[Congressional Record Volume 152, Number 79 (Monday, June 19, 2006)]
[House]
[Pages H4205-H4212]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
ALTERNATIVE ENERGY SOURCES
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Conaway). Under the Speaker's announced
policy of January 4, 2005, the gentlewoman from Pennsylvania (Ms.
Schwartz) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority
leader.
Ms. SCHWARTZ of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate your courtesy
in giving me a few extra minutes to get here.
[[Page H4206]]
What I want to do this evening, and I am a little short on extra
Members and we are going to see how that evolves over the next few
minutes, but I want to begin the discussion on an issue that I think is
really incredibly important to each and every one of us in this
country. And certainly as Members of Congress representing so many
people, constituents come to us, I think, every day, and they may not
say, what are you doing about energy, but they certainly come to us and
say, What is going on with the high price of gasoline? We go to the
pump. We see the price going up, sometimes more than one time in a day,
and we have seen prices well over $3 a gallon.
And what we know, of course, is that consumers are paying 100 percent
more than they were paying 5 years ago. The price at the pump was about
$1.44, $1.50, the average price of gasoline 5 years ago; and now we are
seeing prices certainly well over $3 a gallon. And this is at the same
time, of course, that we are seeing record profits from the oil
industry. And certainly my constituents say to me, What is going on?
What can we do about this? Why isn't something more happening? And they
do understand there are some causes of this, but what I would like to
discuss this evening is what is going on and what we have been doing
about it and what we have not been doing about it that we should.
I think that is really what I am most concerned about as I see these
issues in my district, not only for gasoline. We are not in the right
season yet, but we certainly know that home heating oil and home
heating fuel has gone up as well. In fact, I commissioned a study in
Pennsylvania to see what the price was for home heating oil last
winter, and we saw increases on the average in Pennsylvania of over
$700 a year for a family. That is a lot of dollars, particularly for
somebody on a fixed income, young families struggling to make ends
meet, and, of course, making some of the choices are really very
difficult for families. And, in fact, what we are hearing is that
families are telling us that it matters, that they have seen a real
effect when they see transportation and home heating costs going up an
average of 75 percent increase over what they saw even in 2001.
So what are we seeing? What are we doing about this? What do we
expect to do? There is certainly discussion on the floor about this
issue. And I know, as Democrats, we have stood and really made quite a
few suggestions, some very specific as far as what we can do
immediately. The one specific one, of course, was what about price
gouging? Are we seeing the price of gasoline go up because, in fact,
there was some inappropriate, illegal activity? We have some
preliminary information about that. Unfortunately, we do not have a
Federal definition of price gouging; so it has been really difficult to
be able to say specifically whether, in fact, that is really what has
been going on.
And what can we do more immediately to help make sure that the oil
industry is doing all that it can to get us more affordable gasoline?
But there is no question that those are short-term solutions. Those are
not long-term solutions. And what many of us feel is that we should be
acting on long-term solutions and we should have been doing it already,
and why are we not doing it today, because what we do today matters
next year, the year after, and for years in the future.
So what are we doing to make sure that there is an adequate supply of
energy in this Nation? Are we smart enough to be doing the kind of
innovation and research that we know we need to do to be able to do
this? Of course the answer, Mr. Speaker, is that we are; that the
answer has to be to diversify our energy sources, to look at the
different ways, the innovations, that are out there and bringing
different kinds of fuel to our vehicles and to our homes. And we have
seen that already. We have had numbers of our Members talk about
biofuels and the opportunity for ethanol. We have just seen in my
region of the country, and we have seen it elsewhere in the country,
the fact that we now have mixed gasoline and ethanol. We have 5 percent
ethanol coming into our tanks in the Philadelphia area. That switch was
just made a couple of months ago.
But we also know that you can have a flexible fuel vehicle, you can
fuel your vehicle with 85 percent ethanol. Well, that is made out of
corn in this country. Does that mean we reduce our reliance on foreign
oil? Absolutely. And should we be doing more of that? How do we
actually begin to make the kind of investments that really would matter
where we can actually say we are using the kind of research, the kind
of smart scientists, the engineers, the innovation that exists in this
country to bring new fuel options to our vehicles and to all of us so
that we have a diversity, we have more choices as consumers?
And then, in fact, there was an article in the Inquirer just this
morning that the oil executives themselves are saying this is a
question of supply. It is also a question of demand. If there is less
demand, that would make a difference in price as well. A report I heard
said if we could just reduce demand by 3 percent in this country, we
could, in fact, start to see a reduction in prices.
So we have some real opportunities here. And of course long term if
we can start to look at biofuels to be able to get them going, be able
to get the production up really much faster, then we really have the
opportunity to bring down the cost of fuel in this country for our
automobiles.
Now, of course, tied to that there is something many of us also
believe, and that is that we ought to be calling on the automobile
manufacturers to produce more fuel-efficient vehicles, more hybrids,
more flexible fuel vehicles, and more gasoline-driven vehicles that are
more fuel efficient. And they can do it. They know how to do it. We
need to make them do it more quickly and to be able to create that
option for us so that we as consumers, all of my constituents, all of
my fellow Congressmen's constituents, all Americans, have greater
flexibility and can make choices about what are the right kinds of
vehicles for them to drive, what is the most fuel-efficient way for us
to be handling our own transportation needs.
So I will just say that those are just some of the ideas. In fact,
there are so many ideas. This is one of the things that when
constituents ask, what can you do, I say we should be investing in
serious ways in this country in these new technologies. And then we
should be insisting that our automobile manufacturers and our
purchasers, as well, start to participate in this. There are so many
ideas out there.
