[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 9 (Wednesday, January 17, 2007)]
[House]
[Pages H661-H668]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
CLEAN ENERGY
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentleman from Washington (Mr. Inslee)
is recognized for 60 minutes.
Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, we come here to the well tonight to continue
this discussion about energy. I have enjoyed listening to my colleagues
Mr. Bartlett and Mr. Gilchrest, who have been talking about the need
for changes in our energy policy to effectuate an energy efficiency
policy for this country, to use our innovative talents to come up with
new technologies to deal with our energy challenges, and to really
bring our energy policy from the 19st century into the 21st century.
And the good news is tomorrow, Thursday of this week, in just the third
week of the 110th Congress, this new Congress is going to start with a
big step out of the 19th century, which has been represented by the
last Congress, and into the 21st century, which is represented by this
Congress, and I am pleased to report to the House tonight and to the
country, tomorrow the Democratic majority with some help from some of
our friends across the aisle will pass a bill which will cause a major
shift in the energy policy of this country.
In the last Congress there was a clear direction of the energy policy
of this country, and under the last management of the U.S. Congress the
basic operative rule was to give billions of dollars of taxpayer money
to the oil and gas industry, the most profitable industry in the
history of the solar system, over $10 billion in tax breaks to the oil
and gas industry. Tomorrow, that money will be returned to the citizens
of the United States for the use in developing a truly 21st century
energy plan.
Tomorrow, the Democratic majority held Congress or House of
Representatives will pass a bill which will reel back in $14 billion of
taxpayer money that was sent to the silk-lined pockets of the oil and
gas industry, and that is a good thing for Republicans and Democrats
and Independents and for our grandchildren for reasons we will talk
about tonight. It is a good reason because when we reel that $14
billion in giveaways to the oil and gas industry that happened in the
last Congress, what we will do tomorrow is take that $14 billion and
create a fund of money belonging to the American people that will be
used for the development of new technologies, creative new sources of
energy, energy efficiencies, more efficient vehicles, more efficient
appliances, and a way to beat global warming.
So we are going to convert the giveaways from the oil and gas
industry that happened in the last Congress to an investment in the
future of our country to have a new energy technology, technologically
based future for the energy source of this country. We are going to do
it for three reasons. And perhaps those three reasons are obvious, but
I want to state them.
Tomorrow when we pass this bill, we will create a fund called the
Strategic Renewable Energy Reserve. Not really much of an acronym; I
didn't get to name it. But the Strategic Renewable Energy Reserve will
be a fund with $14 billion that will be taken back from the oil and gas
industry and be used for our inventors, our businessmen, our
academicians, our people who are doing great work to develop new
sources of energy, and we will do this for three reasons. I will go
through them quickly.
Number one, we will use this fund to develop a domestic source of
energy for this country. We will use this money to develop the new
advanced biofuels, the second generation ethanol, the cellulosic
ethanol, the advanced biodiesel systems so that we can start buying our
fuel from Midwestern farmers rather than Middle Eastern sheiks. We know
the trouble we are in in the Middle East due to our dependence on
Middle Eastern oil, and we are going to break that oil addiction, not
rhetorically, but in reality.
Second, we are going to use these funds to develop new clean energy
sources that can stop global warming. We are going to have energy
efficiency which can have efficient appliances rather than dirty
appliances that waste energy. We are going to have energy efficient
cars, plug-in hybrids, flex fuel vehicles that can use biofuels
developed in the Midwest; energy created by wind turbine, solar energy
and perhaps clean coal, wave power. You name it.
[[Page H662]]
We have a thousand flowers that are going to bloom in energy if we use
this money in a smart way to stop global warming.
And, third, we will use this money to create a new energy source of
jobs in this country. It is about time to start building fuel efficient
cars in this country, new technologies here. It is time to reel those
jobs back in.
So I am very excited what will happen tomorrow. It is the first step
in a long road of what we will talk about tonight, the new Apollo
Energy Project. And we have a new Member of the U.S. House who has
brought a new vision of energy, Mr. John Hall of New York. And I will
yield to Mr. Hall.
Mr. HALL of New York. I thank the gentleman for yielding, and I am
excited to be here at this time, at this point in history when our
country will finally, beginning in this House of Representatives, begin
to act on renewable energy and conservation in a meaningful way. And I
also want to say that I hope Northeast farmers will also be able to
contribute to the biofuels that will be developing.
I have a friend in New York State who is driving around in a stock
diesel Jeep Liberty 4-by-4 that he is running on biodiesel made from
wood waste at a renewable tree farm that makes furniture in New York,
just north of my district in Representative Gillibrand's district, but
it is minutes from where I live in Dover Plains, New York. There is no
modification needed to the vehicle. The company that is making this
fuel runs all their farm vehicles on it, they run their road vehicles
on it. Every scrap of leaves and sawdust and little twigs and things
that are parts of the tree that are too small to go into the furniture
they make goes into making biodiesel fuel, and it is very successful.
The only thing that is lacking is the knowledge on the public's part
that they can ask for it, and the law of supply and demand will work
for renewables the same way it does for any other form of energy or any
other commodity.
I called up my own local oil company in my hometown of Dover and
asked if they had biodiesel to sell for me to burn in my home heating
oil system, my furnace that heats our home, and they said yes. And I
said, ``What is it?'' And they said, ``20 percent soybean derivative.''
And I said, ``Sign me up.'' And I asked the gentleman on the phone,
``How is it?'' And he said, ``I am the owner of the company and I burn
it in our house, and it burns cleaner than regular home heating oil.''
