[Congressional Record Volume 156, Number 148 (Monday, November 15, 2010)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7877-S7880]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         UPCOMING CLOTURE VOTES

  Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, the day after tomorrow, on Wednesday, we 
are going to have three cloture votes. These cloture motions were filed 
before we broke in October. Those will be the first three votes of our 
returning this fall. Those three cloture votes are, of course, motions 
to proceed--a motion to proceed on an energy bill, a motion to proceed 
on the paycheck fairness bill, and a motion to proceed on the food 
safety bill.
  Mr. President, the food safety bill came out of my committee, the 
HELP Committee, on November 18 of last year. We have been working for a 
year to get this up. It has strong bipartisan support. We tried to get 
it up before we broke in October, but there were objections on the 
Republican side, and we were not able to move forward even though we 
had been working--Senator Enzi and I--on this along with Senators Gregg 
and Burr on the Republican side, and Senator Durbin, I, and others on 
the Democratic side to work it out. I believe we are there.
  This bill has strong support from the consumer groups, from the 
business and industry groups, and it has strong bipartisan support. I 
hope we will be able to get a successful vote on the motion to proceed 
to that bill. I will have more to say about that later in the week, on 
Wednesday specifically.
  Today I wish to confine my remarks to the other two cloture votes, 
the Energy bill and the one on the Paycheck

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Fairness Act. On November 9, a bipartisan group of us from the Senate--
four of us--sent a letter to the majority leader, Senator Reid, about 
this bill, the Energy bill. We are going to be voting on the motion to 
proceed to this bill on Wednesday.
  Basically, what this letter--which is bipartisan--said to Leader Reid 
was that we need to move forward on energy legislation. We all 
recognize that. But there is a major omission in this bill. What is 
missing from the bill is any mention of biofuels and what biofuels can 
contribute to our energy independence in this country.
  At the outset, first of all, I ask unanimous consent that this letter 
be printed at this point in the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                                                  U.S. SENATE,

                                 Washington, DC, November 9, 2010.
     Harry Reid,
     Senate Majority Leader,
     U.S. Senate.
       Dear Majority Leader Reid: Achieving a transition to 
     cleaner, more secure, and more sustainable energy systems is 
     one of the public policy imperatives of our generation. We 
     cannot afford to continue to send billions of dollars every 
     year to unstable oil producing countries, nor to spend 
     additional billions protecting those investments. We also 
     cannot continue to ignore the rising global temperatures, 
     changing climates, and health effects that are direct results 
     of the annual emissions of billions of tons of greenhouse 
     gases and air pollutants from fossil fuel combustion.
       There is also broad recognition that promotion of energy 
     efficiency and alternative fuels and energy systems offer one 
     of our clearest and most promising avenues for significant 
     job creation and economic development. Indeed, we arc seeing 
     increasing calls for domestic development of renewable fuels 
     and technologies, both for their export potential and to 
     avoid our eventual import of those same technologies if we 
     fall behind in their development.
       We are heartened that you have filed cloture on energy 
     legislation because it provides an opportunity for a full 
     debate about our nation's energy future, and we would like to 
     work with you to craft legislation that can obtain broad 
     bipartisan support. To that end, we urge you to include in 
     that legislation a number of broadly supported programs and 
     policies addressing some of our most immediate and obvious 
     energy challenges.
       One of our most pressing energy issues is our continued 
     dependence on imported petroleum for fueling our 
     transportation systems. On this issue, we are encouraged by 
     the progress that is being made by vehicle efficiency gains 
     and by the increasing contributions from domestic biofuels. 
     However, we are also deeply concerned that continued 
     expansion of biofuels is being constrained by marketplace 
     limitations. Quite simply, we need more vehicles that can 
     utilize high percentages of ethanol and other biofuels, we 
     need to develop pipelines to transport these fuels from their 
     production sites to the largest markets, and we need to 
     ensure that these high renewable content fuels are available 
     at filling stations across the country. We therefore urge you 
     to include biofuels market expansion provisions addressing 
     these barriers in energy legislation considered by the 
     Senate.
       We also urge consideration of legislation to extend the 
     Volumetric Ethanol Excise Tax Credit (VEETC) beyond its 
     current expiration date of December 31, 2010. Letting this 
     key support policy lapse in the coming year could cause a 
     precipitous drop in biofuels production, threatening 
     thousands of good-paying green jobs as well as putting 
     pressure on gasoline prices and supplies. While we believe 
     that the VEETC program deserves review in the context of 
     broader discussions about how best to address the most 
     important limitations facing biofuels, it is very important 
     to not let this support program lapse while those discussions 
     take place.
       The enactment of these policies will enable as much as a 5-
     fold increase in biofuels' displacement of oil-based fuel use 
     in transportation within the next 2 decades--generating 
     energy resource production and refining jobs all across 
     America, improving our international balance of payments, and 
     lessening our dependence on imports from unstable regions of 
     the World.
     Tom Harkin.
     Christopher Bond.
     Tim Johnson.
     Amy Klobuchar.

