[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 173 (Thursday, November 8, 2007)]
[House]
[Pages H13398-H13403]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                                 ENERGY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 18, 2007, the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Inslee) is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, I come to the House this evening to discuss 
our great irony about our position in the world right now, economically 
and environmentally.
  The irony is that we face some real challenges that touch on our 
energy-based economy, and I think those challenges are obvious to us 
tonight, a challenge as oil approaches $100 a barrel, $3 a gallon, and 
there's no relief in sight.
  Americans right now are feeling the pinch associated with fossil fuel 
costs going up. We have a challenge in that we still are addicted to 
Middle Eastern oil as a principal source of oil, and as long as we are 
addicted to oil we will have a problem being wrapped around the axle of 
the Middle East.
  And we have the problem of global warming, which is something that is 
becoming increasingly clear to us, not with scientific research but 
with our own eyes. In fact, I was pretty stunned to see the photographs 
of the arctic this summer where 1 million square miles of the arctic 
disappeared this summer, totally shocking the scientific community. An 
area the size of six Californias disappeared, melted unexpectedly in 
the arctic this summer.
  And, of course, that's a big concern because the arctic ice cap is 
sort of like a big sunshade. It reflects energy back into space. Now 
that it's gone in the summer, or substantial portions of it, the oceans 
are absorbing six to ten times more energy, having a pernicious 
feedback loop, making the problem even worse.
  In fact, if you look at the projections prepared by the scientific 
community showing the arctic ice cap in the year 2000, if you project 
up to the year 2040, the scientific community basically has found the 
arctic ice cap will be gone in the late summer months, essentially in 
my children's lifetime certainly.
  And the results of these three challenges that we have, increasing 
fossil fuel prices, our addiction to Middle Eastern oil and global 
warming, are certainly great challenges and ought to give us pause.
  But I'm here to talk about optimism rather than fear because the 
great

[[Page H13399]]

irony is that these three challenges have the capacity to ignite one of 
the most positive developments in the U.S. economy ever, and that is 
sparking the potential clean energy revolution that we're not 
accustomed to enjoying in the United States.

