dependent upon the potential of foreign natural 
gas being needed in this great economy. We are moving rapidly in that 
direction.

  The last 15 powerplants in America were built with natural gas. If we 
build 15 or 20 more, just as certain as I am standing here, we will be 
importing gas from overseas. So we will just get out of the muddle of 
importing crude oil and we will have sat by and watched ourselves get 
back into the middle of importing natural gas.
  We have done everything we can, that we could come up with, that we 
could understand, that we could be informed on, that says America is 
going to produce as much natural gas as possible. As a matter of fact, 
things indeed could work out under this bill where Alaska--not ANWR but 
Alaska--could be selling natural gas to the lower 48 in large 
quantities.
  We have given some tax credits to companies that would do that. We 
are all hopeful that before too much time passes they will agree to get 
started.
  In addition, we have said there is a great deal of natural gas that 
lies off the shores of America in valid, not prohibited areas, very 
deep. We have said: Why isn't it getting produced? It is gas; we can 
use it; it is ours.
  The issue was it was too expensive. We chose in this bill to do what 
everybody on this conference overwhelmingly supported and that was to 
substantially reduce the royalty payments so as to make that abundant 
natural gas available. We believe with the passage of this bill they 
will be out there drilling for that, adding it to America's reserves, 
quickly.
  There are many more issues like that. I regret we could not produce a 
bill that would alter the current makeup of the use of fuel in America 
to produce energy and electricity without some stimulating and some 
production tax credits that would go to the industries that were not 
currently involved in producing energy for the American mix.
  Incidentally, in that regard, we produced a tax credit for wind and 
solar energy the likes of which will yield wind energy for America in 
abundance. I ran into a gentleman yesterday whose company produces 
windmills and wind energy for America. He thanked me for this bill. I 
don't know him. I didn't know him. I met him right there. He said he 
was visiting with a few Senators just to make sure they understood that 
with this bill wind and solar energy will continue as they are but will 
strive to move ahead exponentially.
  He said: I currently produce more wind energy than anyone, and we 
will be able to double and triple it with this bill because there is a 
good credit that is going to continue under this bill.
  Incidentally, for those who want that, you should know if this bill 
doesn't pass, that tax credit is gone. You can wish all you want about 
wind energy, if that is what you like, but by not passing this bill you 
will have wished that away. It will not be part of any mix for the 
future.
  In my judgment, when you add up all those pluses and you take all the 
negatives that are going to be spoken of here, you have a bill that 
deserves the U.S. Senate follow suit with the House and approve this 
bill.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Hampshire.
  Mr. GREGG. Parliamentary inquiry: I have not been able to locate this 
bill. I understand under rule XI the bill should be printed. I 
understand it may be printed in the House calendar, but I am interested 
to know whether or not printing in the House Journal represents having 
the bill before the Senate.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. I have been informed that the bill is printed 
in the Congressional Record.
  Mr. GREGG. Does that qualify as having the bill before the Senate for 
purposes of debate?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Yes, it does.
  Mr. GREGG. I thank the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oregon.
  Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, I thank Senator Bingaman for a chance to 
talk for a few minutes now. He has done a tremendous job in terms of 
advocating so many issues vital to the public, and I thank him for his 
thoughtfulness letting me begin this debate.
  Throughout this discussion, we have been told this legislation should 
not be looked at in terms of any particular provision, but it should be 
evaluated on its overall merit. We heard that yesterday. We heard that 
again today.
  We have been told that a conference report, particularly, is part of 
a give-and-take kind of discussion among various legislators and the 
various parties. Let me be real clear on that. If we are using the 
give-and-take measure as a barometer of evaluating an Energy bill, it 
ought to be clear that on this one, it is the public that is giving, 
and the powerful and the influential are taking a whole package of 
goodies.
  In my view, if you look at this legislation and its provisions that 
in effect begin with the ``get out of jail free'' card that is given to 
the MTBE producers, and you go on to this grab bag of tax goodies that 
are given to powerful interests, on every measure this overall 
legislation breaches the fundamental principles of good energy policy.
  Let me begin by talking about how it would affect our dependence on 
foreign oil. I believe reducing America's dependence on foreign oil is 
the dipstick for measuring an Energy bill. By that measure, this 
legislation is more than several quarts low. Thirty years ago the 
people of this country waited in long lines to fill up their tanks. 
They dreamed then of the day when the United States would no longer be 
dependent on foreign oil. Our citizens were asked to hold their 
thermostats down, and they said: What is going to be done to make this 
country and our electric supply less dependent on fossil fuels?
  We all understand our dependence on foreign oil has increased. Fossil 
fuels still provide more than 85 percent of all the energy produced in 
the United States. If you look at this legislation, what it does is it 
gives, on a virtual 5 to 1 ratio, most of the tax relief to those 
powerful interests that, in my view, have contributed mightily to the 
mess that our country is in.
  What is needed, of course, is a bold and aggressive approach in terms 
of clean and renewable energy. That is regrettably sorely lacking in 
this legislation.
  So the Senate is aware exactly of the numbers: Renewable energy in 
this legislation gets about $3.4 billion over the next 10 years. The 
combined credits for those involved in fossil fuels comes to well over 
$15 billion.
  I am of the view that when you look at this legislation and the fact 
that it does virtually nothing in terms of the key areas like 
transportation to promote conservation and help us find a way to a 
different energy future. This legislation simply does not meet the need 
at this time for a fresh approach in energy.
  What is so unfortunate about it is, I believe, a new approach on 
energy is just about the most patriotic thing our country could do. We 
all understand the role of oil and energy dependence with respect to 
global security. Yet this legislation is basically a tribute to 
yesteryear, a hodgepodge of subsidies for the well connected, and these 
huge energy conglomerates basically would get additional funds for what 
they are already doing.
  We tried over the last couple of days to amend the legislation. On 
all of the pro-consumer amendments, they were just gunned down almost 
in a perfunctory manner. The American people were given 2 days to scan 
1,100 pages, more than 40 percent of which by some estimates was brand 
new text that was not in either the House or the Senate bill. 
Essentially, we have 500 pages of brand new text that had not been seen 
by either the Senate or the House.
  For purposes of this opening discussion, let me talk about some of 
the areas about which I am particularly concerned.
  The people of my part of the country were shellacked by the Enron 
scams. One of our major utilities used up hundreds of thousands of 
dollars of scores of workers' retirement accounts. Now these workers 
have virtually nothing as a result of Enron. The conference report did 
virtually nothing to deal with the market manipulation that went on in 
the Enron case--all of the smoking gun memos we read about in the 
papers for days involving Death Star, the Ricochet tactics that were 
used to drive

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up market prices, the energy traders who used schemes such as Get 
Shorty or use a Fat Boy to manipulate energy markets with impunity.
  What this legislation does, in effect, is say we will ban just one of 
the manipulative practices used in Enron but for everything else you 
have free rein to manipulate the American consumer. It is sort of like 
building a 4-inch dam across our mighty Columbia; you stop one 
relatively small practice, but it is going to be drowned out by all the 
other manipulative schemes.
  In my view, this legislation is an open invitation to future Enrons.
  With respect to other priorities about which we felt strongly, I 
tried, for example, to prevent the weakening of current export controls 
on highly enriched uranium. It seems astounding that at a time when 
President Bush correctly talked about how important it is to fight 
terrorism--and we have all been concerned about yellowcake.
  I sit on the Intelligence Committee. Of course, I can't get into what 
is discussed there. But I don't think anybody in the United States 
doubts the seriousness of the terrorist threat around the world. 
Controls in current law are intended to end the dependence of foreign 
companies on nuclear-bomb-grade materials, but the conference report, 
incredible as it may seem, goes in just the opposite direction and is 
going to make it easier for terrorists to traffic in these nuclear-
bomb-grade materials.
  The conference report would give foreign producers a fresh 9-year 
holiday on converting highly enriched uranium into the much safer low-
enriched uranium, a conversion, in my view, that should have happened 
years ago. I fought in the conference to keep in place the current 
export controls on highly enriched uranium. I believe had my amendment 
passed, it would have empowered President Bush to be able to fulfill 
his goal of keeping nuclear materials out of the hands of terrorists. 
Unfortunately, this too went down on strictly party lines.
  There are other areas with respect to pro-consumer amendments I 
thought were important which I will discuss briefly.
  Many of our parts of the country have been subjected to price spikes 
in the gasoline market. We saw last summer that many consumers were 
spending more than $2 a gallon for gas. In parts of the Southwest, it 
was up to $4 per gallon for gas.
  I sought to give the Federal Trade Commission authority to go after 
documented anti-consumer practices such as redlining and zone pricing. 
At present, every time there is a price spike, Secretary of Energy 
Spencer Abraham most recently put out various kinds of press releases 
saying they are doing an inquiry into why gasoline prices have spiked 
up. Just as sure as the night follows the day, the next time there is a 
price spike we will hear the very same thing from the Secretary of 
Energy.