I see a colleague of mine has joined us, and I am excited about that
because he is someone who is very knowledgeable about this whole area
and what we could be doing. But when we see the city of Philadelphia
that I represent, that the new city buses they are buying are hybrid
buses, that can make a really big difference. All of our cities should
be doing that. All of our communities should be doing that. What about
school buses? What can we do to make them more fuel efficient? These
are things that we really need to be working on.
And I will say two of the things I have only been focusing on, access
to the energy we need and to price and the concern that consumers have
on that, but there are two other aspects of this that are very critical
for us to understand, and that is that of course it has an
environmental effect if we continue to burn fossil fuels at the rate we
have been doing that, we actually continue the kind of pollution we
have. We cannot just have rhetoric about reducing emissions. We need to
take it really seriously if we plan to protect this Earth we live in
and protect the environment and the consequences that we have seen of
some of the changes in the environment, the increasing number of
storms.
Hurricane Katrina is, of course, one of the examples that is in all
of our minds; and we are just approaching, of course, a new hurricane
season.
{time} 1900
The third point I was going to make in addition to cost and
availability of fuel and the energy we need as well as the
environmental effects is, of course, the third area, which is our
national security. We all understand, I hope we do increasingly
understand, our reliance on foreign oil. Sixty percent of the oil that
we use is imported. We need to reduce, if not eliminate, our reliance
on foreign oil. It changes the relationships that we have with nations
that are not always friendly to us.
So we need to have a much different relationship to foreign oil than
we do,
[[Page H4207]]
and that is we have to end our reliance on foreign oil. But that is not
going to be done unless we start to really seriously invest in
alternative fuels and renewable energy sources, both for our vehicles,
and, of course for our homes as well.
So I am going to ask my colleague to join us.
I did want to also say that I hope we can in our discussion also get
to a little bit of a discussion about what consumers can do. What can
individual Americans do that could really change the way we use energy;
put more pressure on us, on Congress, to create those alternatives?
Someone asked me, well, where can you buy ethanol-mixed gasoline?
Where can you buy E85 in Pennsylvania? Well, the answer is there is one
station in Lancaster, and there is one station in Pittsburgh. If you
live in Philadelphia, that is a very long to drive to fill up your tank
and not acceptable.
So we need to be kick-starting this. We need to not just do a little
bit; wouldn't that be nice, let's do that little project over there,
let's see how that goes. We need to make a serious investment that
changes dramatically the kind of energy options that we have for our
automobiles, for our homes, for our daily lives. And only by doing that
will we be able to protect the environment for the future, will we be
able to end our reliance on foreign oil, will we be able to bring down
the cost of energy for our cars and for our homes.
If we don't do it now, we are going to be having this same
discussion, only more seriously, in the years to come.
So, as Democrats we have had a number of proposals, but one of the
leaders in really putting forward a new energy policy for this country,
and it is a wonderful one, it is called the New Apollo Energy Act, I
guess we would like to see if it gets to be an act, and I would want to
really encourage it, and I am delighted that my colleague Congressman
Jay Inslee has joined us to talk a little bit about what that would do
and how it would get us started in a very, very serious way in changing
the way we create the energy for ourselves, for our homes and for our
businesses.
Mr. INSLEE. Thank you. I am delighted that Ms. Schwartz is leading
this energy discussion tonight for two reasons. One, right now outside
the Capitol there is a giant lightning storm going on, so talking about
energy in the spirit of Ben Franklin is the right time to do it.
But, secondly, and more importantly, many of us here on the
Democratic side of the aisle believe that America is ready for a
project with the same scope and ambition and vision as we had with John
F. Kennedy with the original Apollo project.
I have introduced H.R. 2828, which is called the New Apollo Energy
bill, that basically is working on the belief that this Nation has the
same gumption, the same technological prowess, the same vision that we
had in the 1960s when we decided, as challenged by John F. Kennedy from
that rostrum on May 9, 1961, to say we were going to put a man on the
moon in 10 years and bring them back safely.
We have now introduced this New Apollo Energy Project because we
believe that the times that we now live in this decade are both as
challenging and as promising as the 1960s were in space. We believe
that the challenge we have to deal with energy is of the same scope as
America had and Kennedy had dealing during the Cold War with the space
race. We also believe that our ability to invent, to tinker, to
innovate is as good or better as it was in the 1960s, and we need to
have that same spirit with the New Apollo Project.
In fact, I was just reading before I came over here, one of my staff
handed me the quote from Kennedy's speech, and one of the things that
he said was, I think it was kind of interesting, he was talking about
the need for America to be a leader in space. We believe America needs
to be a leader, it is our destiny to be a leader, and what Kennedy said
was, ``If this capsule history of our progress teaches us anything, it
is that man, in his quest for knowledge and progress, is determined and
cannot be deterred. The exploration of space will go ahead, whether we
join in it or not. It is one of the great adventures of all time, and
no nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to
stay behind in this race for space.''
We believe, those of us who are propounding the New Apollo Energy
Project believe, that we cannot be a leader of the world unless we
decide that we are going to lead the world into a new energy future in
this country and later in the world. And to do so, we believe that that
is a challenge that is much more than nibbling on the edges.
We got to the moon because we had an aspiration of one giant leap for
mankind, not just one little baby step for man. Frankly, this Congress
and this administration to date, sadly to say, has been just nibbling
on the edges. These tiny little inching forward as a baby would take
their first little steps.
We both need and deserve more in this country, which is a very bold
and visionary technological leap in energy. So we have introduced the
New Apollo Energy Project, which will answer that bugle cry that this
country has always answered to really leapfrog the existing
technologies.
If I can just briefly describe some of the things we want to do. We
want to achieve three ends in the New Apollo Energy Project. Number
one, we want to lead the world economically. We want to create good,
high-paying jobs in the new technologies of new energy that are right
now, unfortunately, going overseas.