                              {time}  2230

  Our situation is a little bit like it was in the 1960s. If you 
recall, in the early 1960s, when John F. Kennedy came and stood right 
behind me here on May 25, 1961, and said that we would put a man on the 
Moon in 10 years and bring him back safely, that was a very bold and 
audacious thing to say. At the time, rockets were blowing up on the 
launch pad, and our computers were in rudimentary stages. We were way 
behind the Russians. We just put Spam in a can up. We hadn't even 
invented Tang yet.
  But we were driven to going to the Moon by a challenge, the challenge 
with the Russians, and the need for technological imminence that the 
Americans felt we deserved and had a destiny to fulfill. Indeed, we did 
fulfill that destiny when we went to the Moon in the original Apollo 
project.
  Now we have these challenges involving oil and global warming that we 
can use to the same effect as Kennedy used the challenge in the space 
race, and that effect is to rally the United States of America to a 
brighter future and a higher destiny to use our technological genius to 
develop a clean energy future for the United States of America.
  I am here tonight to share some of the good news that is extant 
across the United States in all 50 States where tonight there are men 
and women of genius and entrepreneurial perseverance and business 
acumen that are building the technology that allows us to beat global 
warming, break our addiction to Middle Eastern oil and, third, grow 
millions of new jobs in the clean energy economy that we intend to 
build.
  I will here tonight, when we conclude, finish by saying we will be 
able to achieve the same level of technological leap forward as Kennedy 
achieved in space. We will do for energy what Kennedy did for space.
  If I can, let me talk about some of the things I have learned in the 
last year. I have been proposing a bill called the New Apollo Energy 
Act for some time and, of course, writing a book called ``Apollo's 
Fire,'' I met a lot of people around the country who are now engaged in 
this great challenge. I would like to share with my colleagues and the 
public tonight what I found.
  First I want to address the issue of our cars. We got great cars. My 
favorite is a 1956 Chevy, always was, always will be, but we know that 
we have a great problem that 40 percent of the carbon dioxide emitted 
as global warming gases come from our cars and trucks. We know that we 
are paying $3 a gallon and it's going to go up. We know that we are 
taking our money and putting it in the pump machine, and it's going 
right to the Middle East to finance people who are attacking us.
  We need to reinvent the car. We need to take a bold leap forward in 
technology to find a new way to propel the car in a more efficient way. 
I am here tonight to say that we have the ability to do that in the 
immediate future.
  I want to share with you a picture of a car called the General Motors 
Volt. This is a prototype of a car that General Motors hopes to have in 
mass production 5 or 6 years from now. It is a plug-in hybrid vehicle. 
A plug-in hybrid vehicle, this car is quite stylish, and this 
physically exists. I actually brought this car to show to my colleagues 
several months ago. Thanks to General Motors, it exists physically.
  The way this car works is that it has a tremendous combination of 
advance battery technology and hybrid drive train technology that 
allows it to be plugged in at night. When you have this car, you will 
be able to take it home, put it in the garage, plug it in. The next 
morning you unplug it. You can drive it for up to 40 miles on total 
electrical propulsion, no CO2, no gasoline for the first 40 
miles.
  The beauty of that, and the importance of that, is that when you 
operate on electricity from the electrical grid, it may cost as little 
as 1 to 3 cents a mile for fuel. It costs 9 cents-plus a mile or more 
for gasoline now, and it's absolutely clean while you are driving the 
car. Now, obviously there is some CO2 involved in the 
production of the electricity, but I will get to that in a moment, so 
it's basically very inexpensive.
  Because over 60 percent of all the daily driving is under 40 miles, 
over half of the daily trips that Americans take will be pure 
electrical propulsion. Then if you want to drive more than 40 miles 
before you get home to recharge, you have a hybrid engine similar to 
the hybrid engines now used in both domestic and foreign manufacturers, 
to basically use a combination of fuel, and right now it's gasoline, 
someday it will be cellulosic ethanol, and electricity residual in the 
batteries to drive until you fill up your tank again or you get back to 
get recharged.
  When these cars are produced, we will get over 100 miles a gallon of 
gasoline. This won't be some small marginal increments, and you know 
right now we are debating whether to improve our corporate average fuel 
efficiency standards up to 35 miles a gallon in 10 or 15 years. These 
are going to blow right by that. It's going to blow right through the 
things we are debating right now and leapfrog that technology that is 
actually available today.
  Cars like this are on the road today being driven. I have driven one. 
They use a lithium ion battery manufactured by the A123 Systems in 
Massachusetts. People have taken the Toyota Prius. I drive a Toyota 
Prius. It is a great car. I am 6'2", 200 pounds; comfortable, safe, 
quiet, works like a dream for us. Folks have taken these Priuses and 
converted them into a plug-in hybrid car today. They are driving around 
the streets of America.
  I drove the first one that was commercially sold. We are going to 
have them in mass production in several years, and that's why it's 
important for this Chamber to send a signal to the auto industry that 
we are going to have a legal requirement that will improve the economy, 
and it will be simple to do and economical as well. Economical, because 
when these are in mass production, they may cost a couple of thousand 
dollars more than if you didn't have this technology, but you are going 
to save three or four times that amount in fuel costs later on.
  A double bonus of these cars is that as you drive them, as the grid 
electricity gets cleaner, because as we move to solar thermal energy 
and wind power energy and other sources, perhaps clean coal energy, we 
will have less CO2 emissions so the car will actually get 
cleaner. I mean, except wine, this will be the only thing that gets 
better with age and put out less CO2 over time.
  A triple bonus, according to people who have studied this, these cars 
have the potential to help the electrical grid where utilities can 
essentially use the batteries in the car in the garage at night to 
store energy. Your utility can be generating wind power at night or 
wave power at night or any kind of power at night, feed that energy 
into your battery and rent your battery in your garage.
  Economists who studied this think the day may come when you are paid 
$2,000 or $3,000 a year essentially for the temporary rental of your 
battery once your battery becomes part of the electrical grid. There 
are companies today in my town of Seattle, Washington, who are 
developing the software to do that.
  The point I think is important to make is that as we talk about 
setting caps on carbon dioxide, as we talk about increasing mileage 
requirements for our cars, we ought to have optimism and we ought to 
have confidence and we ought to recognize what Kennedy did about the 
can-do spirit of America, that that spirit is going to build us cars 
that can radically improve our mileage and radically reduce 
CO2 and then become a source of exports so we can start 
exporting these cars around the world.