  The fact is when you look at the statutes on the books, you will find 
that the Secretary of Energy has absolutely no authority to do anything 
with respect to skyrocketing gasoline prices.
  What I have sought to do in the conference and over the last few 
months is give the Federal Trade Commission the authority to go after 
documented anti-competitive practices in markets where you basically 
have three or possibly four of the oil companies controlling more than 
60 percent of the gas that is sold in this area.
  Many Members of the Senate represent just those communities--
communities where in effect you have seen the competitive marketplace 
forces sucked right out of the gasoline markets in their communities. 
Unfortunately, that too was rejected on a straight party line vote.
  In addition, I offered an amendment to create an advocate for the 
energy consumer. I believed that if you were going to have a whole 
passel of deregulation and regulatory changes, somebody ought to have 
the authority to stand up for the consumer. The great majority of our 
States do exactly that. We all understand that the energy markets have 
changed. Now there is much more being done in terms of interstate 
trading of energy, and there is nothing the States could do to go after 
abuses in the interstate trading of wholesale power.
  In the conference, I offered an amendment. I made it clear I was 
willing to work with both Republican chairs, Senator Domenici and 
Congressman Tauzin, on it. Yet that went nowhere as well despite 
bipartisan support.
  Pat Wood, head of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, thought 
it was ``a great idea'' to have an advocate--those are his words, not 
mine--for the consumer. Regrettably, that idea went nowhere as well.
  I have talked about what the conference report doesn't do. I want to 
talk for a few minutes about what it does do. It gives, for example, 
oil and gas extractors a blanket exemption under the Safe Drinking 
Water Act from pumping noxious and carcinogenic fluids underground. It 
gives energy producers immunity from Clean Water Act protection to 
present contaminated storm water runoff from polluting our lakes, 
streams, and marshes. It gives $30 million to a whole host of mining 
interests to pursue direct leaching of radioactive mine tailings into 
the ground.
  In other words, the conference report either explicitly allows or it 
pays to create America's future Superfund sites.
  I have talked about the get-out-of-jail-free card for the MTBE 
producers. This in effect would allow these producers protection from 
lawsuits that forced them to clean up the problem they created.
  In our State, even Republicans in the State legislature are concerned 
about not only losing the ability to fund MTBE cleanup in Oregon but 
they are concerned about the precedent it sets for future cleanup of 
various other dangerous materials such as perchlorate and TCE.
  I think this is part of what concerns me the most. I have always 
believed that anything important in this town has to be done on a 
bipartisan basis. It is probably the concern I have that has dominated 
my career in public service. I think we had an opportunity for a 
bipartisan bill in this area. As I have been able to do in my home 
State with our colleague, Senator Smith, I think there was an 
opportunity for common ground on a whole host of key kinds of cases 
that would have laid out a vision for a very different energy future. 
But essentially what you had for weeks and weeks was a blackout. You 
had energy blackouts last summer with respect to this legislation. 
Senator Bingaman and I and others who were in the conference faced an 
information blackout. Any time you go behind closed doors, any time you 
do something along the lines of a conference in secret, it is an 
invitation to special interests to exploit their clout and their 
influence. That is exactly what has happened here.

  I will outline one other provision. I know colleagues are waiting, 
and I am particularly grateful to Senator Bingaman for this chance to 
take a few minutes at the outset of the debate and touch on the 
proposal with respect to standard market design.
  In our part of the world, in my home state, we have the highest 
unemployment rate in the country. Reasonable energy prices have been a 
key to our well-being. What we have now in this legislation is a 
glidepath to set up something called standard market design, a one-
size-fits-all approach with respect to energy regulation.
  I come to that view because there are two provisions in the report 
and they are essentially contradictory in nature. The first part of the 
conference report says you cannot engage in a standard market design 
regulatory regime in effect until 2007. The second part says it is 
basically OK for FERC to do anything they want. At a minimum, we have a 
lawyer's full employment program as a result of this regulatory limbo. 
But what is more likely to happen, because of the power of the 
interests that want the standard market design, they are going to 
exploit the regulatory confusion in this legislation to work their 
will.
  On September 30th I received a letter from a Republican FERC 
commissioner, Joseph Kelliher, in which he explicitly told me that 
standard market design is a bad idea for Oregon, a bad idea for the 
Pacific Northwest, and should not be implemented in our region.
  I say to the people of my State and my region, I am still going to 
fight this with everything I have.
  Finally, at a time when our country can be held hostage by oil-
producing

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nations, we had a chance to go forward with legislation that would make 
us truly energy independent. At a time when cutting-edge renewable 
resources are at our fingertips, what this conference report does is it 
lets these exciting technologies slip through our fingers. At a time 
when the people of our country have been clamoring for a fresh 
approach, a different energy future, this conference report looks at 
energy policy through the rearview mirror. I hope my colleagues will 
reject this conference report and look forward over the rest of this 
day and perhaps others to talk about it at some length.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Hampshire.
  Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, I rise to raise my serious concerns with 
this piece of legislation. I appreciate the excellent statement of the 
Senator from Oregon which touched on a number of the issues this 
legislation raises.
  The purpose of an energy policy should be, obviously, to make our 
Nation more independent of international fuels, to allow energy to be 
more readily available, and allow more productivity in our society as a 
result of having energy at a reasonable cost.
  There are a number of ways to approach this. Any energy policy should 
be balanced. First, it forces conservation. Any energy policy should 
significantly encourage Americans, and Americans in business 
especially, to use appropriate conservation which does not undermine 
lifestyle dramatically and does not undermine efficiency but, rather, 
improves efficiency in order to reduce the amount of energy used.
  Second, after conservation, we should use energy products which are 
renewable, things we can use over and over or at least produce over and 
over and as a result not be so dependent on international sources of 
oil.
  Third, of course, is production. We should increase production, 
especially production within the United States or within regions which 
the United States has a relationship which is more positive and 
constructive than the Middle East and other areas of significant 
international attention.
  Good energy policy requires those three elements. However, the bill 
before the Senate does not accomplish that. It does have some 
conservation. It does have some renewable language and it does, 
obviously, have some production language but on balance it does not 
have any of those at a level of intensity or effort, at least in a 
constructive way, that outweighs what is basically a grab bag of 
special interest projects directed at benefiting one segment of the 
economy or one segment of the population at the expense of other 
segments of the population.
  There are a lot of examples of this. The most significant is the 
overall cost of the bill. This bill was suppose to have $8 billion of 
tax credits in it and it is up to $25 billion. That difference between 
$8 billion and $25 billion is almost entirely filled not by a broad 
approach to energy policy but by very targeted, very specific 
programmatic initiatives directed at certain interest groups in order 
to give them benefits to pervert the marketplace, to basically say: 
Here is a winner; everyone else is a loser.
  The most classic example is the ethanol package which makes up one of 
the biggest initiatives in this bill. It is hard to figure out how much 
subsidy is in this bill for ethanol but it is huge. We know there is at 
least $5.9 billion, which is double the present subsidy, and we know on 
top of that there is probably $2.5 billion of tax credit. That is 
probably not all, and as people review this bill, we will find it is 
even more obscene than that. This is more a product which cannot stand 
on its own, a product which essentially has been brought to the 
marketplace because it has been subsidized at such a high level and 
because it is now, by law, required to be used, it therefore becomes 
viable. It does not become viable because it can compete in the 
marketplace--even with lower subsidies.
  Some modicum of subsidy might make sense but to basically take a 
product and say, we essentially are going to pay more for it than it 
probably costs to produce and we are going to require that it then be 
used, is hardly a subsidy. It is basically, to be honest, a socialistic 
approach to managing an economy. The ``pick a winner'' and decide that 
winner, whether it works or not, will be paid for, and then you 
subsidize it at an extraordinary level.

