[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 81 (Wednesday, May 15, 2019)]
[House]
[Pages H3836-H3839]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                          MAKING THE MATH WORK

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2019, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. 
Schweikert) for 30 minutes.
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, this is actually something we try to 
do about once a week, come in here and actually sort of talk about our 
unified theory in our office: What do we do to, basically, keep our 
promises?
  Here is a thought experiment.
  Social Security and Medicare are two of the greatest fragilities we 
have in our society because we are getting older very fast. Remember, 
we have talked about this over and over and over. In about 8\1/2\ 
years, 50 percent of the spending in this body, less interest, will be 
to those 65 and up.
  How do you make the math work? And in an intellectual, lazier time, 
you would get some that would say: Well, we could raise taxes here or 
we can do entitlement reform here.
  Well, it turns out that math really actually doesn't work anymore. 
Now, we actually have to do everything to make the math work. So we 
have been trying to actually sell this concept that it is economic 
growth, and within economic growth it is how we design our tax system, 
how we design trade, how we design our regulatory environment, how we 
actually do population

[[Page H3837]]

stability--and this one actually gets complicated.
  You saw the article in The Wall Street Journal today about what has 
happened to U.S. birth rates. How do you encourage family formation, 
but also how do you deal with the immigration system that maximizes a 
talent-based immigration system to maximize that economic velocity?
  Remember, this is about us having a vibrant enough economy so we can 
keep our promises, but within that, we also have some other issues. How 
do you do what we call labor force participation?
  Countries like Japan and some in Western Europe are dealing with how 
they get those who are older, and if they are healthy and want to, how 
they create incentives to actually say: Are you willing to stay in or 
come back into the labor force?
  We actually have this quirky math here in our country of millennial 
males. In December, we started to see this breakthrough of millennial 
females entering the workforce. We still actually have a whole bunch of 
millennial males who are missing in the workforce who should be there. 
How do we build a society that encourages participation in that labor 
force?
  It turns out, if you actually look at a lot of our economic data, 
from the Joint Economic Committee to the Joint Committee on Taxation, 
when they talk about what are the barriers for us to be able to keep 
growing and continue this actually incredibly robust cycle we are 
having right now, it is capital stock.
  Well, actually, the numbers since tax reform have been dramatically 
healthier than we modeled for, with folks having savings, and that 
savings actually becoming lendable capital. You actually can see that 
in just nationwide interest rates.
  The second fragility that was being written about was labor force 
participation, and we now live in a society where we have hundreds and 
hundreds and hundreds of thousands of jobs and no workers. So who would 
have ever thought a couple years ago you would live in a society with 
more job openings than available workers?
  This is a wonderful problem, but it actually does genuinely become a 
barrier to economic growth, and it is something we have to find a way 
to deal with.
  Part of this is actually really optimistic, though, as we started to 
see in the data over the last several months the number of business 
organizations and others who are taking a chance on people, hiring 
right out of correctional facilities, making accommodations for our 
brothers and sisters who may have a personal impairment, a personal 
handicap; and we actually see that in some of the Social Security 
disability numbers of individuals actually moving into the labor force.
  So, look, this is just our unified theory.
  Today, we are actually going to start to talk about technology, which 
is one of our five pillars, and how aggressive I believe the adoption 
of technology has to be to keep the economic growth going.
  We have done lots of floor time over the last couple months on the 
healthcare technology, the revolution that I believe, our office 
believes, some of the people we work with believe, that is about to 
happen and the ability for you to take care of yourself, the 
wearables--the kazoo you blow into that instantly tells you if you have 
the flu, to the other side of the spectrum, the single shot cure for 
hemophilia--and how do we finance those types of disruptions.
  Wouldn't it be amazing if this body were no longer having the, 
actually, in some ways, insane debate we have had for decades about who 
gets subsidized, who gets to pay in healthcare, and started actually 
talking about what we pay and how we are going to cure our brothers and 
sisters who have chronic conditions? We all know, the 5 percent of 
Americans with those chronic conditions are well over half of our 
healthcare spending.
  So what happens when we actually bring cures to market? And then our 
obligation: How do we finance them so we roll them out as fast as 
possible?
  But today, we are going to talk about another fixation of mine, and 
that is environment issues.
  I wish I had a more delicate way to talk about this. Often, the 
discussion around here is almost Malthusian, saying the pie is only so 
big. If you care about global warming, if you care about greenhouse 
gases, we must shrink the economy; we must get individuals to drive 
less; we must generate less power; we must do these types of things.
  And a decade or so ago, maybe that was a legitimate view, but they 
have missed an entire technology revolution that is going on around us, 
and there should be optimism in this body that, if you are someone who 
cares about greenhouse gases in our national and world environment, the 
revolution is here, and it is a technology one.