  Why can't we sell these cars to China? We can, if, in fact, we will 
start sending the signals from this Chamber to the industry that this 
is going to be very achievable. It makes sense once we limit carbon 
dioxide.
  Now, this isn't the only solution to our car woes. General Motors, 
Ford, Honda, various other companies are also looking at electrifying 
the car and using a fuel cell hydrogen source to essentially generate 
the electricity to run electrical motors. That may be as good or better 
as lithium ion batteries.

[[Page H13400]]

It is probably a little further away from commercialization due to the 
storage issues of hydrogen and the distribution needs for the 
distribution system of hydrogen, but it is another alternative that at 
least one company intends to have commercially available in the next 
several years.
  So we now are ready to have leapfrog technology. It's because of the 
genius of Americans, and it's getting ready to go, and we should not be 
fearful in this Chamber. We should be confident of our ability to 
reinvent the car, thanks in part to guys like Felix Kramer, who 
essentially built one of these in his garage in California and dared 
Detroit and the rest of the auto industry internationally to build one, 
and that's going to happen now.
  So we know we can reinvent the car. But where do we get the energy 
for the electrical grid to energize these electrical cars? Well, the 
good news is that the genius of people building cars is matched by the 
genius of people figuring out how to generate electricity. I have been 
stunned in the last year, as I have studied this, and as I have gone 
around talking to people across America, I have been stunned with the 
rapidity of the developments that are taking place in the clean 
electricity field. You literally cannot turn over a rock in this 
country and not find someone developing a technology that is helping to 
find a way to generate electricity cleanly.
  I want to relate a little story of a company I heard about months 
ago. It's a company called Ausra Energy, Ausra. Ausra is owned largely 
by a fellow named Vinod Khosla, who is a fellow who was very 
instrumental in the development of software, founded Sun Microsystems, 
was very successful, and now has taken his talents to the field of 
clean energy.
  Mr. Khosla has now looked at all of the potential places where we can 
develop clean energy, recognizing that the world is going to demand 
these new technologies. He is a person, as many of the other people 
will talk about tonight, who did very well in software and Internet, 
and now see the same potential in the clean energy world as existed in 
software and Internet. They recognized a market opportunity, and they 
recognized that there are technological solutions that can fulfill 
these market opportunities.
  A fellow named John O'Donnell sent me an e-mail, who is one of the 
leaders of the Ausra Company, and it was a really happy e-mail to get. 
I will tell you why. I was on this floor the first week in August when 
we were debating what's called a renewable portfolio standard, and in 
the energy bill that we eventually passed in the House in August, which 
is a great bill by the way, a good start on this proposal, we were 
working to get a provision that would call for 15 percent of our 
electricity to be generated by clean renewable sources by the year 
2020.
  Of course, we talked to each other on the floor, and I was talking to 
some of my colleagues from the State of Florida. They were explaining 
to me, and I was saying, well, you know, there are a lot of different 
sources of clean energy, biofuels, wave power, clean coal technology. 
Efficiency in conservation is a form of what we call the first fuel and 
solar power. When I said that, one of my colleagues from Florida said 
we can't do solar power in Florida.
  I thought that was a little curious because I thought the license 
plate said Florida, the Sunshine State, but he explained that because 
they have some clouds in Florida, it's not as productive a solar field 
as perhaps the deserts of Arizona. In fact, that is true. Arizona might 
be 10 or 15 percent better than Florida.
  But, a few weeks later, I was talking to Mr. Khosla, who told me that 
his technology has a perfect fit for Florida, it's called Ausra. This 
is a picture of the Ausra thermal solar generator. The way the Ausra 
system works is that it is an array of mirrors. These blue long lines 
are essentially flat-panel mirrors, long arrays. They are quite long. 
As you can see these mirrors concentrate the sun's energy on a little 
pipe. You can see this pipe running about here above the long mirrors, 
and these are all focusing the reflected rays of the sun on that pipe. 
It heats water and eventually creates steam, and the steam turns a 
turbine, just like a coal-fired plant would, and generates electricity.
  Now, this Ausra technology could be and is, as far as we can tell 
right now, probably the least expensive of the solar thermal 
technologies that are being considered. The reason Mr. Khosla explained 
it to me is because they discovered a way to make these mirrors flat 
rather than concave, and they can make them a lot cheaper. The other 
provisions have a concave surface to them. They are much more expensive 
to manufacture.