So it is similar to the situation I ran into when I served in county
government and we were dealing with markets constantly fluctuating in
recyclables, for instance, where one month you might make money on
recycling paper and the next month you might lose it. It depends on how
many plants are built to recycle it and how many new communities start
to do so in earnest.
If our country and our citizens know to ask for wind power, which we
get in my home the first 1,500 kilowatt hours per month from a wind
farm in Atlantic City. And that is only one of many wind installations
that are being put up around the northeast. There is a big wind farm in
the Tug Hill Plateau in the Adirondacks that is going to figure majorly
in New York's energy supply, and in the Finger Lakes region also.
Farmers are finding out that they can lease space on their property for
wind turbines, make royalties on it or lease payments from the
utilities on it that will pay their property taxes and enable them to
stay in farming. The cows don't care. They graze under the wind
turbines, and meanwhile they are turning overhead and cranking out the
energy.
The Jersey Atlantic Wind Farm in Atlantic City that my wife and I are
buying power from will be amortized in 5 years. It consists of five
380-foot-tall wind turbines. Each turbine is a greater surface area
than a football field and taller than the Statue of Liberty and
generates 7\1/2\ million watts of power when it is running at peak
operation.
So if it is free in 5 years, the investment is paid off. After that,
you have free energy, you have no pollution, zero emissions, and as you
were saying it helps our balance of trade deficit, it cuts back on the
money that we are sending to the Middle East oil potentates that are
funding the madrasas that are training people that we then have to send
our military to go fight. It cuts back on oil spills. It cuts back on
asthma and emphysema in the inner cities, the particulate emissions. So
it is a win-win-win situation with jobs being created here, with the
dollars that we are spending on energy being kept here.
And I would just like to say once again that I am proud to be a part
of this action of repealing and closing loopholes. It is not a raise of
taxes as our colleagues on the other side of the aisle were saying
before, but it is actually closing tax loopholes, subsidies, and
giveaways that they created in the last Congress and transferring those
funds to these renewable energies.
Mr. INSLEE. If the gentleman will yield. Very much so, it is claiming
what should be rightfully ours. We essentially gave away oil that
belongs to the citizens of the United States, and gave it away with no
royalties. It was a giant, giant giveaway program. And subsidies in
certain circumstances are appropriate for nascent growing industries,
but this is a mature industry. There was no reason to give a company
that made $20 billion profit last year more of our taxpayers. You are
paying twice when that happens. You are paying at the pump, and then
you are paying on April 15 when you are paying taxes that are given to
these oil and gas companies.
I want to just touch on your wind sample. Today I had the Director of
the Bonneville Power Administration that runs the electrical grid in
the Northwest today, and he was telling me that wind power today is
cheaper, cheaper than essentially any other system that we have to
generate electricity, at least in the Pacific Northwest, cheaper than
coal even.
{time} 2200
For those that say wind cannot be an integral part of the system, a
study came down from a Minnesota group last week which evaluated how
one can integrate wind because the wind does not always blow. It is not
a totally reliable system, so you have to integrate it into your
system.
They concluded it is so cheap you can integrate it by having backup
gas turbines sometimes to kick in if the wind doesn't blow with minimal
to no increases in prices.
This revolution that is happening in energy that we will start
tomorrow, sort of the Concord Bridge moment for the energy revolution
here, is all over the country. You mentioned in your neck of the woods,
it is not just the Midwest, in Washington State we are going to have
the biggest biodiesel plant in the Western hemisphere. It is going to
be up and running next year.
Minnesota has huge growth in wind power. Wisconsin has a company that
is building wind turbines so fast they cannot fulfill the orders.
Missouri has just started three huge wind farms. This is something all
over the country.
When I talk to businesses, what I find is there is not a State in the
country that does not have some business that is going to benefit from
what we will start tomorrow, which is new energy revolution. California
in Silicon Valley is developing these new solar cells that could be 30-
40 percent less expensive. A company called Fiber Forge in Colorado is
starting to make composite bodies for cars that could be 40 percent
stronger and half the weight. This is a national effort. All of us will
get to brag about it some day.
I would like to yield to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Klein), a
new Member of Congress. Thanks for joining us.
Mr. KLEIN of Florida. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. It is a pleasure to be
here with Mr. Hall, my good freshman friend from New York, and my good
friend from the State of Washington. I know you have been leading the
fight for a number of years and trying to get our focus, not only in
your State, but throughout the country on the idea of renewable energy
sources.
Many of us in the freshman class came to this year's campaign and
this Congress with a view that this is an opportunity of historic
proportion. This is an opportunity for us to recognize that this is a
once-in-a-generation calling, no different than our predecessors had
with the Manhattan Project. I know that many seniors in my district in
south Florida have talked about that, the calling of their generation
to make sure that World War II would end
[[Page H663]]
with an atomic weapon. Of course we all know that when Sputnik went up
in the early 1960s, a little before my time, but at a time when this
country saw this little tin can up in space and thought this could be a
threat of possibly bombs coming from outer space into our country, and
John F. Kennedy saw this as a time and place for us to engage our
private sector, our universities, our public, to create a new
generation of scientists and mathematicians who would put a man on the
Moon by the end of the 1960s. By 1969, they did that. And now the
science and technology that came out of the space program has broad
applications to our daily lives.
I view this, as do many Democrats and Republicans, as a time in our
country's history when we need to make ourselves energy independent. I
believe it. There is nobody in this room or in this country who doesn't
believe that Americans, when they put their nose to the grindstone,
can't accomplish anything. We can. We can and we will.
This has the unbelievable capacity of recognizing three great
elements in this day. One is national security. We should never, ever
have to make another foreign policy decision based on where the next
drop of oil is coming from. That is a strategic mistake of unbelievable
proportions. To have to import 60 percent of our oil from unstable
countries around the world that in many cases are taking some of the
dollars that we send over, the millions and billions of dollars, and
financing both sides of the war on terror is wrong.
