[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 174 (Tuesday, November 25, 2003)]
[Senate]
[Pages S15966-S15968]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       ENERGY POLICY ACT OF 2003

  Mr. JEFFORDS. Mr. President, I have raised concerns about the 
troubling environmental provisions contained in the energy bill 
conference report several times during the course of debate on the 
measure, but I also wanted to share my concerns regarding the energy 
provisions of the bill. Energy policy is an important issue for America 
and one which my Vermont constituents take very seriously. The bill 
before us seeks to address important issues, such as the role of 
domestic production of energy resources versus foreign imports, the 
tradeoffs between the need for energy and the need to protect the 
quality of our environment, and the need for additional domestic 
efforts to support improvements in our energy efficiency, and the 
wisest use of our energy resources. Given the importance of energy 
policy, this bill is a very serious matter and I do not take a decision 
to oppose such a bill lightly. In my view, this conference report does 
not achieve the correct balance on several important energy issues, as 
well as on a number of environmental issues.
  In my work on this legislation, I have heard from large numbers of my 
constituents. They generally regard the bill as legislation written by 
a handful of people with the purpose of rolling back environmental 
protections and providing big corporations with giveaways at the 
expense of average Americans. Wally Elton from Springfield, VT called 
my office last Tuesday to voice his many concerns about the bill. Mr. 
Elton is skeptical about many facets of this legislation. ``It makes 
energy the top priority for public lands, it relaxes clean air and 
clean water standards, which will have bad effects on public health. 
There is nothing for conservation--it is all about giving companies 
subsidies and granting them everything on their 'wish list'. In a time 
of deficit, we should not be doing this.''
  In short, Mr. Elton has deep concern regarding all aspects of this 
bill, right down to the way it was produced. ``The bill is not a 
reconciliation of two bills, and was not the product of bipartisan 
effort,'' he said. ``They just started over.''
  Many people echo Mr. Elton's concern about this bill being written 
behind closed doors, in ``secret.'' My constituents tell me that a bill 
written without the valid contributions of a wide range of people will 
not reflect the feelings of the majority of Americans. It is widely 
known as ``Cheney's bill.''
  Carol Groom of Warren said ``They are rolling back our environmental 
protections and cleanup of MBTE will be put on the taxpayers.'' Mary 
Lou Treat of Putney, VT is worried about respiratory diseases caused 
from pollutants from coal-burning factories, while Catherine Audetter, 
also of Putney, said ``wary of this legislation's unusual support of 
oil'' and lack of focus on renewables. Susanna Liepmann of South 
Strafford is concerned about wildlife protection.
  An energy expert in my State likened this bill to a horror movie: 
``My strong recommendation is to oppose this bill in any way you can. 
This bill should have been released on Halloween--it's a Frankenstein 
monster of mismatched body parts, most of them bad in and of 
themselves, and even worse when patched together.''
  For example, in the electricity title, it strengthens the hand of 
FERC by permitting mandatory reliability standards, which is fine, but 
not as big an improvement as some claim. But it weakens the hand of 
FERC to require transmission companies to join RTOs, and blocks FERC's 
hand on moving to better market structures. In New England, this means 
that transmission

[[Page S15967]]

companies now rule the roost, and can essentially dictate terms to the 
ISO--because their participation in the regional pool is voluntary. 
These are the regional monopolists--why is our ability to regulate them 
on a regional basis made subject to their voluntary agreement?
  For another example, this bill is deferring to States by holding back 
FERC from mandating regional markets; but it harms States by repealing 
PUHCA without any meaningful replacement. Two years after the Enron 
disaster, and associated revelations and bankruptcies of many other 
major players, why are we are repealing PUHCA without any serious look 
at what would be needed instead?
  Of course, at a more fundamental level, a bill that gives enormous 
benefits to fossil extraction industries and does not improve CAFE 
standards is an embarrassment. The failure is mirrored on the 
electricity side, where it gives incentives for supply side electricity 
production and delivery with merely face-saving measures to advance 
efficiency and renewables. The list could go on.