                              {time}  1815

  How does this body start to remove the barriers that have slowed down 
the adoption of this clean generation, these alternative generations 
that are in our marketplace? A simple thought: solar generation.
  I hope I get this story, which is coming out of New Mexico, correct. 
They wanted to run a power line to Arizona. They have been working on 
the power transmission lines for a dozen years.
  We have seen the discussion in the upper Midwest. I believe it is 
Iowa, with wind generation, finally figuring it out and saying maybe we 
can run the power lines in the railroad right-of-way because we want 
this power to make it to Illinois. That is where the demand is, and 
over here is where the clean generation is.
  These are things we often don't think about. It is not enough to have 
the technology. How do you get the power to where it needs to be 
consumed? We have never fixed the bureaucratic barriers to moving that 
power.
  It is like some of the discussions we have had in our office. A 
couple of years ago, we did a math experiment. A pipeline in west 
Texas, a pipeline loop that would capture methane so you didn't have to 
flare it off, had a really impressive calculation in U.S. greenhouse 
gas emissions, but it requires permitting a pipeline.
  I need us to remove some of our ideological blinders and think of 
pro-growth, pro-environment, pro-effectiveness. We have to be willing 
to change the permitting system and so much of the litigation and 
bureaucracy that slows these things down.
  We are going to walk through a couple of these boards, just because I 
think there is incredible optimism out there.
  This one I am sort of thrilled with. This is a chart that talks about 
battery efficiency. For those of you that geek out on this stuff with 
me, you probably all saw the article--I think it was April 1--on some 
new solid-state battery technology. It looks like they finally have a 
major breakthrough on what we call power density.
  This chart here, do you see that coming down? That is the cost of 
battery storage. It is a remarkable reduction.
  In Arizona, we have our largest and best utility, Arizona Public 
Service. When you read some of the articles that are going on right now 
with them, the amount of solar that is now in their portfolio, they 
have baseline nuclear and now the holy grail. What happens when you 
live in the desert Southwest as I do? I am blessed to live in the 
Phoenix-Scottsdale area. We produce lots of solar.
  Into the peak of the afternoon, California now produces so much 
alternative solar generation that they can't use it all. On some days, 
they paid Arizona to buy it off them.
  What happens when a company like APS gets really creative and says: 
How do we have solar power at night when, if you live in the Phoenix 
area, you are still running your air-conditioner into the evening? It 
turns out the battery investment is about to bring solar generation 
into the hours it is dark because they will store it. If you design 
that type of battery storage that holds for about 4 hours, you get us 
through the peak.
  It is referred to as the duck curve. If you see the back of a duck, 
we have all this production, and then it collapses. Yet, we still have 
all this demand. How do you cover that gap?
  In the past, we used peaking power plants, fire them up to cover 
those few hours. Now, with what is happening with battery storage, it 
is here.
  Our privately owned utility in Arizona, APS, recently did an RFP or 
RFQ. The numbers that came back