Recognizing that is something we need to do for our own national
security, inside the United States, is crucial.
Secondly, we all understand the environmental impacts. I know my
colleagues that are speaking tonight have led the fight on this, and
many others. And recognizing whether it is global warming or any of the
other environmental impacts of some of the technologies that are used
today with oil and other things, these are issues that we need to take
up.
I live in Florida. We have had a battle in Congress, and I was not in
Congress last year, but many of us fought the fight back home: We don't
want drilling off the coast of Florida, or in Alaska in the refuge.
Those are false choices made by the administration.
The right choice is we don't have to have more oil drilling. Oil
drilling will be a part of our energy solution, but we don't need
drilling in places which will have a potential of having a tremendous
long-term environmental impact. Off the coast of Florida, we have a
very large tourist industry. We have wonderful reefs. We have a
beautiful environment in our oceans and bays and the Gulf Coast. We
can't afford to do that. It is not good for anybody in this country.
There are choices that allow us to have alternative energy.
And of course the last thing is the new economy. Many have talked
about the fact that in this economy today we have lost jobs overseas.
We don't have steel manufacturing like we used to. We don't produce a
lot of the products. The science of alternative energy sources and the
commercialization of that technology and those products can once again
be our big technology boom like we had in the 1990s in this decade, and
for decades to come. It will make us energy independent, and it will be
exportable science to the rest of the world.
Mr. INSLEE. I was talking to a businessman the other day who wants to
develop the Chinese market to sell China thin solar film technology to
become the distributor in China of a technology developed in America.
Talk about a great thing for our balance of payments.
You talked about the original Apollo project. We have named our bill,
the first step we will talk about tomorrow, the New Apollo Energy
Project because we believe, as John F. Kennedy did, that we have
unlimited innovative capacity. But what we don't have at the moment are
policies to put that innovative genius to work.
For instance, we are spending less than 16 percent on energy research
in total in this country. We are only spending 16 percent of what we
spent on the Apollo project. That is just abysmal. We had at least as
much of a challenge as trying to get to the Moon.
I had a utility executive in my office today. He told me this
factoid: We spend more on research about dog food than the utility
industry does on new energy in this country. I don't want to belittle
dog food, it is important, but we need to boost our research. Tomorrow
we will put $14 billion back into the pockets of Americans to use in
part for research, the tremendous things that are going on. Every time
I pick up the phone, I learn about a new technology being developed.
I yield to Mr. Hall.
Mr. HALL of New York. I am just looking at the uses of the Strategic
Energy Efficiency and Renewables Reserve, and I will get that out in
one sentence, to accelerate the use of clean domestic renewable energy
resources and alternative fuels, to promote the utilization of energy
efficient products and practices and conservation, and to increase
research development and deployment of clean, renewable energy and
energy efficiencies and technologies.
The word ``conservation'' is in there, and it is one that has been
sadly neglected. In fact, it was unfortunate a few years ago when our
Vice President said conservation may be a personal virtue, but it is no
way to build a national energy policy. I completely disagree. I think
it is one of the most important ways to start building a national
energy policy, and I was happy Mr. Bartlett earlier was talking about
energy efficiency. It is time all of us on both sides of the aisle did
that and put our money where those words are.
I see these pet peeves of mine as I go through every day life. For
instance, walking down the aisle of the supermarket, in the Northeast,
I can walk through Hanford's A&P or Stop & Shop, and there are aisle
after aisle of cold cases with yogurt or beer or cheese that is being
kept cold by a refrigerator and a compressor running all of the time,
and an open top so it is convenient. I can just reach in. But there is
no door or plastic sheet to keep the cold air in and the warm air out.
Meanwhile, because we live in the northern part of the country, half of
the year there is a furnace going to keep the shoppers warm and the
furnace and the compressor are working at cross purposes. That is the
kind of blindness we have gotten used to, that energy is something we
can throw away.
Mr. INSLEE. There is so much good work going in to stop those things
that you are talking about. To mention two instances of success on
energy efficiency, I was talking to the Vice President of Dow Chemical
yesterday. Dow Chemical historically has not been looked at as a
company on the forefront on environmental issues, but they got a star
last year for their energy efficiency program.
They have saved 42 percent of their energy since 1990. They have
reduced their energy since 2000 by 22 percent by just adopting
commonsense measures, some of which you might have talked about, by
having energy efficient appliances and lighting, by looking at how they
monitor the energy in their building. So a 42 percent reduction of
their energy usage, and they did that because it is good business, not
because it is some granola-crunching idea. They did it because it is
good business. And we will create a fund tomorrow to help businesses
and individuals go down that road.
Second accomplishment, California. California has essentially, while
the average American uses 50 percent more electricity than they did 10
years ago, 50 percent, California has been stable for the last 10
years. They have not gone up one kilowatt hour. And the way they did
that was to help people invest in energy efficient light bulbs, energy
efficient windows and appliances. As a result, they use 8,000 kilowatt
hours per person per year, and the average person uses 14,000
kilowatts.
Does that mean people in California are living in the stone age? They
are still taking hot tubs in Marin County and still putting out movies
in Hollywood. They are living a good life there, and their economy is
booming. But they are doing some commonsense things with energy. That
is what we are going to start tomorrow.
Mr. HALL of New York. I wanted to mention something that should be
another part of our energy mix and that is low head hydroelectric
power. There are dams and waterfalls throughout this country where in
some instances they used to generate power and no
[[Page H664]]
longer do. But our own Idaho National Laboratory from the Department of
Energy did a study a couple of years ago that showed, and it is on
their Website, it shows how much State By State latent hydroelectric
power is waiting to be harvested.