  My recommendation to the Senate is to put the Frankenstein bill out 
of its misery. Stop it any way you can. A filibuster is in order--and 
it should be about a lot more than MBTE.
  These examples serve to express my constituents' frustration with 
this legislation. And their concern is reflected by communication that 
I have had with other energy sector experts as well. Ralph Nader, long 
regarded as an expert in vehicle fuel economy, is deeply concerned that 
this bill does nothing to increase the average fuel efficiency of our 
passenger cars, which is the worst in 20 years.
  Steven M. Nadel, executive director of the American Council for an 
Energy-Efficient Economy, said in the New York Times on November 21, 
2003, that the vehicle and energy efficiency provisions of the current 
energy bill ``are only a Band-Aid.'' The 3-month investigation released 
by a joint U.S.-Canada government task force on the blackout documents 
a significant and overriding reason for the cascading outage that 
knocked out electricity from New York to Toronto to Detroit: No one was 
in charge of the sprawling, heavily loaded and trouble-prone part of 
the transmission grid running around Lake Erie. The portion of the 
midwestern grid centered in Ohio has long worried industry regulators, 
and the energy bill does create operating rules to lessen the risk of 
blackouts. But this conference report could do much more for 
reliability such as establishing uniform net metering requirements, 
promoting the upgrade of existing infrastructure rather than creating a 
frenzy over the construction of new lines, and investing in the 
deployment of new transmission technologies.
  Finally, I have heard from Norman Milleron, former member of 
Berkeley's Energy Commission in the 1970s, that the country could be 
doing much more to capture natural gas that is lost or inefficiently 
combusted at centrally located powerplants, promote the use of 
distributed generation, and advance research to promote energy 
efficiency and more effectively generate electricity from biomass.
  This bill should have contained a renewable portfolio standard 
requiring electric utilities to generate or purchase a percentage of 
the electricity they sell from renewable sources. Fifty-three Senators 
support such a requirement, more than a majority of this body. We can 
and should do better on renewable energy sources. This bill should have 
set a serious target, we should have had a floor debate on this issue, 
and it should have been in the conference report.
  In addition, this bill repeals the pro-consumer Public Utility 
Holding Company Act, among the Federal Government's most important 
mechanisms to protect electricity consumers. The conference report 
fails to protect electricity consumers, investors, and small businesses 
from abusive transactions between utilities and affiliate companies 
within the same corporate family. It also failed to include an 
amendment that I cosponsored, offered by the Senator from Washington, 
Ms. Cantwell, to the fiscal year 2004 Agriculture Appropriations bill, 
which banned all of the Enron-like trading schemes. The Cantwell 
amendment passed with the support of 57 Senators, and should have been 
added to this bill.
  As I have said before, the American people deserve better than this 
bill, and I cannot vote in favor of it as currently drafted. Both the 
environmental and the energy provisions of this measure will need to be 
greatly improved when we return next year to get my vote.
  Mr. ROCKEFELLER. Mr. President, this past Friday I voted against the 
Energy bill conference report that was before the Senate. I did this 
despite having worked for many years on some of the bill's components 
that I believe will be good for West Virginia and the Nation, such as 
tax incentives and related research and development of clean coal 
technologies, incentives to increase domestic energy production through 
an expansion of existing credits for production from non-conventional 
sources, and incentives to promote greater use of alternative fuel 
vehicles. However, presented with the complete package under 
consideration, I had no qualms about voting to continue debate and to 
stop a vote on final passage.
  As a Senator from a State where coal is not merely a home state 
industry, but a part of the spirit of the place, I did not come to this 
conclusion easily. Many parts of this bill will have little or no 
direct impact on my State, while parts of the bill could help West 
Virginia. My first concern when looking at any bill is how it will 
affect West Virginians. Only then do I look at the broader scope of 
legislation. In this instance, these concerns coincide. Balancing all 
that is good against all that is bad in a large and complex bill, I 
believe this energy bill will do more harm than good to my state, 
especially to its coal industry, and to the nation as a whole.