[[Page H3838]]

were remarkably competitive. It is happening.
  When on this floor we discuss global warming, greenhouse gases, and 
what we are going to do in alternative generation, it is here. We just 
need to understand what is happening right around us.
  How do you keep curves like this line continuing? When we are reading 
that there is a breakthrough in battery technology, how do we remove 
barriers so that technology rolls out and becomes part of what we do 
here in the United States and around the world?
  Here is something else. I am blessed to be on the Ways and Means 
Committee. Last year, we updated a tax credit mechanism for carbon 
sequestration. It turns out that we have multiple facilities now that 
were an experiment, but they are growing. They are about to go to 
large-scale commercial where they capture all the carbon.
  This first one, I believe this is the NET Power facility outside 
Houston. It is a natural gas-fired facility, so they are using a 
hydrocarbon and they have no smokestack. They capture not only the 
manmade CO2, but they even capture any other gas throw-off.
  The remarkable design is that they throw a little oxygen. They heat 
it up, and heat it really, really hot. They use that to spin the 
turbines. Then they cool it down and pull out the CO2 and 
then use that to sell for other purposes. They don't have a smokestack.
  This technology is up and running today. The proof of concept is 
done. Now we are heading toward, I believe, a fairly substantial 
expansion in the scale of the facility.
  This was research that has been going on for years. Those of us here 
in this body, a year ago, we updated the carbon sequestration tax 
credits. It is paying off.
  The next one is another facility that is also in Texas. This one was 
really an interesting experiment because, in many ways, it broke 
through a bit of folklore.
  It sits right next to an existing coal-fired generation facility. It 
is a coal-fired carbon capture plant. They are spinning the turbines, 
burning coal, and they capture the carbon.
  It was only 2 or 3 years ago when we had witnesses around here saying 
this sort of technology would not work. It is up and running today.
  There should be joy and optimism around this place because the 
ability to basically say, for the hydrocarbons we have, what happens if 
we can use them to help us through this transition of time and we are 
capturing the CO2? This is wonderful.

  Let's go even further. If we are going to continue the thought 
experiment, you have already seen the United States do some pretty 
remarkable reductions. Most of it has come from natural gas, but there 
have been some pretty remarkable reductions in our CO2 
production.
  A lot of the rest of the world hasn't even come close. For the number 
of new coal-fired plants moving in Southeast Asia, part of the Chinese 
Belt and Road Initiative, they are not going to have the types of 
capture technology we have here in the United States.
  We have to have a worldwide strategy. I am one of those who has been 
really excited because I have been following a facility that is going 
up in Canada. It looks like they have succeeded in the breakthrough of 
mining the air to pull CO2 out of it. Mathematically, we had 
lots of smart people saying this is absurd, that you are not going to 
be able to do it.
  We had a very smart professor in Arizona at Arizona State University 
who had been working on sort of a carbon capture artificial tree. This 
technology is rolling out. It is under production right now, and they 
are moving up to industrial scale. The amazing thing is, they think 
they can do it for about $100 a ton, which is remarkable if you have 
actually played the math game. This is for the new facility.
  What happens if they start to break that curve? If you understand 
that carbon that has been captured, to have the ability to refine it 
and do other things, even make another fuel source out of it?
  The other thing is, think about the article we hopefully all saw last 
week about what the Dutch are doing. The Dutch are basically about to 
take a depleted oil field and take carbon that they have captured and 
shove it back in the ground and sequester it.
  All of a sudden, it is a negative calculation. In this place, in a 
lot of the debate, for a lot of the witnesses we have had in previous 
years, the concept of mining and having negative emissions was 
considered absurd. It is here. The technology is here.
  This is a facility that has, apparently, really smart, really wealthy 
people investing in it because they are so excited about the 
technology. We need to understand that there is optimism out here.
  How do we get ourselves up to date on the cutting-edge technology? 
How do we move it forward and promote it?
  We also need to understand that the theater that we engage in here 
often is not good math. I wish I had a more recent date, but the latest 
we could find is 2015 on this.
  Do you see the yellow bar on the side? That is all the photovoltaic 
solar that rolled out in 2015. It was an impressive year. There were 
fairly aggressive subsidies, State, local, and Federal.
  Do you see the other bar chart next to it? That was all the nuclear 
that went offline that year.
  The reality of it is, in 2015, if you were thinking about power 
generation in the United States that did not produce CO2 and 
you were joyful that this much solar hit the grid, understand that 
almost the equal amount of nuclear came off the grid. We were peddling 
in place.
  We need to be honest about the math, and we need to be honest about 
that baseload nuclear being really, really important if you care about 
this issue.
  There are a couple of quirky things I wanted to throw out here. This 
one is just fun. It is sort of an odd thought experiment.
  In the desert Southwest and mountain Southwest, uranium mining has 
always been a dodgy issue. We need it. We know we need it. We need it 
for everything from our X-rays to refining and refining and refining 
for a nuclear power plant.
  In previous decades, we have been able to take very high grades and 
step it down, but that was some of the excess that was out there after 
the Cold War. That stock has been substantially used up. So what are we 
going to do?
  There is a technology breakthrough of mining seawater for uranium. We 
should be joyful and pushing these technologies. They solve some of the 
moving problem of wanting nuclear generation but where are we going to 
get the uranium? How are we going to step it up? It turns out, even on 
that, the technology has moved forward.
  Look at other little thought experiments. How many of us in high 
school with Popular Science magazine used to get excited about how you 
generate power from ocean waves? It turns out that a new design is 
rolling out. It is sort of a bobbing power generation. It exists now, 
and it works. It is much more robust than anything that has ever been 
designed.
  We should be joyful and trying to promote more of this type of 
technology, but we have to deal with how you bring the power in from 
the shore. All of a sudden, you have a whole other layer of regs, 
rules, and permitting.
  You want clean power. We all want it, but we have to deal with the 
bureaucratic malaise, mess, and blocks that stop us from being able to 
pull this type of new power generation into our communities and our 
country.
  What is exciting about that is that is a type of power generation 
that, if we make it work, it can be all over the world. Being someone 
who, as a younger man, trekked Indonesia, Vietnam, lots of India, and 
Sri Lanka, think about most of the world's population living near 
coastal communities. Wouldn't that be exciting?
  Why aren't we promoting these types of technologies? We need to get 
rid of this Malthusian mindset that the pie is only so big, that we can 
cut it only so many ways, that once you cut it those ways, there is 
never an opportunity for it to grow.
  There are still people who believe that the 1968 book ``The 
Population Bomb'' was real. The only thing they got accurate was the 
author's name.