In New York State, there are some 4,000 dams and waterfalls that
could, just by having turbines placed where the water is already
falling, yield greater than 1,200 megawatts of power, which is about 60
percent of the peak output of the Indian Point Nuclear Plant in my
district.
It is that kind of using everything. We have to leave no stone
unturned and to try every opportunity for clean, renewable domestic
sources of power for national security purposes, as Mr. Klein
mentioned, for environmental purposes, as we all know, and for global
warming. Anybody in my part of the country knows that the weather is
not normal this year. And, indeed, the records for last year showed
that it is the warmest year on record and there has been a string of
years getting warmer.
We had a seminar at one of our freshman orientation sessions on
global warming that shows as the carbon dioxide levels in the
atmosphere are rising, the temperature average is rising with it. It
has risen out of what they call the background noise, where it is no
longer something that can be written off to the normal ups and downs of
climate. We are experiencing a change, a man-made change in our climate
here on earth, and it is our duty to our children and grandchildren not
to leave them that problem or to leave them mountains of debt because
we refused to deal with this problem and keep borrowing money from one
country so we can import oil from another country and lose our own
sovereignty in the process.
Mr. KLEIN of Florida. One of the beauties of what we are talking
about, and what Americans are talking about, is there is a lot of
technology and a lot of science and businesses that are already out
there doing these things. That is a very exciting thing. If you listen
to the national picture that 60 percent of our oil is imported, and
that is a major source. And we obviously have lots of other fossil
fuels being burned at this point, but there is solar power.
I am from Florida, and we call ourselves the Sunshine State. And we
constantly hear in Florida you can't use solar effectively because the
panels are too big and they can't store the energy.
My personal feeling, and I think you believe this, if we put our mind
and science to this, we could probably have a solar panel the size of
this 8\1/2\ by 11 piece of paper on every house that powers that house.
Individual power plants, and it will happen. It is going to happen.
There is wave power. There is wind power and corn-based ethanol and
sugar-based ethanol like they use in Brazil.
Again, they may not be perfect in their present form. That is the
point. Let's further them and use our innovation agenda that we are
pushing in this Congress to get all of the economic incentives in place
to encourage the businesses, to encourage our science and university
academics as well as business leaders to come together.
{time} 2215
Mr. INSLEE. We had a meeting with Hank Paulson today, Secretary of
the Treasury in the Bush administration, and he had made an interesting
comment. I am very impressed with him, though I have been pretty
critical of the Bush administration, because he has been a pretty
outspoken advocate that we need to do something about global warning.
He said everything he has learned since taking the job as Secretary
of the Treasury, he comes from a very successful Wall Street career,
has been worse than he thought. The deficit, the situation in Iraq,
everything he has learned has been worse than he thought, except
energy, because he has learned about the new innovations going on
around the country.
What we want to do is help businesses, like the Iogen Corporation,
which is ready to build the first commercial cellulosic plant in
America in Idaho. They are ready to go, as long as they can get their
loan guaranty. They have 300 farmers that are going to give them their
straw left over after wheat. They are going to chop it up, put an
enzyme in it, and then free the carbohydrates and distill that into
ethanol, and, boom, you have a product that is three to four times more
productive per acre than the current type of ethanol we get from our
farms.
Ocean Wave Technologies has the first permit for wave power in the
United States off the coast of Oregon, a 50 megawatt plant. They are
using a technology now that is in the water in Hawaii, generating
technology with this buoy that is anchored below the water. It goes up
and down and creates a force thoromatically that runs a generator. They
are generating electricity today for the Navy. They are ready to make
this a commercial operation. They need a little help to get started.
The Nanosolar Company, a company that was started, and the fellows
who wrote the first two checks were the two guys who started Google.
They have done pretty well for themselves, and they wrote a check to a
couple of entrepreneurs in California, and now they are ready to do 450
megawatts of thin cell solar, where you use a solar panel that has one-
fiftieth the width, using a selenium, iridium, gallium and caesium type
of technology that they think can be 30 or 40 percent cheaper.
Another company trying something like this is called Miasole.
These are the companies that need help, not the big oil companies.
And what we are doing tomorrow is shifting the subsidies that have been
given away to the oil industry, an 18th century technology, and helping
these new-generation technologies come on.
By the way, in this debate we are the optimists. We should identify
who is on what side of this. We are the optimists who believe global
warming can be dealt with. The pessimists say we can't.
Now, they are giving up. The debate about global warming is over. And
I know it is over because yesterday the Exxon Corporation, which has
fought tooth and nail the science on global warming, basically withdrew
their support from the political organization that has tried to create
doubt about global warming.
So when the Exxon Corporation agrees it is time to start getting
serious about global warming, I think the debate is over. And now the
question is, how can we join on a bipartisan basis to find solutions,
and we are starting this tomorrow. I hope we draw some votes from some
of our colleagues across the aisle.
I yield to Mr. Hall.
Mr. HALL of New York. Thank you, Mr. Inslee. I am pretty confident
there will be votes from both sides of the aisle tomorrow. And it is
interesting thinking about the history of ExxonMobil in terms of their
corporate advertising, going back to the days of Herbert Schmertz and
the op-ed in The New York Times, and how they have spent probably more
money, and other oil companies as well have spent more money. Or I
should say they have spent good money on advertising to try to stop
people from changing the approach that they could have spent instead on
research and development on these new forms of energy.
I wanted to mention one you had not mentioned yet, and that is tidal
power. Wave power, of course, is obvious. My dad taught me to sail when
I was a kid, and many is the time I have sailed by a buoy that had one
of those wave-driven generators in it and keeping the light powered,
and/or a solar panel on it keeping the light powered and a battery
storing the energy.
