[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
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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.
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