Unfortunately, we are losing jobs right now to some of the Japanese
automakers because of auto efficiency. We are losing jobs to some the
German solar energy industries. We are losing jobs to Denmark. And I
think Denmark is a great country, but to lose jobs to them to create
these wind turbines makes no sense. The country that put a man on the
moon, to allow other countries to lead in energy makes no sense. So one
of the things we need to do is to bring the job growth right here.
The second thing we have to do is truly break our addiction to Middle
Eastern oil. Although we laud the President for the first time
suggesting after 6 years of urging him, has now suggested that he wants
to join us to help to break the addiction to Middle Eastern oil, and
that is great, but, unfortunately, the week the President said that, he
laid off 150 or 100 researchers in renewable energy at the Boulder
Energy Laboratory. So we would like to have some reality rather than
rhetoric.
Third, we have to break this tendency to put more carbon dioxide in
the air, to deal with global warming. The debate about global warming
is over. It was a vigorous and strenuous debate, and it is done.
The science of global warming is in, and we need now to really have
technologies that will reduce CO2 emissions.
I met the President of the Marshall Islands the other day, and he
told me, he was on Bainbridge Island, I live on an island, Bainbridge
Island, Washington, he told me that his entire nation may be
environmental refugees because their entire nation is threatened by the
rising sea levels together with the collapse of coral reefs.
We had a meeting with Stanford professors last week in the basement
of this building, who told us in 100 years there may not be any viable
healthy coral reefs in the world because the carbon dioxide we are
putting in the air out of our tailpipes and coal-powered plants goes
into solution in the ocean, it makes the oceans more acidic, and when
they become more acidic, coral reefs cannot survive.
So we got to get these three jobs done. We have got a New Apollo
Project to do it, and I would like to discuss it in depth.
Ms. SCHWARTZ of Pennsylvania. I just want to ask you a little more
about that. I think sometimes for those of us who are not scientists
out there, there is sometimes a feeling when you hear about that, it is
what can we do about that? We need to use all of this energy. We need
to use these fossil fuels. How am I going to get to my job? I mean, how
can we possibly do this? How am I going to worry about the coral reefs?
Why should I worry about that? What can we possibly do about it?
I think what you are saying, and I think what we need to really be
talking about, is believe in ourselves as a country, to believe in how
smart we
[[Page H4208]]
are, how capable we are, how innovative we are, and then to use those
assets, which are really our people and how smart we can be, to say in
fact we can fix it.
Just as you point out, we did create this space program. We did send
to a man to the moon. We have actually even sent some women in space
now, you know? But the fact is, I was just thinking about this as well,
we have taken real problems, and we have solved them. We have solved
some of these environmental problems.
So I wanted to ask you about that, because I think one of the things
as I read your proposal I was so taken with is that it also understands
that there probably isn't one answer. We don't even know exactly what
all the solution is going to be, which I think would be great for
Americans, because the fact is we like choices. So it may be that a
hybrid vehicle works for me, and a more fuel-efficient vehicle that is
not a hybrid works for you. Maybe a flexible-fuel vehicles works for
you. Maybe I need a big car, or maybe I don't need a big car, depending
on where we live, what kind of job we have. But really the question I
have, too, as I look at your proposal is you really look at a lot of
different ways to solve this problem and really take the science and
use it. So talk about that, if you would. I think that is really
important to hear.
Mr. INSLEE. I think you have put your finger on a very important
principle as we go forward on energy debate. The debate in energy
between those of us who believe in the New Apollo Project and those of
us who do not is really a debate between the optimists and the
pessimists.
The pessimists believe that we are tied to these really now ancient
technologies. Fossil fuels is really an ancient technology. It is from
the 1800s. It is old. We have been doing it for a long, long time.
Now, pessimists believe that we are stuck burning fossil fuels, and
that is about as good as it gets.
Ms. SCHWARTZ. In fact, isn't that the President's solution, just more
oil?
Mr. INSLEE. Just more oil. You just drill more holes in the ground.
The problem with that is, unfortunately, for reasons that are past our
understanding, the dinosaurs went to die under somebody else's sand.
That seems so unfair to us. We use 25 percent of the world's oil, but
we only have 3 percent of the world's oil reserves. We could drill in
Yosemite, we could drill outside on the south lawn of the White House.
The problem is, the oil is not there.
We use one-quarter of the world's oil, but we only have 3 percent of
the reserves. So we can accelerate some exploration, but,
unfortunately, the oil, frankly, is not there. So for one reason, it is
just not there. But the pessimists believe that we cannot invent our
way out of this pickle.
The optimists believe that we can do the same thing in energy as we
did in space. Just to harken back in history, when Kennedy said we were
going to the moon on May 9, 1961, put that in historical perspective.
Our rockets were blowing up on the launch pad. We had launched a
softball in suborbital flight. Computers were as big as a room. He
didn't know how we were going to get to the moon, but he did know a
fundamental lesson of American psychology, which is we are the best
inventors in human history, literally. Our culture, our society in
America is the best inventive society in human history. So he
recognized our ability to innovate.
Now, the New Apollo Energy Project that we have propounded delves on
that. Let me just give you an example of just a couple things in my
neighborhood.
It was in my paper this morning, in the Seattle Times, about a young
man who has built a hybrid vehicle that uses an enhanced battery. It is
a plug-in hybrid that has a little larger battery that he adds to the
trunk. That car now gets 100 miles per gallon, 100 miles per gallon,
and it is driving the streets of Seattle, Washington, today. The reason
it does, you plug it in, it gets a little larger boost, it uses
electricity now much greater than the gasoline. Now, it does use
additional electricity, but it is getting 100 miles per gallon driving
on the streets today. This technology exists.
Because of his efforts and some of these other groups that are
pushing this, they are now pushing the auto industries to move faster
to get to this plug-in hybrid technology. It is there.