But tidal power in my neck of the woods, in the Hudson River, which
splits my district in half, is tidal all the way to Troy, all the way
past Albany, and navigable all the way that far north. The current runs
a couple knots and a half south on the ebb and about two knots north on
the flood in New York Harbor. And in the East River and in Hellgate,
what they call the juncture of the East River and the Harlem River,
where it opens into Long Island Sound to the east, the tidal current
there runs five to six knots, depending on the phase of the moon.
We have inlets, rivers, harbors, coastline all throughout this
country where tide comes and goes, millions of tons, millions of tons
of pressure of water moving in and out of these bodies of water twice a
day every day. And that is, well, it is solar and lunar, because it is
driven by, I guess primarily by the
[[Page H665]]
moon, but nonetheless it is natural, free energy that can be harvested
and should be explored. And, indeed, there have been experiments going
on in the East River with tidal generators within the last year that I
am looking forward to seeing the results of. But that is one more
available source.
Mr. INSLEE. I want to comment that some people have argued this is
sort of peripheral or tangential sources of energy, niche types of
energy. I think it is important to realize the scale of energy that we
have available domestically. It is enormous.
When you talk to the scientists about this, the wave power in a 10-
mile-by-10-mile stretch of the California coastline, that is 100 square
miles, if you can imagine 10-by-10, there is enough wave power using
this existing technology to generate all of the electricity used in the
State of California. That is not hypothetical. That is actual wave
power that is available. That is not a niche technology.
In Montana, if we can a find way to burn coal cleanly, and I say if
because we are a long ways from being able to do that, to segregate and
store the carbon dioxide below ground, but there is enough coal in
Montana, just Montana, if we can find a way to do that, to power the
electricity needs of the entire Nation for decades.
Just to give people a sense of the scale of this, with solar energy,
in a few hundred square miles, there is enough to light the entire
Nation, if we get solar power down to a market-based price. It is more
expensive than electricity right now from a coal plant or a gas-powered
plant.
But what we are learning is that for all the technologies we have
talked about today, solar, wind, wave, efficiencies, where some day
plug-in hybrids, plug our cars in and run on clean electricity, every
single one of those technologies has come down in price dramatically as
the technologies have improved and as we have scales of economy.
Wind power has come down in price 80 percent in the last decade.
Solar is coming down. There is a factor basically every time, if I get
this right, every time it goes up, and I am going to have to check to
make sure. In fact, I will not use it because I can't remember what it
was, but there is a ratio that has been clear with solar power that has
come down. Every time you ramp up production by a factor of X, you get
a Y percentage decrease in price, and that has been a constant.
What we have learned is that we know there are two curves. Fossil
fuels are going up because China is coming on gangbusters and demand is
going to go up. We might reach peak oil. We don't know. But we know
fossil fuels are going up long term, and these are coming down, and we
want to be on the downward sloping path.
So one of the things we want to do eventually, in our new Apollo
project, is to have a renewable portfolio standard to say that a
percentage of our electricity will be generated by clean energy sources
by the year 2020. We just did this in Washington by popular vote.
I yield to Mr. Kline.
Mr. KLEIN of Florida. I thank the gentleman, and I think that is
exactly the point. The point is, there is not necessarily one source of
energy alternative that is going to be for everyone. We have a big
country, with lots of existing resources that have been mentioned by
the gentlemen on the floor this evening, and the choices and the
competitive ways that we as a country can competitively grant resources
to companies, to scientists to come together and say, listen, we think
there is enough coal in this country to power the country for 300
years, but we have a high sulfur and carbon dioxide problem. Is there a
solution? If there is a solution, that can be a wonderful thing. So
there is coal in certain parts of the country and maybe that works
there.
Wave power, wind power, all the things we are talking about, it is
this competitive way of approaching this. Not one solution necessarily
to fit all. There is still going to be oil out there to some extent,
but the point of all this is, it is there. And the most exciting part
about this is that there is a solution, and Americans need to engage
this.
The Congress is way behind the American public, and the
administration is even further behind. And the part where we, I think,
are coming together tonight and tomorrow, as you and many others are
going to be leading this fight for energy independence in the first
step we are taking now, which will continue with additional steps, is,
we want to ask the American public to come forward to their Members of
Congress, to their business leaders, and to their Chambers of Commerce
and start talking about the technologies that they have. What can we do
to collaborate with each other to take some of these ideas and make
them commercially viable? The more competition out there, the more
resources in, the lower the price will be.
It is almost like the discussion we have had for so many years,
public transportation versus road building. People have said, well, you
have to subsidize public transportation. Well, absolutely you do. But
guess what road building is? Who pays for the roads? It is your gas
taxes in every State of the country and the Federal Government that
pays for that. So it is a question of reordering our priorities.
In this case, it is the reordering of priorities from more oil
drilling and giving those types of resources and support to putting
that into places and with people that can create the new generation of
energy alternatives, and it is very exciting.
Mr. INSLEE. I want to comment on two really exciting transportation
alternatives. One is public transportation.
The city of Portland, Oregon, has demonstrated the ability of America
to reduce our CO2 emissions to deal with global warming.
They are the first city in the Nation to reduce their carbon dioxide
emissions to 1990 levels, which would be consistent with the Kyoto
Treaty, which may be a treaty we do or do not eventually adopt, but
they have been the first city in the Nation to reach these 1990 levels,
to roll back their carbon dioxide emissions.