  There are, of course, a variety of different projects in here which 
are essentially projects in home States, projects of people who are 
friends of somebody, projects of people who happen to be able to get 
into that room that the Senator from Oregon mentioned was closed to 
most Members.
  We have the advance reactor hydrogen cogeneration project for $1.1 
billion. This appears to be not only for building of the plant but for 
the operating of the plant, which is an incredible concept. First, the 
taxpayers will pay to build this plant and then the taxpayers are going 
to pay to operate the plant. I am wondering what the purpose of the 
plant could be that has any commercial interests at all and the 
taxpayers are picking up $1.1 billion for construction and building 
costs.
  We have $2 billion to pay for companies to assist them in phasing out 
MTBE, which is something I will get back to, but there is an irony in 
that because, of course, the bill limits the liability of those 
customers and then it pays out the program.
  We have authorized loan guarantees for using certain types of coal 
that come from the Midwest and to build a plant in the Midwest which 
does not even exist. Basically, we are going to say, there will be a 
plant out there somewhere and we will put this money into it to build 
it. We do not know where the plant will be. We suspect it will be in 
North Dakota. It is a new concept in taking care of one's constituency 
to essentially create a plant somewhere in theory. It is a virtual 
plant that we are going to spend all this money on, and I guess in 
today's world of virtual reality it is probably appropriate that this 
bill have some virtual things in it because it does not have much else 
because the rest of the bill is equally unsubstantive.
  As to the abandoned mines provision in this bill, we are essentially 
going to take an account which was supposed to help in cleaning up the 
mines which were used in the West, and we are going to take the money 
out of that account and we will redirect it so, basically, none of 
those dollars will flow into the cleanup which they are allegedly being 
raised for.
  We have a proposal to build some sort of green shopping centers, 
whatever those are. That is a great concept. I always wanted to build a 
green shopping center. I like blue, purple, yellow. Why did we leave 
those colors out? We are gone to build a green shopping mall in 
Shreveport, LA. We are going to build a green shopping center in 
Atlanta. We are going to build a green shopping mall in Syracuse. And 
the taxpayers are going to pay for that.
  Building shopping centers is a new concept for energy, for having a 
national energy policy.
  We will spend a lot of time on this over the next week as we debate 
this bill, because it will take at least a week to do this bill. The 
most significant detriment in this bill is the fact that it is 
essentially structured to benefit one region of the country 
significantly over another region of the country.

  It is almost a gratuitous attack on the Northeast from the standpoint 
of the way it has been put together. The most glaring example of that 
is the way this MTBE issue is handled.
  MTBE is an additive put in gasoline. It was decided by the EPA, in 
the early 1990s, that this additive should be put in gasoline to make 
it oxidate faster, thus getting cleaner burning gasoline and reducing 
air pollution.
  It turns out one of the unintended consequences of this legitimate 
desire to make gasoline burn faster is it is an incredible pollutant, 
an extremely difficult pollutant to deal with if it gets in the 
groundwater.
  So States which were put under the authority of the EPA to clean 
their air, and which were then required, in order to accomplish this, 
to essentially use this additive, now find that although their air may 
be marginally cleaner, their groundwater is dramatically more polluted.
  If you have ever been in a house--and I have been in a number of 
them--that has an MTBE pollution issue, it is essentially unlivable. 
You cannot use the shower, you cannot use the sinks, the smell is just 
overwhelming, and the

[[Page S15116]]

water cannot be drunk. It cannot be put on your body to clean. It is a 
horrific situation.
  People in community after community in my State--small communities, 
cul-de-sacs, groups of homes--have found they are basically unable to 
live in those houses until the water system has been fundamentally 
repaired. Sometimes you have to bring in new water because they are on 
wells in order to address the pollution coming from MTBE.
  Thirty-three percent of one of my counties has a serious problem of 
MTBE pollution, and the percentages are in the midteens and higher in 
other towns, counties. So it is a serious environmental hazard.
  Yet this bill says we will continue to use it and States that are 
under these orders will have to continue to use it for another period 
of years, increasing the amount of pollution.
  Then this bill does one more thing that is really--I already used 
this term once, so I hate to use it again, but really is a gratuitous 
shot. It says States which have pursued a legal remedy for the damage 
caused by MTBE will no longer be able to pursue those lawsuits.
  This bill--because somebody got in that room the Senator from Oregon 
was talking about got somebody's ear--has language in it which 
specifically goes back before the lawsuits were brought by some of the 
New England States and eliminates the ability of those suits to go 
forward.
  Now, when I was in law school that would be called an ex post facto 
law and would be subject to some significant debate. However, 
obviously, the people who drafted this have figured out a way around 
that ex post facto attack, and they figure they are going to survive 
this attack and, therefore, they are going to eliminate the capacity of 
States such as New Hampshire to try to get redress on the issue of the 
fact that in some counties, up to 33 percent of the water is not usable 
because of the MTBE pollution.
  It is a truly ironic situation that this has happened, that a bill 
proposed to reduce our reliance on energy would have innumerable 
special initiatives in it that have no relationship to actually 
increasing energy production but actually perverts the marketplace, 
and, on top of that, would take a policy which is being debated in the 
court system between the States and the producers and essentially wipes 
that policy, which is in an environmental fight, off the books in an 
attempt to protect those industries which produce this product.

  We heard the Senator from New Mexico defend the position on the 
grounds that--I believe he used the term--I have it right here; I wrote 
it down because it is a unique term.
  Well, I guess I can't find it right now. Anyway, it was a term that I 
found interesting because it basically implied that well, really, 
States should not be able to bring these lawsuits. These people should 
just have to have this groundwater pollution. And, what the heck, why 
not do it? Why not protect these companies from that sort of pollution 
forever?
  Well, I think you do not protect them because, as a practical matter, 
you let the court decide whether the liability exists in this instance. 
This is not a question that is appropriate to this Energy bill, to say 
the least. It is, in fact, a question which should have been allowed to 
be resolved by the New England States as they dealt with this question 
of MTBE pollution in groundwater.
  So this bill has some very serious problems independent of the fact 
that it is philosophically wrong, that it takes a marketplace, and does 
so much tweaking of the marketplace that you have no longer any 
semblance of market force in the issue of the production of energy. You 
simply have a grab bag of winners and losers.
  The grab bag is unique. It really is unique. I would have loved to 
have had a fly on the wall in that room because there must have been 
just a parade of people coming in and out who had their special 
projects.
  I remember this happened once before back in 1979 or 1980 when we 
were just coming out of the energy crisis of the 1970s, and we had the 
Arab oil embargo, and we decided to put money into trying to pick 
winners and losers in oil production. We put money into shale oil and 
we put money into wind and we put money into solar. At the time, I 
supported a lot of that exercise and said, well, that is something we 
ought to try.
  Unfortunately, what we failed to recognize was unless the market 
makes the product viable, it usually never works. That has been proven 
because all those initiatives--synthetic fuels, shale oil, things like 
that--have fallen by the wayside simply because they were not 
competitive in the marketplace.
  So to abandon the market and to pick winners and losers is not that 
great a policy approach to the issue of energy. It is better to level 
the playing field and give the producers the opportunity to choose 
those products which are going to make sense. That happens to be why I 
was for opening ANWR, for example.
  But if you had been in this room, it would have been an interesting 
experience because as you go through this bill you find it is replete 
with these little special, targeted items.
  Here is one. I just opened the bill because I finally got a copy of 
it. I just opened it. I arbitrarily opened it to a page. This is so 
amusing--it is not amusing; it is horrible. But the interest is so 
apparent and so outrageous you have to smile about it. It is so obscene 
in its attack on the American taxpayers. This section is called the 
Geothermal Steam Act. Basically, what it says--and I am almost tempted 
to read the whole thing--is anybody who wants is now going to be able 
to apply to go on to Federal lands and produce geothermal energy.
  Well, geothermal energy probably has some productive capability that 
makes sense. I am not sure it does because no one, other than icelandic 
countries, has been able to make it efficient. They have an efficiency 
with it because they have so much of it, and they are so small.
  But basically what this bill says is, all right, you can go on public 
lands--let's say Yellowstone Park--where there is a lot of geothermal, 
and you can have the Federal Government evaluate whether or not 
geothermal energy should be produced there. Obviously, they are not 
going to do it in Yellowstone Park. That was an excessive statement, 
but that is where we know there is geothermal power.
  Then, if you, the person getting a fairly significant subsidy in this 
bill for geothermal production, want to, you can then decide you are 
going to pursue energy there. The Department is under some significant 
direction to actually give you a permit, at which time you have to go 
through something called a NEPA process, which means you have to go out 
and prove there is an environmentally sound way to produce this 
geothermal power.