We have the largest wind farm in North America being built today,
350-foot-tall towers in southeast Washington, that is generating over
$1.5 million over a several-year period for one farmer of a stream of
revenue. This is great for farmers as well. It is going to produce
enough electricity for 400,000 people.
{time} 1915
We have the largest biodiesel plant in North America now is under
design in southwestern Washington which will produce environmentally
sound fuel for our cars and biodiesel. And biodiesel is great because
it reduces the CO2 emissions, because the CO2
goes into the plant, we make oil out of it, and we don't put any net
increase in carbon dioxide.
I just mentioned these three technologies out of hundreds that are
now coming on.
Ms. SCHWARTZ of Pennsylvania. A couple things on what you say. One is
that I think we also ought to make clear, and I know in your proposal
and you are talking about it is that this isn't about a new big
government program, this is about working with the private sector and
helping innovation, on whether it is actually giving tax credits or
helping to make some investment or helping to kick-start one of those
ideas for a private company that wants to do this and wants to explore
doing it. That is who is doing it. But what they need is for us to help
make that happen so that it doesn't take them 10 years before they grow
just enough to be able to prove it to someone, to be able to take a
risk.
And I think some of the proposals that as government we could just
ensure that loan, so that, in fact, it helps some private bank be able
to make that loan and risk it, because we don't know what is going to
work. We know some things are working; we don't know which one is going
to really take off. We know, again, even with the biofuels we have been
talking about ethanol, but there is some suggestion we could use sugar,
we could use switchgrass. There is a whole variety of other ways we can
do this, the whole question about electric cars and whether that works
and how we can do this. There is some other technologies out there,
fuel cell technology that we could actually potentially use in cars.
So, again, what we are saying here is that we want to work with the
private sector; we want to work with those scientists and innovators
and entrepreneurs who will be able to take their ideas and then be able
to keep tweaking them, if you will, to see what works, to see what
takes off; and to work with our own automobile manufacturers to say,
you want to scale it up not just another few cars, but a lot of cars,
and how quickly can you do that? How can you make it? How can we keep
making cars here that we want to buy, that we can afford to buy, that
will use less fuel?
But it is working with the private sector with that innovation,
allowing it to be quite dynamic, because we don't know which ones to
choose so much. And that is even happening, as I mentioned this about
the old-time fossil fuels. There are now clean-coal technologies. In
Pennsylvania we are sort of interested in some of that, could that
work? Could it help us get through the hump for the foreseeable future?
But I do think it is so important for us not to be so worried that we
actually only think in the very narrowest ways about how we can solve
the problem for next year or for the year after. This is really looking
at both immediate solutions, but then long term, where are we really
going with this, and why shouldn't we in America be the ones in the
forefront of this? And that is what you are talking about, and I think
that is very exciting.
Mr. INSLEE. And I want to dovetail on this point about this is good
old American capitalism as work. We believe in the power of capitalism.
You look at the space race, and it was not just governmental activity,
it was a public-private partnership with private contractors operating
in a profit margin or incentives that did help get us to the moon. And
we believe the same type of activity can be part of the solution for
energy.
[[Page H4209]]
And I have to tell you, one of the huge transitions going on in the
U.S. economy right now is happening without necessarily government
help, which is a huge influx of investment capital. We just had a
startup company involving biofuels that was announced last week at one
of the largest infusions of capital for some period of time this
decade, and we are seeing that.
And we are also seeing an infusion of intellectual capital. I come
from a part of the world that is very active in the Internet and
software technologies. The Microsoft campus is in my district. And we
are seeing a lot of intellectual capital now from software and Internet
move over to the energy side. We have seen investments from some of the
Microsoft family into biofuels.
I met an interesting fellow a few months ago who was involved in the
commercialization of the MRI machine, the magnetic resonance imaging
machine, and he made a bundle of cash on that commercialized product
that now they put us in the tubes and diagnose our old knees when you
get to be 55 and play basketball like I do. So this guy now is involved
in perfecting a solar cell panel that is nonsilicone-based; it is based
on an organic molecule that you essentially just spray on, and you can
reduce the construction cost because silicone-based solar panels are
fairly expensive to make. This could be just a spray-on application and
potentially reduces the cost 20 to 30 percent.
So here is a fellow that has done well in one electronic business now
making the transition to energy, and we are seeing a lot of that. But
what we can do is we can help those businesses get a jump start, and
one of the important things we can do on that is to offer loan
guarantees to guarantee the loan of some of these new plants. We are
now trying to hustle along a loan guarantee for a first cellulosic
ethanol plant in the world, actually in the State of Idaho, and we are
trying to get that loan guarantee perfected so that company can get up
and running.
Those are the kinds of things that are an appropriate public-private
partnership, along with the tax incentives. I sponsored a bill with
Senator Barack Obama called Health Care for Hybrids, and what it would
do is to help the auto industry with some of their legacy health care
costs in exchange for producing more fuel-efficient cars. So here is a
two-for.
Ms. SCHWARTZ of Pennsylvania. Absolutely. And I think that that says
how good this can be for business, both the cost of the new businesses
that are created as a result of what we are talking about, but I really
also means jobs. Coming from Pennsylvania, and I was in the State
senate for 14 years before coming to Congress, and we would often have
a debate when we discussed some of these changes that we wanted to in
terms of auto emissions and how we would respond to this, and what if
we actually put more regulation on businesses, wouldn't we lose jobs?
And how will we be able to protect the environment and not lose jobs?
And in Pennsylvania it was a really serious issue. And I remember
having those debates on the floor of senate, and yet by not moving
ahead, we, in fact, lost some of those jobs anyway and didn't create
new ones.