One of the principal ways they did it was they embraced an incredibly
popular light rail system to move people. Rather than sitting on
freeways for hours at a time, you go down to Portland on a convenient,
much-loved system that has now been voted on five times successfully in
Portland because people love this system. It is convenient, it is safe,
it is cheap, and it saves us from global warming.
So if we have a transportation policy in this country that helps
communities work in that regard, we will make some strides.
The second thing I want to bring up is a technology called plug-in
hybrids, which I think could be maybe the ultimate vision for us in the
next decade, and that is to develop our cars so we go home at night and
we plug them in. You take power off the grid, electricity generated by
clean wind, clean solar, clean wave, clean coal, or a variety of
technologies. These are cars that today are running, that can run 20 or
30 miles just on electricity. And then when you run out of juice, you
start running on your motor.
If we have a flex-fuel hybrid plug-in car, we are going to be in
really great shape in this country, because we can plug it in and get
clean electricity. We have the pipes to deliver it, which is the
electricity grid. You plug it in at night, you run your first 20 or 30
miles, then you use ethanol that you bought from our local farmer in
the Northeast, or in Iowa, or eastern Washington. And if you don't like
that, you can burn gasoline as well.
General Motors just announced their first sort of proposed car,
called the Volt. They ran it out at their show just 2 weeks ago in
Detroit at the auto show. Now, we have to improve the batteries to
really make them commercialized, but that is where our money should be
going, to improving the batteries so we can have plug-in vehicles,
rather than going to the oil and gas industry.
So tomorrow we are going to make a decision to take money we gave to
the oil and gas industry and give it to these companies, to the extent
we can, to help develop these new technologies for batteries and a
whole host of other things. These are lithium iod batteries, and they
are close to being commercialized. There are a few security issues they
have to work with to make sure they are stable and workable, but that
is a good shift for the country.
[[Page H666]]
Mr. KLEIN of Florida. If the gentleman will yield for a second, the
next level of this, just like any start-up business in this country and
the success of the capitalistic system that we have is, business
entrepreneurs realize value. What we are talking about here is start-up
capital for many of these businesses. We are not talking necessarily
the United States taxpayer funding these things indefinitely.
The great part about this is that many of them are already in place.
They just need a little additional push or a little additional
resource, and then you will see venture capital and lots of business
entrepreneurs, and probably even oil companies who will see a good
opportunity, who will even invest. But whoever it is, we want to see
the direction of this jump-started, and that is what the gentleman is
talking about.
Mr. INSLEE. Sure. And we can do things essentially at no cost to the
Federal Government. For instance, loan guarantees. If we guarantee a
company that wants to start a plant, like this Iogen cellulosic ethanol
plant, if we do a loan guarantee for them, there is a high level of
confidence it is going to work, and it never costs us a dime, assuming
that it works. But it helps them get the capital to give security for
the investors to do that.
That is a good investment for the country, if we choose wisely. But
these companies will tell you they have to cross the valley of death,
to get from development, where they have their prototype, until they
can really commercialize it. And that is where Uncle Sam can happen.
And we will get a lot more bang for our buck helping a battery
company that will help us drive plug-in hybrids a few years from now
than we will just giving it to a company that made $22 billion last
year in the oil and gas markets.
{time} 2230
That is a better deal for America. Mr. Hall.
Mr. HALL of New York. Yes, if the gentleman would yield for another
minute. I wanted to mention a couple of other ways we can help, that
the government can help jump start these industries. One of them is
indemnification of risk. We have unbeknownst to most Americans been the
underwriters for the nuclear industry since its beginning via the
Price-Anderson Act. In fact, there would never have been a nuclear
plant, electrical generating plant built in this country if the
taxpayer didn't underwrite the possible cost of a catastrophic
accident.
Now, if we took that same approach where we were willing to subsidize
or underwrite alternative fuels or low head hydro plants, many of which
are being held up, by the way, because of liability issues, that would
be one way that we could help.
Another way would be preferential purchasing, because the government,
at all levels, buys a lot of vehicles. And if we put out a request for
proposals saying that we want American companies to build vehicles that
will either be plug-in hybrids or plug-in biodiesel hybrids, or just
high efficiency vehicles that can be used in our fleets that the
different departments of our government used, that would start the
economy of scale working. The same way the wrist watches, digital wrist
watches that used to cost $200 when they first came out came down to
the point where they are $2 now, and computer chips that were bought in
quantity by the Defense Department, or by the aerospace industry and
NASA, drove down the cost to the point where now anybody can afford a
laptop. It is that economy of scale that we can help get started.
And as you said, it is not going to be something that we will have to
underwrite or subsidize forever. But when you look at the number of
years that we have been subsidizing the old technologies that may be
19th or 20th century technology, we certainly now, in the 21st century
can look at these renewables, domestic clean safe renewables and think
about the same helping hand to get them off the ground.
Mr. INSLEE. And I think it is important to point out the tremendous
payback to our economy of relatively small Federal investments. Look at
the computer industry. It grew by leaps and bounds because of the
Apollo project. There is more computing power now on a wrist watch than
there was in the original Apollo space vehicle because we developed
computer based software systems as part of the Apollo project.
Our medical device industry with these exotic materials largely came
from the American space program, and these were relatively small
investments.
By the way, we spend less today on research and energy than we do in
a month in Iraq by a factor of about 10, just to put this in
perspective. We are talking about for a family's budget a lot of money,
but for the Federal budget fairly small amounts of money that can have
absolutely tremendous payoffs.