  All that is outrageous in and of itself because it is basically 
putting a put to our national lands for geothermal power that is 
independent of just determining whether or not that is the appropriate 
use for those natural lands. This is where it gets very entertaining. 
Then they say, you--us, the taxpayers--have to pay for the NEPA study. 
We have to pay to reimburse the company that wants to do the drilling 
or use the geothermal power for the environmental study which they are 
required to produce in order to prove that the power can be produced in 
that area. That is a very interesting concept. That is like saying to a 
drug company, we, the Federal Government, must pay to produce the 
research to produce your drug, even though you are going to get the 
profits from selling the drug, or any other business that has to make a 
basic investment to get the asset which they are going to then sell and 
make money on because the only significant cost for determining whether 
or not they are going to get their geothermal power will be the 
environmental impact study. So to ask the taxpayers to pay for it is, 
to say the least, an unusual approach.
  In the context of this bill, it is very mainstream. It is very much 
consistent with the rest of the bill, the fact that you are going to 
have $1 billion worth of land or purchases made in order to protect the 
shoreline. But where is it all going to be purchased? Louisiana. Ninety 
percent of the $1 billion is going to be spent in Louisiana; or the 
fact that you are going to have these shopping centers in various 
locations; or the fact that you are going to have an ethanol program 
which will probably

[[Page S15117]]

cost more in tax subsidy than what it cost to produce the product, 
certainly more than what the net income is going to be of that product, 
no question about that; or that you are going to have a subsidy for a 
variety of initiatives which are now allegedly commercially 
competitive--the list goes on interminably of tax credits which are now 
going to be put in place for different industries which already are, 
theoretically, producing a competitive product. But we have to expand 
that tax credit.
  I won't read them all, but a few of them: There is a credit for 
production for advanced nuclear power; to repeal the 4.3-cents motor 
fuel excise tax on railroad and inland waterways; a credit for natural 
gas distribution; a credit for electric transmission properties--that 
this is an expensing item--an expensing for capital costs incurred in 
complying with EPA sulfur regulations; modifications to special rules 
for nuclear decommissioning costs; treatment of certain income as 
expenses; arbitration rules not to apply to prepayments for natural 
gas; a temporary suspension of limitation based on 65 percent of 
taxable income and extension of suspension of taxable income limit with 
respect to marginal production--that is stripper wells, I presume--
amortization of delayed rental payments--that, I presume again, is a 
stripper well type of thing--amortization of geological and geophysical 
expenditures--these are all significant tax benefits--temporary repeal 
of the alternative minimum tax preference for intangible drilling 
costs--again, a significant tax benefit--credit for clean coal 
technology units--that is a tax credit.
  Then, of course, relative to the natural gas business, there is a 
dramatic change in the way they account for their taxes. There is even 
a credit in here for ceiling fans, for certain steam generators and 
certain reactors and vessels used for nuclear technology. The list goes 
on and on: Energy production incentives; there is a special tax credit 
for granular mine tailings. Maybe that is not tax. I just noted that 
because it seems as if that may be a misapplication of that or the use 
of that.

  The tax credit section, which makes up the difference between the $8 
billion requested and the $25 billion that is actually being incurred 
here in tax credits, is just replete with special interest efforts to 
try to pervert the marketplace for the purposes of picking winners and 
losers in the energy production business. That might work at some 
level. There is no question there may be a legitimate need to do some 
of that. But this bill is excessive.
  It is also clearly not being driven by energy policy but, rather, by 
parochial interests and by interests who see the opportunity to have 
significant gain at the expense of others--specifically, the general 
taxpayer.
  We will spend a lot of time talking about these various issues. I 
think the more light shown on this bill, the better. I think we do need 
to spend a few days discussing the issues within the bill. Most 
specifically, we want to spend more time on this issue of MTBEs and the 
fact that this bill has essentially been structured to target one 
region of the country in a manner which seems highly inappropriate and 
punitive and which is clearly inconsistent with what historically has 
been the case, which is that you don't pass a law which says the 
legitimate activity of a State or group of States, in trying to defend 
the quality of their environment, will be wiped off the books. That is 
something the Federal Government should not be doing. It should 
certainly not be being done by a Republican-dominated Congress which 
theoretically still believes there are States out there that have some 
rights.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Idaho.
  Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, if the Senator from New Hampshire would 
stay on the Senate floor for a moment, I don't blame him for being 
frustrated about the MTBE.
  Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, parliamentary inquiry: I would ask my 
colleague to yield for a question.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Will the Senator yield?
  Mr. BINGAMAN. I was just wondering if those of us who are on the 
Senate floor could agree on an order so my colleague from Illinois 
would know when he should be planning to come to speak. I know the 
Senator from Idaho plans to speak and Senator Thomas would then want to 
speak. Would that be the order? And then I would speak and Senator 
Durbin after that.
  Mr. CRAIG. Certainly. I have no problem with an order.
  Mr. THOMAS. Well, you have also been here. If you care to speak after 
Senator Craig, perhaps I could be after you, and Senator Durbin after 
that.
  Mr. BINGAMAN. I ask unanimous consent that following Senator Craig's 
statement, I be recognized to speak, then Senator Thomas, and then 
Senator Durbin in that order.
  Mr. THOMAS. Fifteen minutes apiece?
  Mr. BINGAMAN. Whatever period of time the Senator would want.
  Mr. CRAIG. No more than 15 minutes for me.
  Mr. BINGAMAN. Fifteen minutes for each of us, and a half hour for the 
Senator from Illinois. I think my statement will probably be closer to 
a half hour as well.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  The Senator from Idaho.
  Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, the Senator from New Hampshire has left. I 
don't blame him for his frustration over MTBEs. What he didn't say was 
that it was a Federal program and a Federal mandate. If there is a 
liability, maybe it ought to be the Federal Government. It was the 
Clean Air Act that drove States in meeting their air shed requirements 
to address additives to gasoline that would result in some improvement 
in that pollution. I don't blame him for his frustration in all of 
that.
  I hope we can sit down and resolve this issue apart from the bill 
that is currently on the Senate floor as it relates to the concern of 
the Northeast or any State that has experienced pollution and now has a 
groundwater problem as a result of a Federal program and a Federal 
mandate passed by this Congress in a Clean Air Act. The product, yes, 
produced independently by a private company to meet a Federal mandate 
and now, of course, years later, after the application of that product, 
we find that there were environmental consequences.
  For a few moments this morning I want to talk about the energy bill 
we have before us, the Energy Policy Act of 2003, and to bring some 
context to it, on where I believe we are and how I believe we ought to 
approach this particular piece of legislation.
  I came to the Senate in 1990. I went on the Energy and Natural 
Resources Committee in 1990. In 1990, we began to talk about the need 
for a national energy policy because we were growing increasingly 
dependent upon foreign sources for our energy--primarily hydrocarbons--
but we had a myriad of Federal regulations that were in large part 
driving energy policy into a nonproductive approach.
  We were basically saying to the energy companies of our country, 
whether electrical, hydro-based, or nuclear-based, or whether they were 
coal-based--we were saying to the hydrocarbon companies: You really 
ought not do business here because it is going to be so expensive to 
meet all of these Federal rules and regulations.
  We had the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. National 
environmental policy has been talked about by the Senator from New 
Hampshire. That was in play, and it was beginning to have very real 
consequences in the ability to produce an abundance of energy for our 
country at a reasonable cost to the consumer.
  Our economy has been based on--historically and even today--an 
abundant supply of low-cost energy. Every American is the beneficiary 
of that. From the car you drive to the toys you play with out there in 
recreational ways, to the home you heat, to the products you use--all 
of them have been tied to an abundant supply of energy at a relatively 
low cost. But that was because we had always been producing a lot of 
energy.
  In the 1990s, all of the environmental regulations came into play. 
Attitudes shifted there. There seemed to be an attitude on the part of 
policymakers that energy was always going to be in abundance, always 
going to be there; therefore, you could begin to regulate and control 
it for a variety of different reasons and it would just keep coming.

[[Page S15118]]

  That is not so. The decade of the nineties proved it. In the decade 
of the nineties, we experienced unprecedented economic growth, but we 
also became increasingly huge consumers of energy at a time when we 
were no longer producing much energy. We were living off the surpluses 
that had been built into the capacity of the energy development and 
producing system in our country and a delivery system that was produced 
in the sixties and the seventies and the 1980s.
  Guess what began to happen in the latter part of the nineties. The 
lights went out. The lights dimmed and, of course, energy costs began 
to go up. That once 75 cents or 80 cents a gallon for gas all of a 
sudden went to $1.25, $1.60, and not long ago, in some areas, it spiked 
at $4 in one instance. We saw what happened to electrical energy. No 
longer was that switch that you woke up to every morning and flipped 
expecting your home and bedroom and bathroom to be filled with light--
no longer was that switch something you considered automatic, that you 
just flipped and it was always going to be there. The generation at 
hand always accepted that energy was always there and relatively 
inexpensive, but, more importantly, they believed it was always going 
to be there: Just throw the switch and on came the lights.
  In the late part of the nineties, they threw the switch in California 
and the lights didn't come on. What happened this summer in the 
Northeast? They threw the switch and the lights didn't come on. 
Somebody has to be to blame; the lights are not coming on. We went to 
the gas pumps, and all of a sudden it was costing us an arm and a leg 
to fill up our cars or SUVs; any form of transportation was beginning 
to cost more.