  The failure to produce a bill the Senate could pass is especially 
frustrating to me because I have argued for my entire Senate career 
that the country desperately needs a comprehensive and responsible 
energy policy. Recently this need has become obvious even to the casual 
observer. Huge portions of the population suffer blackouts, high 
natural gas prices threaten our manufacturing base, and highly volatile 
gasoline prices hurt so many of our citizens. Factors like these compel 
Congress to make prudent energy policy decisions for our nation. These 
include developing our domestic energy resources where it can be done 
without harming the environment, such as is the case with natural gas 
exploration in the Appalachian Basin that I have promoted by working to 
extend tax incentives for the types of non-conventional terrain common 
there. It should include funding advancements in technology, as I have 
advocated with my support for clean coal tax incentives and related 
R&D, to preserve the long-term viability of our coal industry. It 
should include common-sense programs to protect miners and other energy 
industry workers who do the dangerous work that allows our economy to 
grow. An energy policy we can all support would do more than pay lip 
service to improving the reliability of our electrical grid, or to the 
efficiency and conservation measures that must be part of an effective 
national energy strategy.
  I am sad to say that the Energy conference report misses the mark. We 
would have done better to simply pass the much more balanced bill the 
Senate passed in 2002, and again this year. I encourage my Republican 
colleagues in the strongest terms possible to use that bill as a guide, 
and to move quickly, with active bipartisan cooperation, on this 
important issue early next year. This will produce a bill that will 
enjoy support on both sides of the aisle. I will not hesitate to oppose 
another flawed bill, like the one we rejected last week that I believe 
would hurt my State of West Virginia, no matter how many times the 
majority seeks to shut off debate.
  This is a bill I had hoped would help sustain the long-term health of 
the coal industry. I recognize that the bill contains some clean coal 
tax incentives, which I have worked hard for years to enact into law, 
and related research and development. Unfortunately, an Energy 
conference closedout to Democrats made damaging cuts of 20 percent or 
more to Senate provisions designed to move the utility industry toward 
emission-free coal-fired power plants in the foreseeable future. The

[[Page S15968]]

R&D goal of $2 billion over 10 years was cut, and then further diluted 
by including earmarked loan guarantees, including one to strip clean 
coal technology out of an Alaska demonstration project and reconfigure 
it as a conventional coal plant. The tax provisions, already reduced 
from a level coal and utility industry experts project as necessary to 
truly drive technological development, were cut further. That money was 
shifted to allow the oil and gas industries to receive almost 49 
percent of all tax incentives, while coal, which produces more than 50 
percent of the nation's electricity, has to be satisfied with only 
about 10 percent of the benefit of the bill.
  What is probably most troubling for my State of West Virginia is that 
this bill would tilt a playing field that is far from level already 
dramatically in the direction of western coal. Under this legislation, 
companies out west that mine coal on public lands will be required to 
conduct much less stringent environmental analysis, and then be 
reimbursed by taxpayers for any costs incurred. At the same time, these 
companies will be able to mine this coal the taxpayers' coal--and pay 
lower royalties than have been required until now. Coal from the Powder 
River Basin is already cost-competitive in parts of the eastern United 
States with coal mined in Appalachia. Finally, this bill includes a 
completely unjustified repeal of a 4.3 cent per gallon excise tax 
railroads pay on diesel fuel, which will make it even cheaper for 
western coal companies to flood the eastern United States with their 
product.