And I think what we are talking about here is let us create those new
jobs. If you have an innovative entrepreneur of a company, well, they
are going to hire people who then get jobs that potentially will grow
into more jobs and more jobs. And these are often skilled jobs, they
are decent-paying jobs. And if as a result they end with a product, new
energies, new ways for us to both fuel our vehicles and also heat our
home, and at the same time reduce some of these really serious carbon
emissions and be able to home-grow some of our energy, more of our
energy, while we are really doing a lot, and we are at the same time
reducing costs, We are reducing costs to our businesses. And now some
will say to me, if we could just reduce the cost of our energy, well,
then maybe I could hire that additional person that I am trying to do.
You hear that all the time, just bringing down the cost of electricity
or being able to bring down your home heating or heating for business,
that action may produce enough residual money for someone to be able to
create a new job or two or maybe many more jobs.
So I think we have to see this as just an extraordinarily potential
win-win for all of us. And, again, creating that diversity of options
for people and the kind of energy, maybe more choices, meaning that
there will be a little more competition, means that prices might come
down. That helps all of us. But I think what we have to say is this
about creating new businesses, creating new jobs, and at the same time
creating new sources of energy that could be both safer for the
environment and also be able to be far more available without our
having to have those serious kinds of negotiations that might get in
the way of some of our more international relationships.
And this isn't about being an isolationist when we talk about other
countries. The idea is to share some of these innovations. And we have
seen that, too. Talk about the high-tech industry, well, it is actually
some of our ideas that are now being produced elsewhere. But it is our
ideas, and we need to work and bring all those ideas together, create
those jobs, create those opportunities, and help our businesses be able
to be competitive, because without reducing energy costs, they simply
won't be able to.
Mr. INSLEE. It has been very sad to see technology originally
developed in the United States, particularly solar cell technology, now
being perfected and commercialized in Germany and other countries. To
see that hemorrhaging of jobs is really a pathetic statement of our
inaction to have a national energy policy. And we effectively don't
have a national energy policy right now, except to just sort of allow
the status quo to stumble along.
There is one thing that is very clear about energy: Somebody is going
to create millions of jobs and millions of dollars, and we want that to
be Americans. In the 1960s, they had the missile gap. Remember, during
the Nixon-Kennedy debate there was a debate about the missile gap. In a
way, we have an energy technology gap right now that, frankly, other
countries are getting a leg up on us. And the reason is, is that those
countries have developed energy policies that have decided to leapfrog
technologies and develop technologies there. We can't allow that gap to
continue to widen. And that is why this New Apollo Energy Project, H.R.
2828, if you want to take a look at it, is going to answer this
challenge.
When Kennedy set us forth in the original space race, it really was
not for economic reasons, it was largely not for a job creation
program. But if you look at what it did create, can you imagine had he
not challenged America to start the original Apollo Project? We would
not have a computer industry in this country, we would not have an
Internet-based industry, we would not have a satellite-based industry.
We would likely probably not have a nanotechnology-based industry. That
has been the mainspring of economic development and job creation in
this country.
So I think the important thing to realize about energy is we are not
just acting to $3 a gallon gas, we are not acting just to save the
planet we live on from the ravages of global warming. We are doing it
from a positive economic growth-oriented proposal. And I think you can
honestly say that this is probably the best thing the U.S. Congress
could do to really grow the U.S. economy right now, because it is the
one thing that the world obviously needs. Our market is not just in
America. When we develop a clean-coal technology, we want to sell that
technology to the Chinese and to India. And assuming we can do that,
there is enormous growth potential.
Ms. SCHWARTZ of Pennsylvania. I was going to bring up another aspect
of all of this discussion. I think also that sometimes when people hear
these kind of conversations, they think, well, it is not really about
me. What can I do that would really affect carbon emissions in this
world? You know, how can I actually help save the planet and create
more energy sources?
But the fact is, and if we could just talk about this for a minute,
there is a lot that people can do. And, again, I am reflecting back. I
remember when we first started talking about recycling, and I remember
some of my colleagues would say, well, no one is going to want to
bother doing that. And now people are doing this all across the
country, and it actually makes you
[[Page H4210]]
much more aware. It is something you can do. It saves cost at some
level.
But when you think about what some individuals can do related to
energy, and I thought we could talk about that. Again, if you are a
business owner, there is so much you can do in your own plant
potentially to be able to reduce your energy consumption so that you
could reduce your costs. All of us know about if you can weatherize
your home.
Well, I just went to visit a new building in my district that is
actually on the campus of a university that they just built a green
building. Well, I think I have seen green buildings, you know. They
have sort of motion detector electric lights, or they have more
efficient plumbing appliances and all that. But this building, actually
the roof looked like it had grass on it. It had green plants on the
roof. It was new to me. I didn't know that that existed. But they said
this isn't new. This is something we are experimenting with, but, in
fact, it is not just grass, it is a little more complicated than that.
But it is going to reduce their need for heating and cooling that
building dramatically. Dramatically. So if you could, I don't know what
the number was, cut it in half, cut it 80 percent. They are trying to
perfect this, of course.
My guess is that they are going to be able to come up with something
as we experiment with these ideas that we can do in our homes, in our
businesses, in our public spaces. And we should be leaders in that as
public officials, as elected officials. This is something we should be
doing because we know how important it is. And we know that we should
learn from each other. We always talk about best practices. Well, we
should start to scale up on this, as they say. We should start to say:
If it is working in this State, why isn't it working somewhere else?
And the States are innovative to change. We are interested to hear what
you are talking about in terms of the State of Washington. We are proud
in Pennsylvania that we have wind farms and they are working, that they
are working, as I said, on clean coal, that we are creating incentives
for businesses to be able to reduce their costs of energy.
Public transportation obviously is something we are not even getting
into here, but some of the newer technologies on that.