  Mr. HARKIN. Again, what is missing is biofuels. While I will 
certainly vote for the motion to proceed because I think we should 
proceed to it, major changes need to be made in this bill before it can 
earn my support on final passage. Let me talk about what those changes 
are.
  First of all, I think it is very clear that we have to wean ourselves 
off of spending more and more of our taxpayers' dollars, consumer 
dollars, on imported oil. I think President Bush said that, and 
President Obama has said that, and it is not a partisan issue. It is a 
national security issue dealing very much with our economic security in 
this country. What is missing from the bill is a focus--any focus at 
all--on the one thing that over the last, say, 20 years has decreased 
our dependence on foreign oil; that is, the use of biofuels for 
transportation.
  Again, there have been a lot of alternatives proposed: natural gas, 
hydrogen, electric vehicles--all of which will be pursued in the 
future. But, quite frankly, the only thing right now and in the 
foreseeable future, the next 10, 15 years that will do anything to 
decrease our dependence on foreign oil is biofuels.
  There has been a remarkable success story with biofuels in this 
country. This chart shows what we have done--it shows production 
increasing from 1998 up until about 2010. We had a huge increase in the 
use of biofuels, so we are up to about 11 billion or 12 billion gallons 
a year. Under the renewable fuels standard 2--the mandate we passed in 
2007--that is projected to go up to 36 billion gallons of biofuels by 
2022. That is in the law--36 billion gallons by 2022. So, again, this 
is what is going to replace imported oil. We are well on our way to 
doing that. However, right now biofuels are facing significant market 
limitations. Well, first of all, about the only thing that can be used 
is 10 percent ethanol blends with gasoline--E10--although the EPA just 
recently came out with a new standard where we will be able to use 
E15--or 15 percent ethanol--in model cars 2007 and higher. It is 
thought that maybe sometime next year EPA will come out with another 
standard that will allow as much as 20 percent ethanol.

  These are all well and good, but, again, there are a couple of things 
that need to be done. First of all, let's keep in mind that converting 
to use of biofuels is much quicker and much easier, much more cost 
effective than using natural gas. For example, to use E85 or any other 
blend of biofuels at a pump just takes a different kind of pump. But 
you, as the driver of the car, would simply drive up, pick up the 
handle, put the fuel in your gas tank, just as you put in gasoline 
today. But for natural gas, there would have to be a big pressurized 
storage tank. That natural gas would have to then be transferred to 
your vehicle tank, a very strong tank in your car, and there would have 
to be some kind of nozzle to transfer that pressurized fuel. It 
wouldn't just be putting gasoline in a vehicle. So a whole new 
infrastructure would have to be built to accomplish this. But no new 
infrastructure needs to be built to put biofuels in your car. So it is 
much easier and much more rapid.
  Now, a couple of things I have already said about the infrastructure, 
but let me talk a little about two things. The first is the ethanol tax 
credit. Right now it is at 45 cents a gallon. There is a lot of talk 
that when it expires this year it shouldn't be renewed because it costs 
$5.9 billion a year for this tax credit for ethanol. You might say: 
Maybe we shouldn't be spending that. Well, studies by McKinsey and 
others show that ethanol reduces gasoline prices--estimates vary, but 
conservative estimate is 17 cents a gallon. So that savings of 17 cents 
a gallon saves consumers in America $24 billion a year--$24 billion a 
year. So it is not a net cost to taxpayers but a real savings of four 
to five times as much as the cost in the tax credit.
  Secondly, on jobs. Everyone is talking about jobs. We have to have 
more jobs in this country. Well, each 1 billion gallons of biofuels 
generates anywhere from 10,000 to 20,000 jobs--a broad range. So if we 
go from 13 billion gallons today to 36 billion gallons in 2022, that 
would generate over 400,000 permanent jobs--400,000 permanent jobs. 
That is not to mention the number of construction jobs that would be 
needed during the building of the facilities.
  Now, two other things about market problems. Right now, we have a 
problem in terms of the number of cars that can be flex-fuel. Every car 
that General Motors makes in Brazil is flexible fuel. Every car Ford 
makes in Brazil is flexible fuel. Every car Honda makes in Brazil is 
flexible fuel. They can burn anything from gasoline to 85 percent 
ethanol--E85. So why aren't they doing it here? The cost is minimal.
  The second thing is to get blender pumps--pumps at gas stations--that