  Further, I am simply astonished that in a bill that gives an 
unprecedented amount of taxpayer money to special interests, and which 
purports to support coal, that House conferees not from coal states 
demanded that a small but critical provision of mine from last year's 
Senate bill be removed. This provision, which would have added no 
additional cost to the bill, called upon the Secretary of Labor to 
hire, train, and deploy as many Mine Safety Inspectors as she is 
currently authorized to have. This was meant to overcome a decline in 
the number of mine inspectors, and therefore, in mine inspections, that 
predates this administration. This situation, where mine inspectors 
spend far more time on the road traveling between mines than they ever 
spend inspecting them for compliance with federal health and safety 
rules, will become untenable if the nearly 25 percent of inspectors 
scheduled to retire in the next three to five years actually leave the 
already-depleted workforce. Let me reiterate: No new authorization; no 
demand for additional personnel to make sure the coal mines in this 
country are safe for the miners producing the fuel that generates more 
than half our electricity. Just hire and train them now so that planned 
retirements do not leave our miners unprotected by qualified Mine 
Safety Inspectors. Secretary Chao signed off on the provision last 
year, and in 2003, Senator Domenici included it in his version of the 
bill. But it's not in the conference report. I wonder how, in an energy 
bill that is supposed to be about maximizing our domestic production, 
we can look the other way at miners' safety.
  I would be remiss, if I did not give credit where credit is due. I 
have worked for many years on incentives to promote natural gas 
development from non-conventional sources. These so-called section 29 
credits, including incentives for the capture of coalmine methane and 
the production of coke, would, respectively, reinvigorate natural gas 
drilling in the Appalachian Basin, lower the production costs and 
increase the safety of coal mining, and help the struggling American 
steel industry get back on its feet. I have advocated for these 
incentives during my entire career because I understand how much they 
would help my State of West Virginia. I was proud, both last year and 
in 2003, to lead a broad bipartisan coalition in the Senate pushing for 
extension and expansion of section 29. With regard to these provisions 
I commend the conferees. Unlike many pieces of our bill that went into 
conference with the House, I believe the section 29 provisions in the 
conference report have been greatly improved.
  I trust that few Senators cast many votes that are decided purely on 
the numbers. How much something costs, or how much are we willing to 
give to this industry or that one play into our decisions, to be sure. 
But for this Senator, at least, figures tend to be obliterated by the 
people our actions are helping. We had a chance in this conference 
report to help a group of people I have taken into my heart, and for 
whom I probably have spent more hours working than any other. I am 
speaking of retired coal miners and their surviving spouses.
  The Coal Act was created to protect the promise of lifetime health 
benefits for coal miners, who fueled the nation's post World War II 
economic growth, and who made salary and pension concessions in 
exchange for those health benefits. The Coal Act fulfilled a promise 
first made by President Truman in his 1946 agreement with legendary 
UMWA President John L. Lewis. In response to a coal strike in the late 
1980s and a looming crisis in the miners' health funds, the first Bush 
administration created the Coal Commission to find a long term 
solution. Those recommendations became the basis for the Coal Act, 
which protected the health benefits of more than 100,000 retired 
miners. Today, there are almost 50,000 retired miners and widows who 
depend on the Coal Act for their health care security--their average 
age is about 78. Since enactment, the Coal Act has faced many 
challenges, but the combination of sharply escalating drug costs and a 
series of negative court decisions have resulted in a serious deficit 
in the Funds. That deficit will mean a cut in health benefits next year 
if Congress does not act to stop it.
  We had a chance, in the Energy conference, to shore up the Combined 
Benefit Fund while also helping make states whole with regard to what 
was owed them in outstanding Abandoned Mine Land contributions. I have 
heard promises that both Senate and House Chairmen have made to deal 
with this issue next year, when the AML Fund is up for reauthorization. 
For the 80-year old miners' widows who are facing a benefit cut next 
February, they have heard promises before, but in their behalf I must 
say that I sincerely hope that next year is not too late.
  I am not happy that I must vote against this bill. I am sorry for my 
State of West Virginia, because it deserves better than this bill gives 
it. I'm sorry that our balanced bill of 2002 has been replaced with 
this lopsided monstrosity. I will continue to push my colleagues for a 
balanced and responsible energy policy for this nation, and I look 
forward to a time, hopefully soon, when I can vote for such a bill.

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