  What happened? Why are we here? This President, George W. Bush, 
before he came to office as President elect, met here with the majority 
leader and leaders in the Senate and said: We have to get this country 
back into the business of producing energy--all forms of energy, 
including hydrocarbon, electrical, green energy, black energy, but 
environmentally sound in all respects. We have to get back into the 
business of production.
  No longer were we 35, 40, 45, 50 percent dependent; now we were 55 
percent dependent upon some other country to supply our hydrocarbon 
base. We had to begin to extend our politics around the world to secure 
the stability of that market and that supply because we decided here at 
home that we were no longer going to be producing it because there was 
an environmental cost to that production.
  If you were witnessing the Senate floor a couple of years ago, the 
debate was on producing oil in Alaska. This Senate basically said: No, 
we are not going to do that anymore; the environmental consequences are 
too great. So we will let somebody else produce it in Saudi Arabia or 
in Iraq or Russia, and we will pay them and we will ship it over here. 
They will profit by it and we will spend it, we will use it.
  That is really what our policy said--not in a spoken way but in an 
unspoken way.
  That is why this President and it is why others--I and others who 
work on the Energy Committee and studied the market and watched the 
trends over the past decade--realized something had to be done. We 
began to try, as Republicans and then as Democrats.
  The Senator from New Mexico is in the Chamber. He chaired that 
committee. He worked mightily hard to produce an energy bill a couple 
of years ago, and we got it to the floor and we passed it out of the 
Senate. I voted for it. Why? Because it was a major step in the right 
direction. In fact, it was the bill of the Senator from New Mexico that 
passed out of the Senate this year because we could not get our bill 
out. We could get enough votes for that bill.
  What was happening out there was a growing consensus in the Congress, 
the House and the Senate, that something had better get done.
  Now, let's take the Clean Air Act. To maintain clean air quality, you 
heard about the problems we created in the Northeast with MTBEs--that 
additive to fuels. We have another problem as it relates to all of 
that. The lights went out up there this summer because we had not 
created an environment in which investment in a profitable way could be 
put back into the electrical grids and electrical systems, that could 
be returned to the investor so that these kinds of problems would not 
exist. There were a lot of other things we tried to do.
  Out of all of that, there clearly came a consensus that something 
ought to be done. What you have before you now--and my guess is we 
ought to debate it for a good long while--is the Energy Policy Act of 
2003. It just passed the House. It is a mighty big piece of 
legislation, no question about it. What does it do? It puts the United 
States back into the business of producing energy. That is what it 
does. It didn't pick winners or losers. It largely said, pick it all, 
get it all, advance solar power, advance wind power, advance 
conservation, take the old technologies of gas, coal, and oil and put 
new technology to them so that we can use those abundant resources in a 
way that they will be environmentally cleaner.
  That is what we are saying here. We are not subsidizing. We are 
saying that if you invest your dollars into the market, you are going 
to get a tax credit in return. That is called incentivizing investment. 
That is why those who look at our work product say that over the course 
of the decade this bill could produce over 800,000 new jobs in the 
lower 48 States and Alaska and Hawaii. Why? Because we are asking the 
marketplace to invest, and we are incentivizing all of the bits and 
pieces of the marketplace.
  I used to be a bit selective--solar is only a percent; wind may be a 
couple to 3 percent. Was it worth doing? Yes, it is worth doing. It is 
clean. So we add it up and it is 4, or 5, or 6 percent in the total 
marketplace over the next decade, and it is clean energy. Americans 
want clean energy, and we ought to be doing that. So we are doing it in 
this bill.
  We are also saying, without question, that coal is a huge producer of 
electricity today and it has caused problems in the past. We have a 
Clean Air Act, and we want to drive ourselves toward ever cleaner air. 
Here we are continuing to incentivize the substantial investment in 
clean coal technology.
  What is also transpiring here--and we heard it debated on the floor a 
good number of times--is the issue of greenhouse gases and climate 
change, a product of burning of hydrocarbons. This bill goes more 
toward climate change and improving our environment than any climate 
change bill we ever had on the floor of the Senate, and here is the 
reason: Every new technology, every new dollar invested in the 
marketplace puts down a cleaner form of energy and brings down the 
overall emission of greenhouse gases. That is what happens when you 
create new technologies and you bring on line new approaches. It was 
the old approaches that were producing the greenhouse gases using 
hydrocarbons. The new approaches are producing substantially less 
greenhouse gases.
  As this economy comes back under new technologies, already per unit 
of production in our economy we are using less carbon, and that has 
already been shown. We are leading the world as it relates to unit of 
production as to the amount of energy or carbon produced by that 
production. This bill drives us even further toward a cleaner 
environment because we are investing in the environment, and we are 
incentivizing that investment.
  Madam President, how much time do I have?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Ms. Murkowski). Two minutes remaining.
  Mr. CRAIG. Madam President, another area that is significant in this 
bill--and I will be talking later about a variety of the approaches we 
have taken--is the area of nuclear energy, without question one of the 
cleanest forms of energy out there. There are no emissions. There has 
always been a concern about waste management and the waste stream that 
comes from nuclear plants, but we also have recognized our ability to 
manage it and other nations' ability to manage that waste stream in a 
responsible fashion.
  In this bill, we clearly incentivize the marketplace to get back into 
the business of electrical production through nuclear generation. We 
have even proposed a new reactor concept called a passive generation 4 
reactor, and also we will tie to that an electrolysis process to 
produce hydrogen, to begin to fuel this new exciting initiative which 
our President led in saying the transportation fuel of the future ought 
to be

[[Page S15119]]

hydrogen. Why? We can produce it, and we can produce a lot of it. We 
ought not be producing it from natural gas; we ought to be producing it 
from water. Let natural gas heat space. Don't ask natural gas to 
generate electricity or create hydrogen. That is not the way to use 
natural gas. That is part of what has driven the cost of it up. So 
another new initiative.
  While anyone can stand on the floor and pick at the pieces, look at 
the whole. It is a market basket full of energy for the future of this 
country to ensure reliability so that when you wake up in the morning 
and you turn on the light switch, the light comes on; when you plug in 
your computer, the screen lights up; when you go to the Internet, you 
can communicate across the world instantly, and it is all driven by 
energy.
  Every single minuscule thought is driven by energy, and this country 
hasn't been producing energy for over a decade. We have been only the 
consumer of that energy basket. I think we ought to be proud of this 
work. I think we ought to be energized to pass it for the future of our 
country, for the future of our economy. We incentivize the marketplace 
to go back to work and produce all forms of energy from every concept 
and every idea.