[[Page S7879]]

can take ethanol and blend with gasoline at any mixture you want and 
then can be put in that flex-fuel car. So we need two things: We need 
more flex-fuel cars, and we need more blender pumps. Very low cost, 
very easy to install.
  Senator Lugar and I have repeatedly introduced legislation to 
accomplish this, and that ought to be a real part of this Energy bill 
we are bringing up a motion to proceed to on Wednesday.
  Lastly, let me get to the issue of net energy. This is a red herring 
that comes up all the time. People say it takes more energy to produce 
ethanol than we get out of it. We have been hearing this for about 30 
years, and it is simply not true. It is like the old Will Rogers 
saying: It is not what we don't know that hurts us, it is what we know 
that ain't so. And what we seem to know that isn't so is that it takes 
more energy to produce ethanol than we get out of it. That is factually 
incorrect.
  Take gasoline for example. Think about gasoline in terms of net 
energy payback. For every unit of energy going in, how much do we get 
out? For gasoline, it is .813. In other words, we get less energy out 
of the gasoline than we have used to drill for the oil, pump the oil, 
transport the oil, refine the oil, get the gasoline, and pipe the 
gasoline. All that takes energy. That plus the energy in the resource 
means the net energy payback for gasoline is at about .813. For ethanol 
it is 1.42.
  Now why is that? Why would we get almost half, again, as much as 
energy from a unit of ethanol than we put into it? Very simple. The 
energy that is in the biofuels comes from the Sun when it is growing, 
and that is free. That doesn't cost anything.
  This figure also takes into account the energy used to make the 
fertilizer, the energy in the diesel fuel for the equipment, the energy 
used in harvesting, and the energy in conversion and transportation. 
That is all figured into this, and we still get 1.42 units of energy 
for every unit of energy going into ethanol.
  Now, that is just the ethanol. We know when we take the ethanol out 
of certain biofuels--say corn--there is something called distillers 
dried grain left over which we can feed to the livestock. If we take 
that into account, and allocate some of the input energy to those 
byproducts, then we get over two times the energy output for every unit 
of energy we put into ethanol. But I will not go there. I am just 
talking about using the ethanol that we would put into a car where we 
would get a net payback. So, again, we have heard for the last 30 years 
about how ethanol takes more energy than we get out of it, and that 
just isn't so.
  So, as I say, Mr. President, on Wednesday, the motion to proceed to 
the Energy bill, that is fine. I am going to support that. But I want 
to make it clear there have to be major changes in the bill before I 
can support it, and one of the major changes is that we need to make 
sure we have a strong biofuels section in that bill.
  The second issue that is coming up on Wednesday that I want to 
discuss is the Paycheck Fairness Act. Again, this is something I and a 
lot of others have been working on for a long time. I say the real 
leaders on this have been Senator Mikulski and Senator Dodd. They have 
led the charge on this for a long time.
  In 1963 we passed the Equal Pay Act, which said a woman had to be 
paid the same as a man for the same job. In other words, if you had the 
same job, same job description, you couldn't have any pay differential. 
That went into effect in 1963. However, all of these years later, right 
now, a woman earns 77 cents on the dollar compared to what the man 
makes. There is a differential even if we talk about different jobs. 
And why is that? Well, it is because, quite frankly, this wage gap 
between men and women basically has been ignored lately, and we have 
built in a kind of infrastructure that lends itself to women being sort 
of shortchanged. Studies done by the Academy of Management Perspectives 
in 2007 tried to explain the difference as to why women are making only 
77 cents on the dollar compared to what a man makes.
  Race accounts for 2.4 percent--that is interesting--whether they were 
a member of a union--organized labor--experience, and then the industry 
category or what industry you were in might explain the difference. For 
example, the construction industry would be more heavily dominated by 
men than women. Then the occupational category--the occupational 
category itself. I have always said truckdrivers tend to be men not 
women. So the occupational category, that explains a lot of the 
differential.
  The point is that 41.1 percent was unexplained. It could not explain 
why there was a difference between what a woman makes and what a man 
makes. What is the difference? Well, quite frankly, the difference is 
the gender. The gender gap is what it is. No other thing, nothing else 
explains it other than that.
  The other thing we have to understand is that today two-thirds of 
mothers are major contributors to the family income. Almost 40 percent 
are the primary breadwinners. Think about that: 4 out of 10 mothers are 
the primary breadwinners for their families, and 24 percent are 
cobreadwinners. In other words, the husband and wife are both working 
together. About 36 or 37 percent are other factors. In other words, 
they may be a third or something like that because of maybe part-time 
work or other things.
  The fact is, that is not what Congress intended when we passed the 
Fair Pay Act back in 1963. We wanted to close that gap. Yet 47 years 
later we still have this gap. So the Paycheck Fairness Act would 
strengthen the penalties for discrimination. It would give women the 
tools they need to identify and confront unfair treatment. It would 
fund education programs designed for women and girls to support and 
empower them. It would increase training, research, and education to 
help the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission respond to wage 
discrimination claims more effectively.
  Again, these are steps that are meant to make the Equal Pay Act of 
1963 more meaningful. We had a lot of bills in the past on civil 
rights, but it wasn't until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that we 
actually put teeth in it and made those previous laws something that 
meant something. So, Mr. President, we can't afford to kick the can 
down the road any longer on the Paycheck Fairness Act.
  On the heels of the Paycheck Fairness Act is what I call the Fair Pay 
Act. I have been introducing this bill every year since 1996. In every 
session of Congress since 1996 I have introduced the bill. It is 
basically to understand the gap that occurs--this gap here--in this 
occupational category. You see, there are a lot of women who work at 
jobs that require as much education and training as a man's job, but it 
is in a different category.
  For example, millions of female-dominated jobs--such as social 
workers, Head Start teachers, childcare workers, nurses, nurse 
assistants, long-term care assistants in our long-term care 
facilities--are equivalent in skills, effort, responsibility, and 
working conditions to similar jobs dominated by men, but they pay a lot 
less. Again, this is inexcusable, and that is why I have introduced 
this Fair Pay Act in every session of Congress since 1996.
  The Fair Pay Act would require companies to publish their job 
categories and their pay scales. It wouldn't require a company to say 
what each person is getting paid, it would just say they have to 
publish their pay scales and their job categories. That way people 
would know what their contemporaries are making, or at least a range of 
what they are making.
  I asked Lilly Ledbetter when she appeared before our committee a 
couple of years ago if the Fair Pay Act had been in existence when she 
was discriminated against would she have been in a better position. She 
said yes; she would have known then that she was being unfairly paid 
less than what her contemporaries were. So, again, that is why we have 
to move ahead on the Fair Pay Act. We can't forget that there are 
millions of women who work very hard--they care for our elderly, they 
care for our kids, they teach our kids, in many cases they are daycare 
workers, nurse assistants, and they do extremely important work. What 
would we do without them? But because they are categorized as women's 
jobs, they are paid a lot less. For example, take the difference 
between a truckdriver and a nurse. They both require about the same 
amount of skills, education and training and physical