I want to talk about one other thing that we think we need to help
these companies too, though. If you want to start a company that will
generate clean electricity with no carbon dioxide emissions today, you
don't have a huge advantage because of a loophole in the law that a
coal company has right now that is putting their carbon dioxide up the
stack. That coal company that has what we call dirty coal, where you
just burn it and you put your carbon dioxide, you dump it into the
atmosphere, they have a huge loophole in the law because they can put
as much CO2 into the air as they want the tape. They can't
put as much sulfur dioxide, they can't put as much nitrogen oxide, they
can't put as much particulate matter, but they can put as much
CO2 into our atmosphere that you and I own jointly, with no
charge. And the company that is going to make a clean industry, they
don't get any benefit like that. We have to close that loophole. There
has to be a way that there is some charge imposed on polluters who use
our atmosphere to dump their carbon dioxide. And that is a loophole
that needs to be closed to help these innovators as well to level the
playing field.
Now it is really interesting. We are getting some support for this
idea from some unusual sources. Duke Energy, I think, the third or
fourth largest electrical utility in the United States, they burn
massive amounts of coal, I think 40 or 50 percent or more of their
electricity is produced by coal. But they recognize the need to have
what they call a cap and trade system that caps the amount of carbon
dioxide going into the atmosphere. And in part they realize that, I
think, because when you impose some cost on this pollution it inspires
these new companies to be able to create new technologies that are
clean. So we hope ultimately the U.S. Congress will adopt a measure
that will level the playing field and not allow these dirty plants to
continue to pollute our atmosphere for nothing. You know, when you and
I go to the dump it costs us 25 bucks to dump our pickup load of junk
at the dump. But a company that burns coal can put their carbon dioxide
and just dump it into our atmosphere, gigatons for nothing. That needs
to change
Mr. KLEIN of Florida. Well, exactly. And the incentive that is being
used to encourage a company to make the investment in some type of
scrubber or some type of way of reducing the amount of carbon dioxide
should be just that. It should be an incentive to do that and make that
capital investment in that technology, versus not having to pay for it.
There is no economic incentive to change. Obviously there is a huge
environmental impact for all of us who are breathing the air and the
entire impact on the climate and the environment. But those companies
that continue to burn coal don't have an incentive. So if we flip it
around and say, all right, there is going to be a charge, in order for
you to do this there is going to be an expense associated with it,
whereas if you invest, if you are going to have to pay something in, if
you are going to invest in something that is good, good for the
environment, good for you. You get some type of benefit out of it then
it is a good swap for the company, and it is a particularly, it is
exactly what we need in terms of our encouraging private investment in
technology that will clean our air.
Mr. INSLEE. And what we are finding is that more and more companies
are actually accepting this idea, thinking it is a good idea because
one, it will drive innovation. It will help us invent new technologies.
But second, they realize this works. What we are talking about is a
thing called a cap and trade
[[Page H667]]
system. We cap the amount of carbon dioxide that can go into the air
and we allow polluting companies to bid and trade for the right to put
that pollution in. It is the most economically efficient way to do it.
And what the companies have discovered is that when we do this, it
works. When we did with sulfur dioxide in the 1980s it cleaned up the
air and it actually ended up helping the economy.
Mr. HALL of New York. It created jobs.
Mr. INSLEE. It created jobs in creating these scrubbers. It helped
our health and it actually, if anything, increased the gross domestic
product. So what we are seeing is that some of these visionary
companies are embracing this idea and it makes sense.
Today when I was talking to the Treasury Secretary, Mr. Paulson, I
said, you know if we don't do this we are going to be wasting a lot of
money. The Bush administration has supported a program, basically, it
is a combined cycle way of using coal that you can make into hydrogen
and sequester the carbon dioxide. It is called ``future gen.'' We are
going to have a future way of generating coal based electricity. And I
think it is a good idea to invest in that type of research to see if we
can burn coal, take the carbon dioxide, stick it in the ground forever
and we will have clean electricity. But the Bush administration is
spending $750 million of taxpayer money to do that. But the plant will
never, ever, ever be used or built if the Bush administration's
policies succeed because they don't want to have any charge for carbon
dioxide, any regulation on the amount of carbon dioxide going into the
air. Well, if you are a coal company and you have got to invest money
in this future gen program but you can put your carbon dioxide in the
air for free, are you ever going to build this kind of machine that
President Bush wants to build? It doesn't make any sense. So if we are
going to do research in this new technology, it only makes sense also
to have some regulation in the amount of carbon dioxide that goes into
the atmosphere. Otherwise these technologies will be developed and
never used. And that is not our goal, Mr. Hall.
Mr. HALL of New York. I wanted to say that you prompted this thought.
I am not against big corporations. I am not against corporations making
a profit. In fact, a couple of the companies that are making the most
innovation and putting the most investment into wind energy in our
country right now are GE and Siemens. General Electric built the wind
turbines that are in the Atlantic City wind farm that I mentioned
earlier. Whether it is small start up companies working on alternative
energy or whether it is existing oil companies or other utilities or
big energy companies, the important thing to say, and this is the
important thing, I think, to say to individuals also, and it is what I
believe leadership should be doing, whether it is our President,
whether it is Senators or whether it is us here on the floor of the
House of Representatives, we need to tell our corporations and our
citizens that it is patriotic to save energy, that it is patriotic,
when you have a choice, to use the most domestic, clean, renewable form
of energy that you can. It is patriotic to try to support, if you have
a choice on the back of your utility bill, as I do in New York State,
to check off that I want wind power, or to check off that I want hydro
electric. You could choose the source of where your power comes from if
you can afford to do it. And not everybody can, but those of us who are
able to spend a couple of cents more per gallon for home heating fuel
can get biodiesel. Well, right now it is no difference where I live. It
is the same price for bio as it is for oil. But we need to think of
this in terms of patriotism and national security and our national
interest, and that you can't separate it from our foreign policy. You
can't separate it from our economic well-being. You certainly can't
separate it from our health. And I don't think you can separate it from
our job future either. We need to have these industries start up and be
developed here so we can compete. We can't afford to be in a situation
we are in right now with hybrids, where I, who want to support, I got
elected with union support, I am proud to say. Now I want to buy an
American hybrid car that gets top mileage, and right now, the best
mileage cars being sold in the United States are made in Japan. I don't
believe, for a minute, that we can't compete and make a car that will
get as good mileage or better as any other country in the world as
their companies can. I think it is the choices that have been made, and
the incentives that have been offered or the direction that has been
given by government has been lacking. And I am proud to be a part of
this 110th Congress, when we, tomorrow, will start down that road where
we transfer the emphasis from the old to the new in terms of energy.