  Let's not pick winners and losers. I am sorry, we don't pick winners 
and losers. The Senator from New Hampshire is wrong. We say do it all 
and do it well. Out of it may come new sources that 30 or 40 years out 
dominate the energy supply of this great country.
  I am proud of the work we have done. I hope the Senate will join 
collectively in adopting the conference report. The House has already 
seen the merit. The President strongly supports it. Let me tell you, 
the American people support this package because they don't want $4-a-
gallon gas, and they want the light to come on in the bathroom when 
they wake up.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Mexico.
  Mr. BINGAMAN. I thank the Chair.
  Madam President, I will speak for a few minutes about the Energy 
bill. I know we will have additional opportunities to speak as the day 
wears on, but I wish to give a few comments before my colleague, 
Senator Thomas, speaks.
  We are beginning today the debate on H.R. 6, which is entitled the 
Energy Policy Act. We have had many hours of debate on this subject in 
the Senate over the last few years. The debates we have had before in 
the previous Congress and then this year in this Congress have resulted 
in our passing an Energy bill with an overwhelming vote.
  I am very gratified to recount that the Senate did vote with a large 
majority, a bipartisan majority, in favor of an Energy bill in 2002. In 
the 107th Congress, we passed an Energy bill by a vote of 88 for the 
bill and 11 against and 1 not voting. Earlier this year, we passed the 
same bill we had passed in the previous Congress again with a large 
bipartisan majority: 84 Members voted for it, 14 against, and 2 did not 
vote.
  Of those who opposed the bill, I would say there is fairly good 
representation from both parties. So this has not been a bill that has 
gone through the Senate, as previous energy bills, on a partisan basis. 
I think we can all take some gratification in that.
  It is important, in my view, that we deal with these issues--the 
issue of energy supply, the issue of energy sufficiency, concern about 
the important connections between energy policy and environmental 
policy, including global warming, to which my colleague, Senator Craig, 
was just referring. Those are all issues that I think deserve 
substantial attention as, I have said, we have devoted substantial time 
to them.
  It is not easy to bring together all the competing views and points 
of view that come together in this legislative body and come out with 
an end product. I congratulated my colleague, Senator Domenici, the 
other day when we concluded the conference on the fact that he had been 
able to produce a conference report. I did not congratulate him on the 
content of that report because I had serious disagreements with it, and 
I expressed those views. There is a substantial amount involved in 
producing a conference report, and he deserves credit for doing that.
  The chairman of our committee said--and the chairman of the 
conference said--he did not consider this report to be perfect. I could 
not agree with him more. I recognize that it is not fair to expect 
perfection in this process, but we could have done much better had the 
process been a better process. We could have done much better in terms 
of the product that was produced.
  I believe we find ourselves now with a bill that does not command the 
broad support and staying power we should have in a national energy 
policy.
  I think the entire country should be brought into a national energy 
policy and support a comprehensive approach to dealing with our energy 
problems.
  Our difficulty, of course, is we now are presented with a bill that 
we either vote for or against. I have been one who has advocated 
adopting an Energy bill. I have advocated for essentially the basic 
premise that President Bush campaigned on when he ran for office. He 
said that we needed to try to put in place something that was a 
coherent national energy policy, and I essentially agreed with that 
idea.
  I remember former Chairman Bob Galvin of Motorola saying at one point 
there are certain things that the country should set out to do on 
purpose. To me, establishing a national energy policy seems to be one 
of those things that we should set out to do on purpose, because if we 
allow the issue to go unaddressed and the subject to go unaddressed, we 
can find ourselves substantially disadvantaged economically and in many 
other ways by virtue of not having an energy policy. I fear that is 
where we find ourselves today in many respects.
  So while I compliment the President for recognizing the importance of 
an energy policy, I do not think he got us off on the right foot once 
he became President in trying to develop that comprehensive, coherent 
energy policy. By that I am referring, of course, to the process that 
the Vice President was tasked to perform and did perform of trying to 
come up with a blueprint. That was a closed process. There have been 
efforts through the courts and otherwise to try to find out precisely 
who was talking to whom and which groups and individuals were 
consulted, but clearly that was a closed process. There was no reaching 
out to Democrats in the Congress. To my knowledge, there was no 
reaching out to many of the groups that have a vital interest in this 
issue. That was a mistake. At the time, I said it was a mistake. It 
prevented policymakers from hearing the broad range of views that would 
have been offered, I believe, in a constructive manner.
  In addition, the conduct of that exercise, in that closed process, 
failed to generate the public trust and confidence that we ought to 
have behind the energy policy we adopt. So I think the President made a 
mistake in the way he got us started on developing an energy policy. 
Unfortunately, that mistake has been repeated in the process that we 
have seen leading to this final conference report.
  My colleagues and I on the Democratic side of the aisle in the Senate 
have voiced our concerns about this many times. The conference was a 
closed process. In my view, clearly that was not designed to get us a 
product that would enjoy broad support, and it has not. We did have a 
meeting. We had, of course, one early meeting where conferees were 
permitted to come forward and make opening statements. Then some 71 or 
72 days later, we had a final meeting, which lasted approximately 3\1/
2\ hours, where Democratic conferees in the Senate offered 20 
substantive amendments on a wide variety of topics. None of those 
amendments can be found in the conference report today. That leads me 
to conclude the exercise was cosmetic and that there was no real 
intent, as we went into that final conference meeting, of seriously 
considering any of those Democratic amendments since none of them were 
agreed to.
  In fact, one that was agreed to by the Chair when it was offered was, 
of course, rejected by the House, as were all the others.
  Of the 4 that slipped through the process--16 of the 20 that we 
offered were rejected out of hand. Four of them did get through the 
process, but they were all rejected on a party-line basis by the House 
Republicans as the first order of business when they convened later 
that same evening.

[[Page S15120]]

  We went to conference on this bill expecting we would be able to 
participate in a meaningful way. That was not permitted. I regret that 
it has gotten to the point we are at now.
  The common ground that was reflected in the Senate-passed bill was 
based on a few basic principles, and I will allude to those. First, 
perhaps most importantly, was the basic agreement that we needed to 
have an energy policy that struck a balance between increasing energy 
supplies and encouraging additional energy efficiency or conservation. 
I think all of us can agree, at least at some level, of a 
conceptualization that both have to be done in order to deal with 
energy problems. Supplies have to be increased. Usage has to be 
decreased. That is the only way to begin to make up the enormous 
deficit which we are currently operating under with regard to energy, 
where we are importing a tremendous amount of energy.
  The reality is that our country does need new policies in both areas, 
and that was what we set out to do. On the energy supply side, one of 
the most important national needs is to meet the need for natural gas. 
Natural gas is the fuel of choice for most electric generation that is 
now being planned. We know there have been plans to construct 
substantial additional electric generation that uses natural gas.
  Natural gas will play an important role in any new distributed 
generation that is planned in the future. It is favored by alternative 
fuel vehicle programs in both the Government and in the private sector. 
It is the most likely feedstock to produce hydrogen.
  The President has indicated his strong support for moving to a 
hydrogen-based economy. The point which I think often gets lost is that 
the most logical and ready source for that hydrogen is natural gas. So 
it is not possible to just say, OK, let's not use oil and gas, let's 
use hydrogen. Natural gas has to be used, or at least that is what most 
people think is the most economic course to follow.
  Apart from its energy uses, of course, natural gas is also a critical 
feedstock for the petrochemical industry and the fertilizer industry.
  Over the long haul, natural gas consumption in this country is 
outstripping the amounts we are able to produce in the lower 48 States. 
We as a nation are in the early stages of developing a substantial 
dependence on foreign sources of natural gas. Just as we find ourselves 
today dependent upon foreign sources of oil, in the near future, the 
next decade or so, we are going to find ourselves substantially 
dependent upon foreign sources of natural gas. That is not a good 
result, and it is not one that we should sit by and idly allow to 
occur.
  We all know, and the Presiding Officer today knows better than any of 
us, that there are at least 35 trillion cubic feet of natural gas that 
are stranded on the northern slope of Alaska, Prudhoe Bay. That gas has 
been produced and is being produced every day, along with the oil that 
we now produce at that location. The gas is currently being pumped 
right back into the ground because there is no way to transport it to 
the lower 48 where it is needed.
  As we see the price of natural gas go up in the lower 48, as we may 
well this winter--we do not know--we need to remember there is a 
substantial supply of natural gas that we are not accessing. We need to 
provide financial incentives to the private sector to help in the 
construction of a pipeline to bring that gas to the lower 48. Such a 
project would not only help with our national energy needs, national 
energy security, it would also, of course, be a great boon to 
construction in this country, and to the domestic steel industry.
  We hear a lot of talk about how this bill before us is now a jobs 
bill. To the extent that one cannot argue the virtues of it from an 
energy perspective, they have to talk about it as a jobs bill. There 
are jobs that will be created from this bill. There are a great many 
more jobs that would be created if we provided an adequate incentive 
for the construction of the pipeline in Alaska. On this topic, the 
conference report does not measure up. It does not do what we did in 
the bills that we passed through the Senate, in the bills that we 
passed through the Senate both last year and this year.