                              {time}  2245

  Well, as a result of these and other improvements they made, Mr. 
Khosla's company just signed for ten, I believe, hundreds of megawatts 
with the Florida public, with a Florida public power utility for the 
production of zero CO2 emitting solar thermal energy. So 
here we have a situation in a State that at least some folks didn't 
think we could produce solar energy, and within weeks we have a 
contract with a major league, a Florida utility to produce electricity 
for thousands of people in Florida. And this stuff's powerful. In every 
2 acres of these mirrors, you can do somewhere between, you can provide 
enough electricity for somewhere between 750 and 1,000 homes. This is 
not just, you know, powering just your fan. It's real electricity.
  And now I got an e-mail from Mr. O'Donnell 3 days ago that, in fact, 
a contract has also been signed, a major public utility in California. 
And the sky's the limit. Now, this power's a little more expensive than 
coal-based power now, but the folks who run this company believe that 
can be competitive in just a matter of a few years once the cost of 
investment capital comes down and their scales of economy, and the fact 
that the prices of fossil fuels have not exactly been coming down, 
witness the price of gasoline.
  So in a very few years, this technology has the capability to be as 
inexpensive or less expensive than traditional fossil fuel-based 
systems with zero CO2 emissions without sending our money to 
Saudi Arabia and without digging up anything in the ground. That's a 
pretty good deal.
  Now, there are other companies besides OSRA that have similar 
technology, and there are contracts being let around the country for 
them as well. So we have the potential, not the potential, but the 
existence of real energy. This is not a pipe dream. This exists in 
reality. And we have the right to be excited about it.
  Now, there are many other ways to produce potentially clean energy. 
One of those potentially is clean coal technology, and research is 
going on, as we speak, in the potential of being able to take coal, 
gasify it, draw off the carbon dioxide, take the carbon dioxide and 
inject it underground into permanent geological sequestration, and then 
burn coal without any CO2 emissions of any significant 
amount. And that research is expensive, and it is not a guarantee that 
this tip of technology will be commercially viable. But it is a 
distinct possibility.
  In fact, an MIT researcher that reviewed this believed it was 
probable that this type of sequestration technology, putting 
CO2 underground in either large saline aquifers underground 
or in two or three other types of geological formations, that we would 
be able to do this in many, many places in the United States in 
commercially viable costs.
  Now, that technology's being developed too. There's a company called 
Ramgen Corporation in Seattle, Washington, that has developed a 
compression technology that costs 30 percent less money that could make 
this commercially viable to allow true clean coal to occur. And it 
strikes me that research to make that determination whether this can be 
done is appropriate investment.
  Now, this is to be distinguished from something you might hear called 
coal-to-liquid, which is a very different thing. Coal-to-liquid is 
turning the coal into a liquid and then burning the liquid. When you 
just burn the liquid, for instance, in an airplane motor or a car 
motor, you end up putting CO2 right back into the air. So 
coal-to-liquid is not an improvement from a global warming perspective.
  What we call clean coal, where the CO2, from its 
production is actually sequestered underground, is a marked improvement 
in global warming, and that's another technology that we are

[[Page H13401]]

