[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 169 (Thursday, November 20, 2003)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E2342-E2343]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


         CONFERENCE REPORT ON H.R. 6, ENERGY POLICY ACT OF 2003

                                 ______
                                 

                               speech of

                            HON. MARK UDALL

                              of colorado

                    in the house of representatives

                       Tuesday, November 18, 2003

  Mr. UDALL of Colorado. Mr. Speaker, I cannot support this 
legislation.
  We all know that this country is overly dependent on a single energy 
source--fossil fuels--to the detriment of our environment, our national 
security, and our economy. To lessen this dependence and to protect our 
environment, we must pass a bill that helps us balance our energy 
portfolio and increase the contributions of alternative energy sources 
to our energy mix.
  Unfortunately, this bill doesn't provide that balance. And for the 
most part it not only falls short of meeting the challenges of our 
time, in many ways it can be described as an energy policy for the 
nineteenth century.
  Of course just as no bill is perfect, even this bill is not totally 
bad.
  For example, I am pleased that legislation I've initiated is being 
considered as part of this bill.
  The bill includes the Federal Laboratory Educational Partners Act of 
2003, legislation I introduced with my colleague Rep. Beauprez that 
would permit the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and other 
Department of Energy laboratories to use revenue from their inventions 
to support science education activities in their communities.
  The bill includes the Distributed Power Hybrid Energy Act, a bill I 
introduced to direct the Secretary of Energy to develop and implement a 
strategy for research, development, and demonstration of distributed 
power hybrid energy systems. It makes sense to focus our R&D priorities 
on distributed power hybrid systems that can both help improve power 
reliability and affordability and bring more efficiency and cleaner 
energy resources into the mix.
  The bill includes my High Performance Schools Act, which would enable 
our school districts to build school buildings that take advantage of 
advanced energy conservation technologies, daylighting, and renewable 
energy to help the environment and help our children learn. As included 
in the conference report, my bill would be expanded to help state and 
local governments improve not only energy efficiency in schools, but 
also in public buildings in general.
  I am also pleased that this bill includes the Clean School Buses Act, 
a bill that Chairman Boehlert and I drafted that authorizes grants to 
help school districts replace aging diesel vehicles with clean, 
alternative fuel buses.
  But despite these bright spots, most of the bill is bad policy--bad 
for the environment, bad for the taxpayers, and bad for the country.
  Like its predecessor in the last Congress, this bill puts all its 
eggs in one basket, the wrong basket. For every step the bill takes to 
move us away from our carbon-based economy, it takes two in the 
opposite direction.
  The bill fails to take any steps whatsoever to require that the 
nation reduce its dependence on oil or improve the fuel economy of our 
cars, trucks, and SUVs. In fact, the bill makes it more difficult to 
update fuel economy standards by adding new requirements for redundant 
studies to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's CAFE 
standards-setting process.
  By contrast, just today we learned that China is preparing to impose 
minimum fuel economy standards on new cars for the first time--rules 
that will be significantly more stringent than those in this country. 
This is great news for the world--but what an embarrassing proof that 
we won't even do as much for our own national security and the 
environment.
  That contrast speaks volumes about this bill's priorities, which are 
the priorities of this Administration.
  This bill not only does nothing to decrease our dependence on oil--it 
also does almost nothing to control demand. But increasing production 
while ignoring demand is a recipe for disaster.
  The Administration boasts that this bill is a balanced approach 
because it would promote the development of renewable energy and energy 
efficiency technologies. But aside from a few provisions on electrical 
appliances and heating systems, the bill does little to promote energy 
conservation. And although there are some tax incentives for renewable 
fuels, they pale in comparison to the lavish tax breaks the bills gives 
the oil and gas industry.
  And for all we hear from the Administration about the hydrogen 
provisions, the bill doesn't go far enough. It's all well and good to 
authorize billions of dollars to deploy hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, 
but the bill includes no production or deployment requirements or even 
goals to ensure that a meaningful number of hydrogen vehicles will be 
delivered to consumers.
  As co-chair of the Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Caucus in 
the House, I define a balanced bill as one that gives more than a 
passing nod to the development of alternative sources of energy. The 
Senate version of this bill included sensible provisions to require 
large utilities to get modest amounts of their power from renewable 
sources. Although 13 states have already passed their own versions of 
such a Renewable Portfolio Standard, and although the energy bill 
conferees just yesterday voted to include the RPS in the conference 
report, the Republicans stripped it out late last night. If this were 
really about jobs, as the Republicans claim, they would have retained 