  It does contain regulatory streamlining procedures for the pipeline 
that former Senator Murkowski and I worked hard on in the previous 
Congress. That is a critical part of the problem. But in order to get 
the pipeline constructed, we also need to have fiscal incentives. The 
Senate voted for those. The administration opposed them.
  Once Chairman Domenici announced publicly that they would not be part 
of the conference report, all of us who were officially conferees 
received a letter from the CEO of the gas company that has been most 
active in promoting going forward with the design and construction of 
such a pipeline, and that corporate executive stated that based on his 
understanding of the conference report, his company could not proceed 
with the project in face of the extraordinary financial risk that it 
would have to bear if gas prices were to drop below what the Energy 
Information Administration agrees is the likely level.
  So the lack of a risk mitigation mechanism, that probably would never 
have cost the taxpayers a dime, and even if it had cost taxpayers, 
there was a provision to ensure that those funds would be repaid when 
the price went back up again--but because of the lack of that risk 
mitigation mechanism, the likelihood is that our Nation will forego the 
possibility of using that Alaskan natural gas for future supply needs.
  We will, instead, depend on imports of liquefied natural gas. We will 
bring our natural gas from places like Nigeria and Trinidad. Those are 
places, of course--some of those places, at least--that have their own 
problems with regard to political stability and the security of that 
supply.
  Building the necessary transportation system for LNG, liquefied 
natural gas, will create jobs for shipyard workers in Korea, but we 
will not have the jobs for pipeline construction for Americans on this 
continent.
  I believe this is an unfortunate policy mistake that our country will 
come to regret. I am disappointed we were not able to maintain in the 
bill the financial incentives that we put in the bill when the Senate 
acted previously, both in the last Congress and this Congress.
  Along with providing for more robust domestic supplies of natural 
gas, we need to look for ways to diversify our energy generation away 
from such reliance, such strong reliance on gas. One important arena in 
which we can do this is in electricity generation.
  The bill the Senate passed earlier this year focuses this 
diversification strongly on new technology, including ultraclean ways 
of burning coal. Ultraclean coal is the most sustainable way over the 
long term to ensure that coal maintains its key position in our 
national energy mix. This is because concerns about the levels of 
pollution emitted from coal-fired plants are only increasing. It 
increases, of course, as the concern about the contribution of coal-
fired generation to global warming increases.
  This conference report unfortunately takes a step backwards from what 
we passed through the Senate in its commitment to ultraclean coal. The 
percentage of funding dedicated to these purposes is cut by 20 percent. 
A new competing program of direct grants to companies to pay for half 
of the cost of current technology pollution equipment, and current 
technology coal-fired generation is also put in place.

  In my view, we have limited Federal funds. Focusing those Government 
subsidies to buy today's technology instead of investing to create 
tomorrow's coal technology, risks coal's ultimate ability to maintain 
its position in our energy mix. I think that is unfortunate and a 
policy mistake as well.
  Another key part of the strategy of diversifying away from natural 
gas would be to tap into opportunities for distributed generation, such 
as combined heat and power at industrial facilities. Here again, the 
conference report falls short as it does not address the barriers that 
have been erected to uniform interconnection of distributed generation 
to the grid. It is not enough to have the technology. We need to rid 
ourselves of the redtape that is keeping that technology from being 
used. Again, I believe our previous bill facilitated that. I don't 
believe this bill does.

[[Page S15121]]

  Along with these steps, we also need to make a greater push to 
introduce renewable energy technologies for electricity generation. 
Some of these renewable technologies are already cost competitive. Wind 
is the prime example. But in order to see widespread use of these 
technologies, both financial and regulatory incentives should be put in 
place. That means both a meaningful production tax credit--and there is 
a meaningful production tax credit in this conference report. I commend 
the drafters for that. We would need that, but we also need a flexible 
renewable portfolio standard for electric utilities.
  For those who have not been studying this area, a renewable portfolio 
standard essentially means a requirement on utilities to produce a 
certain portion--in the case of our bill, 10 percent--of the power they 
produce or that they sell, 10 percent of that power should come from 
renewable sources. That is what our Senate bill provided. That 
provision, of course, has been deleted from the bill that is now before 
us. I think that, again, is a mistake in policy.
  The lack of an effective renewable portfolio standard is a major 
missed opportunity for our country. There are those who argue that we 
should leave this to the free market. But the reality is that a 
majority in the Senate, a majority of Senate conferees have disagreed 
with that. In spite of that, we have deferred to the House, and the 
House says they don't like it. We say fine; if you don't like it, we 
will drop it.
  The conference report is pretty much status quo on the future of 
renewables and the future role of renewables in our energy mix. Tax 
credits are extended for a few more years and slightly broadened, but 
renewables do not get anywhere near the attention lavished on them in 
this legislation that the coal industry gets or that the nuclear power 
industry gets.
  Coal and nuclear power have problems with regard to social 
acceptance. So in the absence of a stronger push forward on increasing 
renewables I think the conference report is basically making a choice 
in favor of the existing trends toward an overreliance on natural gas 
for future electric generation. That choice leaves our citizens' future 
natural gas and electricity prices that are more volatile than they 
should be, resulting in more frequent price spikes than we would like 
to see. People will come back and say: Why did you in the Congress not 
try to deal with this problem and anticipate this problem and head it 
off in a more meaningful way?
  Renewable energy technologies can help with another energy supply 
issue that we face and that is of transportation fuels. The conference 
report mandates a phase-in, an introduction of up to 5 billion gallons 
of ethanol in our gasoline supply by 2012. This has been coupled in the 
conference report with the issue that has already been discussed fairly 
broadly here in the Senate this morning, and that is the issue of how 
to treat the gasoline additive MTBE, methyl tertiary-butyl ether. One 
provision in the ethanol title purports to ban MTBE by the year 2014, 
but when you look at the rest of the language, it is clear the ban is 
full of loopholes.
  For one thing, each State Governor can opt his or her State out of 
that ban, if the Governor determines. This language is sufficiently 
vague that it appears that States can opt out, even after the purported 
national ban goes into effect.
  I do not know if that was intended, but that certainly is the way it 
appears.
  One other problem with the language is that the President is given 
extraordinary powers to make the statutory ban null and void by a 
stroke of the pen in the year 2014 before it takes effect. With these 
kinds of loopholes, it is not likely MTBE will actually be banned 
nationwide in 2014.
  In addition, the conference report provides product liability 
protection for MTBE and does so retroactively as to September 5 for any 
lawsuit filed after that date. The Senator from New Hampshire spoke 
about his objection to this as it affects his State. I can certainly 
understand that objection. I think it is one other provision that 
undermines the broad bipartisan support we really ought to be able to 
enjoy for this bill.
  Even with the greater use of renewable fuels in cars, we still will 
be very dependent on oil for the transportation sector. It is in our 
national interest to support domestic production of oil. But many of us 
know our domestic production of oil is not adequate. We are more and 
more dependent on foreign sources of oil, and most of that growing 
dependence on foreign sources of oil is occurring in the transportation 
sector as we are using more and more gasoline for larger and larger 
cars every year.
  I notice, as everyone else does, all of the advertisements for 
Hummers. I am sure that is a great vehicle, but the reality is that 
when you have such a focus on larger and larger vehicles and less and 
less efficient vehicles, as we have and have had for some time in this 
country, it is clear that our dependence on foreign oil will grow, as 
it has been growing.
  I understand that the answer to our doing nothing there--we did not 
do a great deal in the Senate bill on this subject, and we did much 
less than I wanted to do. But we did adopt an amendment by the Senator 
from Louisiana, Ms. Landrieu, that set a goal for reducing the amount 
of oil consumed in our transportation sector, and we gave broad 
discretion to the President and the Secretary of Transportation as to 
how they achieve that goal. That provision, modest as it was, has been 
deleted from this bill. That, in my view, was an unfortunate deletion 
and, again, a wrong direction for us to be going in our national energy 
policy.
  I have various other points I wish to make. I know my colleagues are 
here ready to speak. I will have opportunities to speak later and 
conclude my remarks on a whole range of issues since this is such a 
comprehensive subject. It is a comprehensive set of provisions with 
which we are being presented.
  At this time, in deference to my friend, Senator Thomas, let me yield 
the floor so he can speak. Of course, the Senator from Illinois is also 
here ready to speak. I will defer to him as well.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Wyoming.
  Mr. THOMAS. Madam President, I thank my friend from New Mexico and 
the ranking member on our committee. I thank him for the work he has 
done.
  I think it is interesting, as we hear people begin to talk about this 
bill and talk about the need for an energy policy, to say how important 
it is for us to have one and then spend the rest of the time opposing 
the things that are there.
  The fact is we do need an energy policy. We haven't had one for a 
very long time. It has been something we have been working on now for 3 
years. The other side of the aisle was unable to get one for the last 
year, and we worked right up to the end and it didn't get through. Now 
we have worked on it another 2 years, and we ought to be able to get it 
finished. I am disappointed that everyone talks about the need and then 
begins to talk about why they don't like this bill and this little 
piece and that little piece. I understand. It is a broad bill. But it 
is an important issue.
  We need an energy policy. We need the kind of energy policy that 
gives us some direction for where we are going to be in the future. It 
is not designed to deal with all the problems that may exist today, 
although some of those are there of course. We ought to be looking to 
where we need to be in 10 years or 15 years down the road. That is what 
policies are for--to talk about the future.
  It obviously has to be a balanced policy. Unfortunately, I am afraid 
very many of our friends here and very many of the folks in the country 
are just accustomed to turning on the lights, going to the gas station, 
and not thinking about how it happens to be there.
  It is kind of interesting that for States that are dependent on all 
other sources, their representatives are more opposed to doing 
something than the people who are producing the product. I think it is 
time they begin to take a look at the fact that energy just isn't there 
naturally. There has to be a policy to do that. It has to be a balanced 
policy.
  We are looking at conservation. We are looking at alternatives. We 
are looking at renewables. Of course, in the short term, in reaching 
those goals, the most important thing we have to talk