looking at. But there are a host of others, and some of them are off 
our coastline. And I learned about these technologies in the last year 
in the course of my research and in the preparation of the new Apollo 
Energy Act that I've cosponsored.
  Off of our coastline in our estuaries, we have enormous amounts of 
energy in the waves and in the tides. And I have a picture here of some 
of the technologies that are now under development to harness that 
energy. And to have a, just to get a sense of the energy that is in our 
waves, if you've ever been thrashed in the surf like I have, you get 
some sense of how much energy is in a wave. But it's truly awesome.
  In a 10-by-10-mile stretch of the coast of the Pacific, just in a 10-
by-10-mile square, there is enough energy in the waves that could power 
all the electrical needs for the State of California. That's big-time 
energy. And the Department of Energy has concluded that if we can 
commercialize wave power technology, it could produce even in excess of 
10 percent of all the electrical needs of the United States. So there's 
an awesome amount of energy off the waves.
  In fact, the Pacific Coast of the United States happens to be the, 
happily, the single most beneficial prospective place for wave power in 
the world. This has actually been mapped. There are maps of the wave 
power all around the world, and the best in place in the world is off 
the Pacific Coast.
  So now we have brilliant Americans developing technology to harness 
that. We have a picture of some of them here. A buoy developed by Ocean 
Power Technology. As this buoy bobs up and down, it compresses air that 
then compresses, essentially, hydraulic fluid and drives an electrical 
generator.
  There are others from a company called Finavera that uses a system as 
the buoy bobs up and down, it pressurizes a column of water that then 
turns a generator. There are others that look like these large snakes. 
As they undulate and move up and down, they, through mechanical 
transference of energy, basically run a generator that then through a 
wire sends the electricity back to the coast.
  Now, the first of these in the Continental United States has now gone 
in the water off the coast of Oregon. We have them off the, actually 
powering Navy bases in Hawaii right now that have been in the water now 
for over a year. We're learning a lot from them. We're learning that 
there's a lot of energy there. And, in fact, as you might imagine, 
we've learned that you've got to make them incredibly strong to 
withstand the forces of the sea.
  Now, people, we cannot guarantee that this technology is going to be 
commercially viable. It is an infant industry. But we know, with the 
energy available in the waves, and we know the advances we can make, I 
think it is a reasonable opportunity that justifies investment in this 
technology, and, in fact, the private sector is making a very large 
investment in this technology.
  Now, there's another type of power called tidal power which involves 
currents, harnessing the currents that are driven by the tides, by the 
Moon, of course. You know, this is kind of lunar energy. The Moons run 
the tides. And we now have technology using turbines that look like 
underwater wind turbines. There's a picture of one here manufactured by 
a company called Verdant that is now in the East River in New York.
  These essentially work like wind turbines that you've seen. As the 
tide moves in and out, and of course it's very predictable and happens 
every day, it spins this turbine very slowly, so it has a minimal 
impact on marine life and generates the electricity. And these are 
actually in the water.
  Now it's interesting, we found out there's so much energy in these 
currents these have had to be rebuilt, which is a good sign, 
essentially, because we found out there's more energy than we knew. So 
we have substantial energy off of our coastlines that we have potential 
for capturing.
  Now, a lot of people thought ocean energy is where wind energy was 
about 20 years ago. About 20 years ago, people started to put up these 
wind mills and generate electricity from them. And when they started, a 
lot of people thought they were kind of wacky. It was very expensive at 
the time. It was a new idea and the oil and gas folks kind of laughed 
at them. That was 20 years ago.
  During this succeeding 20 years, we've had continuing improvements of 
the technology, and now we have wind turbines over 300-foot in height 
powering over 1,000 homes apiece, producing electricity that is as 
cheap as any electricity in the Nation.
  Today, in the State of Washington, where I hail from, in southeast 
Washington, we have the largest wind farm in the Western Hemisphere 
producing electricity as cheap as coal-fired electricity. And now it is 
the largest most rapidly growing form of energy in the United States, 
and it has still huge potential to grow because we have enormous 
resources of wind. In fact, it's growing so fast that the wind turbine 
manufacturers cannot keep up.
  And I'd like to tell the story of an American company called Clipper 
Wind. Clipper Wind tonight has several hundred Iowans working in Cedar 
Rapids building clipper wind turbines; good, well-paid American jobs 
now spinning, and these are also being exported around the world, 
producing exactly zero CO2 emitting wind energy. And these 
are American jobs.
  And that's what this is about. Whether it's plug-in hybrid cars or 
solar thermal technology, or wind turbine technology, these are 
American jobs that we're building. But we're only going to build them 
if Congress starts to adopt the policies that drive investment into 
these technologies, rather than just the fossil fuel industry. And 
that's why we need to take some of these subsidies we've given to the 
oil and gas industry and we did it in the House bill we passed some 
time ago, $16 billion, reel it back in and put it into a fund to help 
some of these nascent industries grow.
  And we need a renewable portfolio standard to send a message to the 
investment community that they can invest in these technologies, 
because we know there's going to be a demand for them. And we need a 
cap and trade system so that we don't allow polluting industries to put 
their carbon dioxide and their pollution in unlimited amounts into the 
atmosphere. And when those things happen, there will be a gold rush, a 
flood tide of investment capital into the companies that are developing 
these technologies. That's what they need. They've got the brilliance. 
As soon as they have the investment capital, they're going to take off. 
And as soon as the demand is obvious, investment capital will flow.
  I talked to a fellow named John Plaza. He was here three days. John 
has a really interesting story. He was an airline pilot, and he said he 
sort of got bored going back and forth. I know what it feels like 
because I fly back and forth every Monday and Friday. And he decided he 
wanted to try something new. So he went out and decided he was going to 
start brewing up biodiesel fuel, literally in his garage, and started 
to figure out a way to make biodiesel. And he actually came to believe 
it was commercially viable. So he went and found an investor, a fellow 
named Martin Tobias, who was successful at Microsoft; raised some 
capital, built a little plant on the shores of the Duwamish River in 
Washington. Really wasn't much to look at. Just your typical little 
tilt-up warehouse.
  John was pretty creative. He went to the Rainier Brewing Company, the 
iconic Big R in Seattle, and he bought two big huge brewing vats from 
the Rainier Brewing Company, and he moved them down to this little 
warehouse and he designed a way himself on how to filter some of the 
material out of biodiesel when you refine it. And he started refining 
biodiesel, and he started selling it.
  Well, that was last year. This year he is leading and has constructed 
the largest biodiesel plant in the world that puts out 100 million 
gallons of biodiesel at Grays Harbor, Washington, a town that's 
experienced some economic hardship because of the decline of the timber 
industry. And John, in his genius and his business acumen, has built a 
business hiring people in Washington State, now going to be shipping 
biodiesel all around. They just signed a deal with a distributor to 
start distributing it. And the very first committed biodiesel pump from 
this group called Propel was installed in Ballard, Washington, just a 
couple of weeks ago.
  So here's good old American know-how, can-do spirit, developing a 
whole

