[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
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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
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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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