But just to comment on what we can do. I know there is a Federal
program, I don't think it is known well enough, called Energy Start,
where you can buy more efficient appliances. Businesses can get
credits, tax credits, for being more energy-efficient.
So as you pointed out, there are little starts here, but if we really
want to get serious about this, we have to start talking about it,
making it clear that everyone, every business, every family, and
certainly our bigger businesses can really start to participate in this
in a way that will start to really make the kind of difference that
will see us shifting to these new energy sources and reducing our
reliance on foreign oil.
{time} 1930
Mr. INSLEE. I would like to compliment you for bringing up the idea
of efficiency and not wasting energy. Because one of the things when we
talk about energy, it is very easy to just launch into how we are going
to generate more energy in an environmentally clean way. Obviously, or
maybe not so obviously, the best energy you can create is the energy
you do not waste. That is, clean energy is saving dirty energy and not
wasting it, and those of us who have studied this believe that 30 or 40
percent of this solution ultimately is using energy in a much more
efficient way, as much as inventing new ways to generate it.
That starts at home, with weatherizing your home, as you have
indicated, a pretty simple thing, and there are some simple,
inexpensive things you can do. There are more expensive things one can
do with insulation, green building; and the green building, we just had
two young men design the greenest building. They won a national award.
We are kind of proud of that. It uses passive solar heating.
They can use solar cell technology now. If you want to build a new
home, you can buy shingles that have the solar cells incorporated right
in the shingle. There is a home about 20 miles from where we are
standing in Virginia that is a net zero user of electricity, and they
use massive solar heating. It is a two story, looks like a nice little
home you find in any suburban place around Virginia. They use an in-
ground heat pump, integrated solar panels on the roof, solar sort of
passive heating through the use of the windows and tiles that collect
the heat. When they generate more electricity than they use, they feed
it back into the grid. That home was built for no more money than an
average home. They are using zero electricity off the grid on a net
basis. So a family that is committed to this can do it today using even
existing technology.
But you said something I thought was very interesting, too, and that
is about businesses. We are fortunate to have some visionary business
leaders who are already accomplishing what we need to do.
British Petroleum, under the leadership of Sir John Brown, they
decided they were going to change their energy use, and this is an oil
company. This is an oil company that decided to reduce their carbon
dioxide emissions to actually meet the treaty goals of the Kyoto global
warming treaty. They were not pessimists. They were not nay-sayers.
They just decided to do it; and within 3 years, they met their Kyoto
targets of a reduction in their CO2, and, importantly to
their shareholders, saved something like $300 million in the process
because when you do not waste energy you save yourself money.
General Electric, under the leadership of their CEO, has decided to
make an enormous investment not only in the use in their CO2
emissions but in developing these new high-tech, energy-efficient
appliances that all of us are going to use.
So we have some business leadership; and regrettably what we do not
have, we do not have leadership here in Congress, at least in the
majority, who have not joined us optimists in breaking this addiction
to oil and gas. The sad fact is that oil and gas still dominate the
situation here in the House of Representatives; and until something
changes, we are going to follow the leadership of the business
community and people around this country who want to respond to this
energy crisis individually that we are seeing.
Ms. SCHWARTZ of Pennsylvania. Just to be a little political here for
a moment, because you brought up, I think, how do we take what we are
saying and make it happen. I mean, that really is sort of what we are
talking about; and again, we are starting to sound sort of hopeful,
optimistic, and it sounds like a lot of new terms for a lot of people,
but I think we will increasingly get comfortable with some of this
discussion. You know we can do that, and I think that is one of the
reasons that I am on the floor tonight. It is one of the reasons that
Mr. Inslee joined me.
We want to get more familiar with this terminology. What are the
alternative fuels? What are the choices they have? What is the flexible
fuel vehicle? What are the kinds of options that I have out there in
the future? What should I be asking for? How can I save energy at home?
How can I save energy for business? How can we encourage businesses to
do that? And what is the role of government in all of this?
I think what is exciting here is that there are so many of these
ideas out there that if, in fact, we can encourage businesses to push
even harder, to move even faster, push automobile manufacturers to
higher fuel efficiency, if we went to 33-miles per gallon rather than
22 or whatever we sit at right now, we would save literally 2.6 million
barrels of oil per day by 2025. You say, well, that is a long time from
now. If we start now, we will start to do it. We should start to do
it. We really have this opportunity to do it, and in fact, we know how
to make those vehicles. We can make more fuel-efficient SUVs. So if
Americans want to buy the SUVs, we can make them fuel efficient.
The fact is we have brought these ideas, brought them up as
amendments and bills, and we want to work together to make this happen.
This should not be a fight about do we ever use oil again or do we only
go to you get to live in a green building or not. It is about moving
all of us forward so that we can use less energy, use it more
efficiently, bring down the costs for Americans, be more self-reliant.
Knowing that we can do this, our role
[[Page H4211]]
is to recognize the innovation out there, to create the incentive, to
encourage it to move much, much faster so, in fact, we can make this
happen.
Occasionally we have to set some of the rules. I mean, sometimes we
cannot bring people along. You do have to set rules out there to help
make it happen, and to help make it happen much, much faster; but the
fact is that this is very much a part of the Democratic agenda to be
able to again use our innovation and to use our smarts to make this
happen.
I see the pamphlet that you have, and I will maybe yield over, but I
know one of the things we are talking about that we have not brought up
today is we do need to encourage our young people to be well-educated
in science and engineering and technology. We know that that is so
important to our future for all of us that if we do not start making
sure that our young people and some of the old people who are maybe
going back to school or have some new training and education that we
actually encourage this so that we do have the best and the brightest
who are putting their minds to this work, and that is what we are
hoping to make happen as well.