[[Page H13402]]

new industry. And the biofuel industry has a very bright future.

                              {time}  2300

  I would like to talk just for a moment about biofuels. We know we 
have corn ethanol today in abundance, and 23 percent of all the corn 
grown in the United States now goes to ethanol. And it's been 
productive. The price of gasoline actually would have been worse if we 
hadn't had that ethanol available. It's bad enough as it is.
  But the good news I want to share with you is that we have tremendous 
cause for optimism that we are going to grow second, third, and fourth 
generations of ethanol. They're going to be much more productive than 
corn ethanol that we are using now because the corn ethanol we use now 
only uses the kernel, a very small part of the total plant. Scientists 
have now developed ways to use the entire plant, all of the 
carbohydrates in the plant, what they call the corn stover, 
switchgrass, and some advanced feedstocks that have the capability to 
be four or five times as productive per acre as corn.
  And I was at a company called Mendel Biotechnology in Hayward, 
California, a few weeks ago that have developed a grass called 
Miscanthus. Miscanthus grows about 10 or 12 feet high, a real thick-
looking plant. When you harvest it, you take the whole plant. They take 
it, they chop it up, they expose it to heat and enzymes that breaks 
down the cell wall and freezes the carbohydrates that then could be 
distilled into an alcohol. Ethanol is an alcohol. And that feedstock 
has the potential to produce four or five times as much per acre as 
existing corn ethanol with less fertilizer and less water needed.
  We're also making tremendous strides in enzymes. And there are ways 
to do this even without enzymes. The very first cellulosic ethanol 
plant in America had the ground broken 2 days ago, I believe, the 
Ramgen Company, another company owned by Vinod Khosla that I talked 
about, and we have five others that are going to begin construction 
shortly. So conservative estimates are that within the next 20 years, 
we will be able to have 25 to 30 percent of all of our transportation 
fuels fueled by biofuels. And the best is yet to come.
  Last night I learned about a company called Solazyme. Solazyme is 
developing a way to make biodiesel from algae that is 50 times as 
productive as corn per square meter or acre in its productive 
capability. Now, it's not commercialized yet. It's quite aways from 
commercialization. A lot of work has to be done. But when that is done, 
Katie, bar the door when it comes to biofuels. And when we do that, we 
are going to have plug-in hybrid cars that we can plug in, run for 40 
miles, then burn cellulosic ethanol or potentially biodiesel, and have 
an infinite number of miles per gallon of gasoline because we won't be 
using it. We will have a decarbonized car. The car may become total 
electric, but even if it doesn't become total electric, it can become 
decarbonized by a combination of plug-in hybrid technology and 
biofuels. And of course biofuels are zero CO2 emitting net 
because you don't put any more carbon into the atmosphere than the 
plant takes out of the atmosphere. It's just a little circle. The plant 
sucks the CO2 out of the atmosphere, photosynthesis kicks 
in. You make carbohydrates, build the plant, chop the plant up. You 
make it into biodiesel or cellulosic ethanol. You burn it, and then 
CO2 goes back up and the cycle is repeated. There is no net 
CO2, unlike coal and oil. We are taking stuff out of the 
ground that has been there for a million years, and that has enormous 
net increases to the atmosphere.
  So here we have existing technology that is on the cusp of 
commercialization and American know-how is going to do it. And that is 
why we in this Chamber and my colleagues who might be listening 
tonight, should that be the case anywhere in this fair country, we 
ought to have confidence that we can move forward with the host of 
these clean energy policies that we are now considering and realize 
that the American economy is going to grow as a result of these 
policies, not shrink, because the world is going to need this clean 
energy. And it ought to be America that is selling it to China and the 
rest of the world, and we have every possibility of doing that.