[[Page S7880]]

ability--about the same amount. Yet a truck driver is making much more 
than a nurse makes. Why is that?

  We tend to think of truckdrivers as big burly men but, you know, with 
power steering and power brakes and some other machinery, it does not 
require a lot of muscular effort anymore. But a nurse, who has to turn 
patients over--that requires physical effort also. That is one example 
of the disparity we have in our society.
  We have to end this categorization that certain jobs are women's jobs 
and therefore we can pay them less. I daresay a truckdriver is an 
important part of our society. You make no bones about it. But so is a 
long-term care assistant taking care of our grandparents, or someone on 
an Alzheimer's unit, or a person who is taking care of our kids in the 
dawn of their life when they are in daycare centers. They do important 
work, vitally important work. They should not be discriminated against 
any longer.
  I hope we will move forward on these two bills. As I said, the third 
bill is the food safety bill. I am hoping we will move forward on that 
also and that we can finish that bill by the end of the week. We 
reported this bill unanimously out of our HELP Committee November 18 of 
last year. There was not one ``no'' vote against it. Frankly, I daresay 
if we can bring the bill out on the floor--I am just wagering--I bet we 
get 90 votes. But there is a small group on the Republican side that is 
basically filibustering the bill. I am hopeful in good faith, working 
with Senator Enzi, Senator Burr, Senator Gregg, and others on our side, 
we can break this logjam and we can get the food safety bill through 
this week. It is so vitally important. As I said, it has broad 
bipartisan support. We worked hard to keep it that way. We have 
industry support and consumer groups support. Certainly it is vitally 
important to the health and safety of our country.
  Our food safety laws have not been upgraded in 30 years. Think about 
the changes that have taken place in the way we grow food and ship food 
and prepare it compared to what it was 30 years ago.
  Again, I am hopeful we will be able to bring that up and pass it, not 
only the motion to proceed but the bill itself, sometime this week. I 
will have more to say about that.
  I yield the floor.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Illinois.
  Mr. BURRIS. Mr. President, are we in morning business presently?
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. We are in morning business. The 
Senator is authorized to speak for up to 10 minutes.

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