Mr. INSLEE. As Ms. Schwartz indicated, I just happen to have an
Innovation Agenda, which is the Democratic suggestion on how we can
seize the power of innovation for the country and how the Innovation
Agenda is just part of a larger package that one can read if anyone is
interested.
We think energy is a very important part, but it is one part of our
Innovation Agenda; and page 3 of that basically is our effort to
develop a new generation of innovators, and that is what we need to do.
That is why we are committed to placing a highly qualified teacher in
every math and science classroom, why we are committed to educate
100,000 new scientists, engineers, and mathematicians in the next 4
years, why we want to make college tuition tax deductible for the
students studying math, science and engineering so we can have those
minds available.
But if you look at page 8 on our Innovation Agenda, you will see our
dedication to energy independence in 10 years. I will just mention two
of the bullet points in the Democrats' larger agenda. We would commit
to substantially reducing the use of petroleum-based fuels by rapidly
expanding production and distribution of synthetic and bio-based fuels,
such as ethanol derived from cellulosic sources, and by deploying new
engine technologies for fuel-flexible, hybrid, plug-in hybrid and
biodiesel vehicles. Now, those are different kinds of vehicles.
Coming back to what Ms. Schwartz said, we want to give consumers
choices of what kind of vehicles to buy and to use. This is not a
command-and-control suggestion we are making. We think we want to
develop an economy so that you can decide what kind of vehicle you want
to use. That might be a flex-fuel vehicle. That is a vehicle that can
burn gasoline or biofuels, and Brazil has done this through great
genius. Now, when you pull up to a pump in Brazil, if you have a flex-
fuel vehicle, you can burn either gasoline or biofuels or ethanol,
which makes you in the driver's seat literally, not the oil and gas
companies. So you can compare prices and decide what to burn.
Now, the reason they have done that is Brazil basically told the auto
industry to start producing these vehicles, give consumers choice, and
that is what we stand for is giving consumers choice so that we are not
victims of the oil and gas oligopolies in our country. We talked about
fuel-flexible, hybrids, plug-in hybrids, and biodiesel.
The second bullet point in our plan will create a DARPA-like
initiative within the Department of Energy to provide seed money for
fundamental research needed to develop high-risk, high-reward
technologies and build markets for the next generation of revolutionary
energy.
We do realize that there is some basic research that the government
is good at that is very high-risk. It might be hard to get a bank loan
on some of these cutting-edge technologies, but we have had very great
success in the Defense Department with a group called DARPA, the
Defense Advanced Research labs. They have done great work in the
Department of Defense. We need to use that same strategy in energy, and
that is why Democrats are proposing to have a similar energy
advanced research program in the Department of Energy. We are very
optimistic about that.
Ms. SCHWARTZ of Pennsylvania. I think this is something that is so
exciting I think for all of us. It is something I have been excited
about, too. We see the National Science Foundation being able to do
some of this research, and again, some of the funding we give to
scientific research is done by scientists who work for the government.
So it is also given out in grants that are then either given out all
over the country to innovators who are doing this kind of work, but
then because we are involved in it, we have scientists sort of talking
to each other, being able to give that information back on a national
level, being able to share that information, being able to again act
more quickly on that shared information to see what is working and what
is most effective and cost effective and actually what is fuel
effective.
These are, I think, really exciting, exciting options for all of us.
It is something we can do, but again, I think we should be clear, we
are not doing it now. That is detrimental to all of us, not just
because when we go right today to fill up our tank we are paying $3 or
more a gallon and because the vehicles we drive are not as fuel
efficient as they could be and the homes we live in are not as
efficient either as they could be. It is because we actually have not
gotten serious about taking this next step and we need to. We need to
again because of the high cost to our families.
If you look at families that are paying several hundred dollars more,
in some cases several thousand dollars more, those are really tough
decisions for a lot of our families in this country, what do we do and
how do we make ends meet when we have these concerns. I hope they are
hearing us. We want you to push us. You should push us. You should push
this administration to do more.
Again, you pointed out the oil and gas industry could be a part of
this. They should be a part of this because they also have scientists.
They could be more fuel efficient. They should be.
Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, if the gentlewoman would yield for a moment,
this is a point that is absolutely galling to me, and folks need to
understand this. This Congress is pathetic, with a capital P, when it
comes to energy policy. We are doing nothing significant to really
reduce our dependency on oil and gas. This place is awash in oil. It is
a slave to oil. It has not broken its addiction even to the political
ties that bind it to the oil and gas industry. As a result, it has done
nothing significant to move forward on energy.
When we have all these new technologies coming on, solar cell
technology which costs 80 percent less than it did 10 years ago, those
prices are coming down spectacularly, wind energy that is coming down,
has come down 20 percent so that it is competitive right now today in
the State of Washington with other sources, has come down 20 percent.
Instead of making investment in those technologies, you know what this
Congress did? It stood up and gave another multimillion dollar tax
break to the oil and gas industry of your tax money, and that is
boneheaded.
Ms. SCHWARTZ of Pennsylvania. They did the same thing they have been
doing.
Mr. INSLEE. They did the same thing they have been doing since the
1800s. The way I described this is this Congress last year passed a
great energy policy for 1890. It was visionary for 1890. It is
Neanderthal in the year 2006.
When you look at when this country has made great advances, we have
done it in two major challenges that our country had in the last
several decades, the Manhattan Project which developed nuclear power,
and it was a major investment by the United States of America because
of a major challenge. The second was the original project in the space
race, and we responded and were successful. The third now needs to be
an energy revolution in this country.
But the fact of the matter is under this Congress and in this
management of Congress, we are investing less than 15 percent of the
equivalent of what we would have done in either one of those projects;
and as a result, we are getting
[[Page H4212]]
teeny, tiny little baby steps that we are encouraging when we should
have these great leaps for mankind.