  Now, there is another place where the clean energy revolution is 
going to be really important, and that is in our homes, in a lot of 
different ways. And some people think that to make our homes 
electrical-generating units or to make them zero CO2 
emitters is sort of a Buck Rogers fantasy, and I have learned that that 
is anything but true. In fact, on the mall 2 weeks ago, we had a solar 
decathlon where 13 colleges sent kids, and anybody under 40 is a kid to 
me now, but these college students that came in and built these zero 
CO2 emitting solar-powered homes. And they were just 
delightful to look at and fascinating to behold what these young 
students had created.
  Now, they did look a little different than my home and maybe yours 
look like because they had the absolute avant guard technology in them.
  But I want to show you another home in one of the rainiest parts of 
Washington, up north in Redmond, Washington. This is the home of Mike 
and Meg Towne. Mike is a teacher at Redmond High School. And several 
years ago Mike was talking to his students about the importance of 
dealing with global warming and all the whiz-bang technologies that he 
thought was going to come on to help solve this problem. And one of his 
students said, Mr. Towne, if this is so cool, why aren't you using it? 
And he said to himself, well, maybe I will. So he and his wife, Meg, 
decided to go out and build essentially a zero net CO2 home 
that's solar powered, and they did it. And they did it for very little 
more than it costs to build a typical home. And here's their home in 
Redmond, Washington.
  I want to note this is a very unusual day because it was not raining 
when this picture was taken, and it tends to rain a little bit where I 
live, and it rains even more where Mike lives. This is up towards the 
foothills of the Cascade Mountains, and it's just a very damp, gray 
environment. But even in that environment, they put up these solar 
cells, and you will see that they are incorporated into the roofing 
material. You can just put them on. Mike put them on himself. They used 
a little extra insulation, decent windows, designed it in a way to 
minimize heat loss. And right now they have zero electrical net usage 
because they feed back into the grid frequently of electricity they are 
not using, and they netted out to zero. And Americans are going to have 
that right if a bill that I have been working on for 4 years called the 
Net Metering bill passes, so that when you generate electricity and you 
feed it back into the grid, you get paid for it.
  The point of this is that this exists today in rainy climates. It's 
possible almost anywhere in the country. And we are going to do it. And 
we have a bill in the House that we have now passed this August that 
will establish building codes that will decrease energy use by 50 
percent in our homes and our businesses in the next 10 years of new 
construction. That is possible to do. We are doing it. Mike and Meg 
Towne did it. And we are well on our way as part of an important part 
of the clean energy revolution.
  And, by the way, this is going to create jobs, because when we 
retrofit our homes, when we put in new insulation, when we put in 
weather stripping, when we put in more efficient heating systems, all 
of those things generate jobs. And a conservative estimate of the new 
Apollo Energy Act that I have sponsored is that it will create 3 
million new jobs in the next several years.
  So what we have seen tonight is a host of new economic opportunities 
for America. And what I started out with, I was talking about that this 
is an irony. The irony is that these great challenges of global warming 
and addiction to Middle Eastern oil and the huge increase in the cost 
of oil and gas are actually disguised opportunities. And if this 
Chamber will act, and we would like to do it in a bipartisan basis, to 
adopt this signal to the market, these technologies are going to 
blossom.
  And I would like to talk about one policy that is of overriding 
interest, and that is the cap-and-trade system that we need in this 
country to drive investment in these technologies. Right now we have a 
broken market. We have a great market failure. And that market failure 
is that we are allowing polluting industries to use our atmosphere, a 
scarce resource, and put