Mr. INSLEE. I really appreciate your comment. A couple of comments,
first off, about the value of business, big, little, medium, small, all
sizes. There are so many companies today that are leading this
revolution that we want to assist them. DuPont has done tremendous work
on energy efficiency. 3M has done tremendous work on energy efficiency.
British Petroleum, an oil and gas company, internally, because of their
great leadership, reduced their own carbon dioxide emissions down to
1990 levels. They thought it was going to take them 5 years. It took
them 3 years. And they saved $300 million in energy because of doing
just exactly what Mr. Hall is talking about of energy conservation.
This is a green policy in two ways. Green environmentally and green for
profit, and red, white and blue for America. So we have a lot of colors
working for this policy.
I want to mention one other thing about our auto industry. We need
our auto industry to give consumers cars that we can drive to use
multiple fuels. Right now we are all kind of slaves to gasoline. We
don't really have a choice. We need cars that will burn gasoline or
ethanol, like they have in Brazil. The cars in Brazil drive, almost all
of them burn either gasoline or ethanol. And because of that Brazil is
energy independent today because they are growing their own ethanol,
which we can do in this country. But we need the auto industry to give
us this choice, to give us cars that can burn gasoline or ethanol. Now
you can make a car for about $85 that does that. That is all it costs.
Almost nothing. That is what is costs to put tint in your glass. But we
need the industry to do that. And you know, Congress may need to act,
and I think it does need to act to get the industry to agree to do that
rapidly. The second thing we need is these oil and gas companies to
agree to put pumps in that will be ethanol pumps or biodiesel pumps.
{time} 2245
That is not happening, because, unfortunately, those companies kind
of only are selling gas right now, not biofuels. So we need to act to
give consumers that ability to have at least a small percentage in the
number of service stations that are going to give us that choice.
Mr. KLEIN of Florida. To follow up, if, the whole idea of gas, miles
per gallon, which people have a tendency to look at cars today and look
at the miles per gallon, there have been a lot of games that have been
played with that over the years, sport utility vehicles being viewed as
trucks, therefore, not having the same limitations that most
automobiles in the United States have.
As the gentleman from New York mentioned, there are many cars made in
other places around the world that have figured out how to make 40, 50
miles per gallon, base car and some hybrids as well. I don't believe
there is any inhibiting factor in the United States for our car
companies to do the same.
Now, do we need to give a little incentive? Maybe. I think we have
all seen the statistics. For every couple of miles per gallon you
increase in efficiency, we are dropping some amount of oils per barrel,
gas that has to be imported from the Middle East or wherever every day.
So there is a trade-off here.
There is also this issue of importing, which is a current issue which
we need to reduce. The technology is going to take a little bit of
time. We need to do exactly what we are doing tomorrow and over the
next number of weeks and months. But there are some immediate things we
can do.
I certainly would suggest to Americans on a patriotism basis, on a
smart basis on the thinking of your children
[[Page H668]]
and your grandchildren and what's right, we will sacrifice. We are all
in this together here. Let's make the right decisions, do what you can.
It's not the right thing for everybody. But to the extent that you can
buy a car that gets better gas mileage and focus on that cars that
maybe use regular instead of premium. Those are all choices that people
make. Everybody is in this together. Let us make some smart decisions.
Mr. INSLEE. We know this can be done because in the 1970s and early
1980s we increased our gas mileage by 60 percent in 8 years. If we had
simply continued on that path with the same rate of improvement, we
would be free of Saudi Arabian oil today. We need to get back on that
path of energy efficiency. We can do that. We can start tomorrow. It
will be a good day for energy revolution tomorrow. I am looking forward
to it.
Mr. Hall do you have any closing comments here? We are about ready to
wrap it up.
Mr. HALL of New York. I think you have said it all, Congressman. I am
happy to be here and proud to be here as part of this 110th. This is
part of our taking our own future back, we as a country, I am talking
about all the citizens of this country.
I think the same way Congressman Klein mentioned the moon shot, I do
remember that, I am a couple years older than you are, and there was a
huge lift in the psyche of this country, because even though President
Kennedy didn't live to see the day that we landed a man on the moon, it
was done in 9 years when he said we could do it in 10.
So our ingenuity and our industry and our creativity took hold, and
we accomplished the goal. You could just sense this palpable lifting of
the weight off the shoulders of Americans on the street. I mean, people
you knew, that we had done this.
The day that we harness all these alternatives, and harness the power
of conservation and efficiency so that we can say no thanks, turn that
tanker around, send it back to the Middle East, we don't need that oil,
that day, when that day arrives, you will see the same feeling of
weight lifting off the shoulders of the American people and a feeling
of self-sufficiency and of pride and of being in control of our own
destiny again. That is really something to look forward to.
Mr. INSLEE. When that day arrives they will write a sequel to Tom
Wolfe's book about the Mercury 7 program, and he called it ``The Right
Stuff.'' Tomorrow Congress is going to have the right stuff. We are
going to do a good energy policy.
____________________