{time} 1945
You know, if this Congress was running the space race, the quote
would have been, ``Another little step up the cabin of a DC-3,''
because that is about all we would have invented. Kennedy got us to the
moon; this energy policy won't get us to Cleveland.
We believe we need a very significant ramp-up both in Federal
research and development, basic R&D, tax credits to manufacturers, to
help them manufacture fuel-efficient vehicles; tax credits to consumers
to allow you to decide how to buy both a fuel-efficient car and build a
fuel-efficient home; and use of the procurement policy.
We haven't talked about this tonight at all, but one of the great
tools we have in our toolbox in energy policy is the Federal Government
procurement power. The Federal Government is kind of the 800-pound
gorilla when it comes to buying things in this economy. The Federal
Government needs to start buying fuel-efficient cars, fuel-efficient
air-conditioning units, and building green buildings. There is much
more that we can do.
We are taking little baby steps there. The Pentagon is looking at a
fuel-efficient battery. One of the competitors trying to develop this
is in my district. It is called Neopower. They are building a fuel-
celled battery that will actually power computers and radio devices
using fuel cells. So as we ramp that up, hopefully we will have much
more efficient batteries that can last much longer and not burn
gasoline-generated electricity. But we are just starting.
I don't know how to categorize it other than to say that we need a
revolution, and what we are getting is not even an evolution. It is
almost a devolution, going back the wrong way.
Ms. SCHWARTZ of Pennsylvania. It is not using our imagination and our
skills to move forward. And, also, I will just second the point you
made. I do feel very strongly that the public buildings, for example,
and our public procurement, that is what we buy, we should be setting
an example. We should be practicing what we preach. We should be doing
as best we can.
Again, it is not so easy for us to change our patterns, you know,
what we are used to doing. Someone said, when gasoline prices were so
high, one of the suggestions we were trying to make to people is if you
are going to run your errands, try to be more efficient in the way you
drive and do that. You could save yourself a few gallons of gasoline
every week, several a month. That could make a difference. Think about
carpooling.
It is hard to change our own patterns, and I think that is true in
government, too. We should be setting an example that when we actually
build a new building, that it is more energy-efficient; when we change
light bulbs, and I think there were just some changes made in some of
the hallways and some of the office buildings, but are we encouraged to
turn the lights off? We keep a lot of lights on every night. What would
that save if, in fact, we had these all on timers or motion detectors?
We should be thinking about this in a way, because if each of us
reduced our energy consumption by 10 percent, maybe some of us could
even do better, we could have a dramatic impact on the amount of energy
and fuel we would need.
So, again, this isn't picking and choosing. This isn't saying, I am
going to blame individuals for not doing all they can. We are not
blaming anyone. The idea is for us to really use all of our power, if I
can use that word, all of our power to make it clear that we want less
costly, more efficient fuel for all of our needs.
And we are going to have these needs. We are going to need this
energy for our needs. They are not going to get fewer. There are more
of us, more people, more densely populated, and we need to figure this
out and do so in a way that doesn't just say let us just give a little
more subsidy to the oil industry. If we just took the subsidies, $8
billion, $9 billion from the oil industry, maybe collected those
royalties for offshore drilling from the oil industry, and said let us
take that money and invest it in these new technologies and invest it
in renewables, use the incentives so people will build buildings that
will be more fuel-efficient and energy-efficient, what would that do
for us?
In fact, what we know is that that is really significant. The amount
of reduction in energy needs would be really significant and would have
an impact. And at the same time, we would be learning better what, in
fact, works best for us so we would be able to move ahead.
I just want to say one more thing, and then I want to reflect on some
of this, too. I think we also have to say to people that we have done
this. I think you are right to use the example of the man on the moon,
but we have even done smaller things; for instance, when we found out
that lead in paint was extremely harmful to kids in this country. We
didn't always know that. There was lead in paint, and we all painted
with that, used that paint, but, in fact, those paint chips actually
caused brain damage for our kids. Well, we did something about it. It
didn't happen immediately. People finally had to get outraged by it.
Members of Congress finally had to stand up and say, you know what we
are going to do, we are going to take lead out of paint.
Now, originally people said, I don't think we can do that. I don't
think we have the technology to do that; how do we do that? Well, some
smart people got together and figured out how to do it, and they did.
We don't allow lead to be put in our paint anymore. We don't have
chlorofluorocarbons anymore, because we realized it was causing a big
hole in the ozone layer. It took a while for us to agree to do
something about that, and some people said, oh, it is not really a
problem, but it turns out it was a problem, and the fact is we could
fix it, and we did.
So I just want to reflect on that because people sometimes think this
is just too big. I can't do it, you can't do it, how are we going to do
it? But the fact is we can if we get serious about it. If we understand
the different roles of the private and public sector, we can actually
do something really dramatic about creating less expensive, more home-
based energy.
Mr. INSLEE. I just want to point out the history of our own country
is that we will succeed on this because we have succeeded.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, because of what Congress did, and
President Carter, we increased our fuel efficiency at least 50 percent.
And if we had simply continued on that path, we would be free of
Persian Gulf oil today. We could have solved this problem if we had
simply continued with that success.
But I want to close by thanking you for your leadership on this and
by saying that the Democrats are optimistic on energy, Democrats
believe in innovation, and Democrats believe in paying for it and not
having a deficit. And we are going to do that by closing some of these
giveaways to the oil and gas industry.
Thank you for your leadership.
Ms. SCHWARTZ of Pennsylvania. And I'll just also end by saying thank
you very much, Mr. Inslee, for joining me and for helping, I hope,
being able to talk about what is such an important issue for every
American, and that is how to create less expensive, more available,
more home-grown energy.
So thank you very much for joining me this evening, and I look
forward to getting this done with you.
____________________