[[Page H13403]]

unlimited amounts of their pollutants into the air for no cost 
whatsoever. And that is not only morally wrong; it's economically 
wrong, because when you have an asset, if somebody uses it up, they 
ought to pay for that; right? And there ought to be some limit on it. 
But right now when a utility burns coal and they dump the 
CO2 in our atmosphere, an atmosphere we have in common, it's 
like a city park. And we would not allow a utility to back their dump 
truck into the city park and dump their trash in the city park. We 
would not allow some refinery putting CO2 into the 
atmosphere to drive up to the city park and dump their sludge in the 
city park. But that's what we are doing right now by allowing unlimited 
amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And that has to stop. We 
have to develop a limit on the amount of carbon dioxide that goes into 
the atmosphere. And a cap-and-trade system does that. When we develop a 
cap, we will put and guarantee Americans that only a certain amount of 
carbon dioxide can go into the atmosphere every year. It's common 
sense. We can't continue to put this into the atmosphere without very 
devastating ramifications. And we need to charge for that as well.
  Europe made a big mistake. When they did this, they just handed these 
permits out, and the utilities took them and then took a huge windfall 
profit by charging rate payers for an asset that was just given to 
them. We can't do that. We need to have an auction of those permits to 
create a price for carbon and to use the market to determine who really 
needs them and what they will pay for that scarce resource.
  And this is a resource owned by the taxpayers. The taxpayers own the 
atmosphere, not the corporations. The citizens of America own the air 
we breathe, not the utilities. The Congress has a responsibility to our 
citizens to take care of that asset, and we are not doing it yet. And 
when somebody uses that asset, they need to pay for using that asset.
  So what we would propose to do is have an auction and let the market 
determine what the cost of those permits are for polluting industries. 
And the sooner we do that, the better; the more powerful impact we will 
have in driving investment to these new technologies, and the sooner 
that taxpayers will get a break getting paid by something that they own 
mutually. And that money can then be used for further research and 
development into these technologies. It can be used to help lower-
income folks with their heating and cooling expenses. And it can be 
used as part of the clean energy revolution. And we need to increase 
that R and D. We are spending 25 times more in Iraq today than we are 
spending on trying to solve this energy problem. We spent seven times 
more on the original Apollo Project than we are spending today on this 
energy problem. We have got to ramp up our Federal R and D as the 
private sector does as well.
  So in closing, Mr. Speaker, I would like to say that if people come 
to know the people I have known during the last year; the folks who are 
developing solar thermal; the folks who are developing clean coal; the 
folks who are developing advanced forms of cellulosic ethanol and 
advanced forms of biodiesel; the folks who are developing wind and 
tidal power; the people who are developing what's called the SIPs 
industry, the structural integrated panels, where they have built these 
panels now that you can build a house with them and you can reduce your 
usage by 40 percent at no additional cost; the people who are 
developing the plug-in hybrid car, these are the Americans that we need 
to listen to and have confidence in that they are going to solve this 
problem. And that is why in the next few weeks in this Chamber I hope 
we will pass an energy bill that is as bold and as visionary and as 
optimistic as Kennedy's original Apollo Project. And America deserves 
nothing less than that because we are just as capable, we are just as 
smart, and we are just as technologically ambitious as we were in the 
1960s. And if we do that, America will produce. It is our destiny. The 
New Apollo Energy Act will solve these problems and grow our economy at 
the same time.

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