[[Page S15122]]

about is domestic production so that we aren't becoming more and more 
dependent on foreign countries to provide what we are using.
  One of the reasons is that much of the opposition comes from 
environmentalists who only look at things from one side. This needs to 
be balanced. In my State of Wyoming, we are very concerned about the 
environment. We also know that you can have multiple use, you can have 
production, and you can also take care of the environment. You don't 
just have to say you can't touch these areas. These are the kinds of 
balances we have to find to really be able to move forward the way we 
would like to do.
  I thank Senator Domenici and Representative Tauzin and their staffs. 
They worked very hard. We worked on it very hard as well, prior to 
putting it together for the Senate and certainly from the House side, 
with a mix of domestic production, research and development, incentives 
to cause these things to happen, and conservation. We will be better 
off certainly with the passage of this bill and this legislation. It 
has been over a decade in coming.
  It has been over 2 years--almost 3 years--since the President's 
office and the Vice President particularly set about to come up with an 
energy policy so we will have some direction on where we are going as 
the demands increase, which they are. There has to be some way to meet 
those demands.

  The idea that you can suddenly go to alternatives and renewables--
they produce now about 3 percent of the total we utilize, 
notwithstanding the dams and that sort of thing. But air, wind, solar 
are a very small percentage. They have great possibilities for the 
future, but that isn't going to happen next year, or the next year, or 
even 5 years from now. That is what this thing is all about--to make 
some movement.
  We have experienced blackouts. We have experienced natural gas price 
hikes and all of those kinds of things. When that happens, suddenly 
everybody talks about energy. When that moves away from us, we forget 
about it again. We really ought to stay on the issue. I don't think we 
should, nor can we, wait for another crisis to be able to do something 
of this kind.
  If there is anything we should have learned in the 21st century and 
the quality of life that we seek, the idea of creating jobs, the idea 
of having a vibrant economy is very closely enhanced and tied to 
reliable energy and a clean environment. Those are the goals that we 
have. We have to modernize conservation to be able to do that job more 
effectively.
  Everyone is in favor of conservation. But how much have you done in 
your home in terms of having incentives to change the equipment you use 
to make it more conservation-like? Very little. We just want more power 
at a cheaper price.
  What have we done to modernize our infrastructure? We see things 
changing. With more and more market generators who do not make the 
distribution and have to move it to a market, then you have to change 
the system, you have to change the system of moving power. Those things 
change. Indeed, they are changing.
  We have to increase our energy supplies, including renewables and 
alternatives.
  We can do a better job of protecting the environment. I am persuaded. 
Obviously, there are some places in our States that should be set 
aside--and they are set aside--national parks, wilderness areas, parts 
of the forests, and this and that. Half of our State land belongs to 
the Federal Government. It is public land. We have to find a way to 
have alternative uses and to have multiple use. We intend to do that.

  Finally, one of our goals ought to be increased national security. 
What could be a more important goal than that? Are we going to be 
dependent on Iraq and Saudi Arabia for our energy? We need to change 
that. After years of talking about it, this is a good opportunity to do 
something.
  In any bill as complex and as large as this, there will be items of 
disagreement, such as MTBE liability. Of course, we can talk about that 
the rest of the month. But we ought to give a little thought to where 
we need to be with energy and whether that is the tradeoff necessary to 
defeat a bill. I cannot imagine that tradeoff. We need to have a 
balanced approach. That is what we seek.
  There has been a lot of talk about the tax credits. Let me state what 
they are for: tax credits for residential energy efficiencies; tax 
credits for producing electricity from certain renewable sources; tax 
incentives for fuel-efficient vehicles; tax credits for efficient 
appliances. All the talk of tax credits, and that is what they are for. 
That is how a private sector system gives incentives.
  For reliability, accelerated depreciation of natural gaslines so we 
can have accelerated depreciation for distribution, electric 
transmission lines. We need reliability to move the energy; open 
transmission, to be able to deal with the changes taking place in the 
development of the energy we have now.
  Production: How to get more production of gas and oil? Through 
incentives. Marginal wells, low-production wells, do not produce. There 
has to be an incentive to continue to produce, to continue to 
reintroduce CO2 into the ground. These are not to make 
someone wealthy. These are designed to cause things to happen.
  Suspended income in the percentage of depreciation for small 
producers, provide amortization for geophysical expenses to determine 
where we have production opportunities for oil and gas--these are the 
items we mean when we talk about tax credits.
  Yes, there are substantial credits but that is how we move toward 
domestic production. We can do it in an economically and 
environmentally sound manner.
  Oil and other fossil fuels provide 85 percent of all energy use in 
the United States. The fact is, we still depend on coal largely for the 
development of electricity. Quite frankly, we ought to depend on it 
even more because gas is so much more flexible for other uses. We are 
working on ways, with some of the dollars in the bill, to provide 
cleaner plants for the production of electricity with coal. That is 
part of the overall plan to move forward.
  Renewables, including hydrogen, currently provide about 7 percent. 
Absent hydro, it is only about 3 percent. We built a building for a 
company I worked with in Caspar and we used solar. This was about 15 
years ago. Quite frankly, it did not work. We had to remove the solar 
panels and do something else. We had to find another way. Now I think 
it probably would work. We have to move forward.
  There is a difference in views depending on where you are from. The 
New Englanders have one point of view; of course, they use the energy. 
Some of the rest of the country produces as well as uses energy. My 
State produces about 35 percent of the Nation's coal and has the 
greatest coal reserves of any place in the United States. We are sixth 
or seventh in the production of oil. In gas, we are about fifth. We 
have come up with a methane production opportunity recently. There has 
to be a policy that encourages production so we can move forward.

  We have to have investment in the transmission. We find increasingly 
the market is here and the energy use is over here. That is a problem 
in California. California is the biggest user of energy but that is not 
the energy development area. We have to move that energy, whether it is 
through pipelines or transmission.
  In the bill we are trying to put together regional transmission 
organizations for electric transmissions so the States can collectively 
make some decisions with respect to interstate movement. No Member 
wants to leave it all in the hands of FERC, although there has to be 
some opportunity for FERC. We have to leave some responsibility there.
  We have had a big hassle over standard market design. This bill puts 
in a standard market design as it was designed a couple of years ago. 
But it does recognize that FERC still has to ensure reliability so we 
do not have blackouts, to assure the opportunities for movement of 
energy among States, which is not always an easy thing to do. These are 
realistic issues.
  I am surprised sometimes we find so much opposition to ideas. Ideas 
have to be here to accomplish our goals. That is what a policy is, to 
have a goal and decide how to get there. I cannot help but continue to 
be a little surprised at

[[Page S15123]]

the difficulty in getting an energy policy on the ground. In any bill 
as complicated as this, everyone has a different view and everyone can 
change things a bit. This has become a collective bill, put together by 
the House, the Senate, Democrats, Republicans, people from New England, 
people from all over. We have a mixture of ideas. I would not have done 
it exactly this way had I been doing it by myself, but I think it is 
important to have a policy to move on, dealing with our demand for 
energy, and moving in the direction we want.
  In general, this is a good bill. This is a bill that moves us forward 
for energy in the future, the kind of future in which we can work on 
our conservation methods and, hopefully, reduce the demands we have--at 
least the growth level we have had in the past--and that we can find 
alternative fuels.
  As we move forward, we are looking now at coal as the basis for 
hydrogen. That can be very important. Imagine if we developed hydrogen 
cars next year and were ready to go with them as a clean and available 
source. How long would it take to get the delivery system in place, to 
get hydrogen stations instead of gas stations all over the country?
  When we think about potential changes out there, we have to think 
about reaching that point. We must continue to provide energy as we now 
know it, as we move toward something different. All this talk of more 
oil and gas, we will have renewables. Good luck. What are we going to 
do in the 15-year-period of transition?
  I hope we continue to look at a balanced policy with conservation, 
alternatives, domestic production, research, more cleanliness in 
production, and so on.

  We will continue, I suppose, to talk about this matter for a while. I 
am disappointed that apparently there is going to be a reluctance to 
let us move forward with it as quickly as we should. We are trying to 
complete some business this week, and yet it is going to be very 
difficult to do that.

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