the RPS provision--which experts say could create millions of new jobs 
in this country.
  I won't even get into some of the other egregious provisions, such as 
the incentives in the bill for new nuclear and coal development, and 
the repeal of the Public Utility Holding Company Act, the main law to 
protect consumers from market manipulation, fraud, and abuse in the 
electricity sector.
  Nor will I complain in detail about process--the fact that Democrats 
were shut out of conference proceedings, that we don't even know the 
cost of this 1100-page bill that we were able to review in its entirety 
only last night, that Republican conferees have essentially been buying 
votes over the last week to ensure the bill's passage.
  An example of this vote-buying is the bill's language to allow 
polluted areas to have more time to reduce smog pollution but without 
having to implement stronger air pollution controls, placing a 
significant burden on states and communities down-wind of these urban 
areas.
  There are other provisions related to public health that should never 
have been included in this bill. The bill eliminates protections for 
underground drinking water supplies from potential damages caused by 
hydraulic fracturing. The bill also provides a special liability waiver 
for MTBE producer who face lawsuits from states and localities for 
polluting their water supplies, thereby shifting cleanup costs to 
taxpayers.
  Bad for the country, the bill is particularly bad for the West.
  Many of its provisions will directly and immediately affect Colorado 
and other western States. We have important resources of oil and gas, 
as well as great potential for solar energy and wind energy. I support 
energy development in appropriate places and in ways that balances that 
development with other uses and such other vital resources as water and 
the people, fish, and wildlife that depend on it. Unfortunately, here 
again this bill does not reflect the needed balance.
  Instead, it combines big subsidies for energy development with 
lessening of the procedural and substantive requirement that have been 
established to protect our lands, water, and environment.
  Overall, the oil and gas title of the bill is intended to stimulate 
increased production from both the Outer Continental Shelf and onshore 
lands. It combines a series of royalty reductions, so companies will 
pay the public less for the oil, gas, and other energy resources 
developed on publicly-owned lands.
  It also would completely exempt oil and gas construction activities--
including roads, drill pads, pipeline corridors, refineries, and other 
facilities--from the stormwater drainage requirements of the Clean 
Water Act.
  It also has provisions designed to speed up establishing rights-of-
way and corridors for oil and gas pipelines and electric transmission 
lines. Under section 350, within 2 years the federal agencies are to 
designate new corridors for oil and gas pipelines and electricity 
transmission and facilities on Federal land in the eleven contiguous 
Western States of Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, 
Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming. And it 
provides for a pilot project to speed up the processing of federal 
permits related to oil and gas development in several parts of the BLM 
lands. This includes the Glenwood Springs Resource Area in Colorado as 
well as areas in Montana, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming.
  Nothing in the bill would increase the resources available to BLM or 
the other federal land managing agencies to carry out their other 
responsibilities in connection with management of the affected lands. 
As a result, this bill has the potential to essentially repeal 
multiple-use management and to make energy development the dominant use 
on the public lands.
  Similarly, the bill includes a requirement for a study and report on 
opportunities to develop renewable energy on the public lands and 
National Forests as well as lands managed by the energy and defense 
departments--including units of the National Wilderness Preservation 
System and wilderness study areas, National Monuments, National 
Conservation Areas, and other environmentally-sensitive areas. At best, 
this is a prescription for controversy. At worst, it threatens to open 
the door for incompatible development on lands that should be left as 
they are.

[[Page E2343]]

  These are big steps backward. So is the provision that would allow 
geothermal-energy leases to be in effect converted into claims under 
the Mining Law of 1872.
  In conclusion, Mr. Speaker, we need a well-designed policy to meet 
the challenges of our time, not a policy that will diminish our energy 
security. With the Middle East--the world's main oil-producing region--
in turmoil, we must question the predictability of future foreign oil 
supplies. Fully 30 percent of the world's oil supply comes from the 
volatile and politically unstable Persian Gulf region. Yet with only 3 
percent of the world's known oil reserves, we are not in a position to 
solve our energy vulnerability by drilling at home.
  This bill does nothing to tackle this fundamental problem. I only 
wish my colleagues in the House could understand that a vision of a 
clean energy future is not radical science fiction but is instead based 
on science and technology that exists today.
  In much the same way that America set about unlocking the secrets of 
the atom with the ``Manhattan Project'' or placing a man on the moon 
with the Apollo program, we can surely put more public investment 
behind new energy sources that will free us from our dependence on oil.
  This bill would continue our addiction to finite and politically 
unstable energy resources, while undermining public health, the 
environment, and ultimately our national security itself. It should be 
rejected.

                          ____________________