                              {time}  1830

  We need to understand there is a technology breakthrough happening 
around us, in particularly power generation. But if you want to have a 
revolution--and I am sort of banking on being one of the first people 
to talk

[[Page H3839]]

about this because this one is really disruptive, but it is worth the 
thought experiment.
  For anyone who might be watching or having an interest in this 
Google, ``photosynthesis 40 percent''. Read the complete articles that 
have been written.
  Madam Speaker, you remember your high school biology class talking 
about plants and plant cells having a certain inherent inefficiency, 
where there is a flaw that has been there for millions and millions of 
years where it reaches out and grabs the oxygen molecule when it should 
have grabbed the carbon molecule.
  Through some synthetic biology they fixed the inefficiency. It now 
will reach over and grab the carbon molecule every time. All of a 
sudden it means a 40 percent efficiency in growth.
  So, what happens tomorrow when crops require 40 percent less water, 
40 percent less land, and 40 percent less fuel?
  What does it mean to the world?
  Thought experiment: I need you to take it a step further. World 
agriculture represents 2.2 times the total greenhouse gases of every 
automobile on Earth. Just adopting this plant technology in our 
agriculture equals removing every car off the face of the Earth.
  As this rolls out, how fast would it take to change the seed stock 
around the world?
  There are solutions, and they are not always a linear thought. They 
sometimes require some creativity. Let's face it. We work in a math-
free zone that also lacks creativity. This exists. This is rolling out. 
It is a revolution.
  Yes, it is going to be incredibly disruptive to agriculture around 
the world. It is going to be incredibly disruptive.
  At the same time, what happens when you want to plant trees and you 
can grow them 40 percent more efficiently, and they are just little 
carbon capture machines?
  This is here. We should be excited about it.
  The last one is just more of the thought experiment of trying to say, 
if we really care, we need to stop the theater that seems to be what 
happens behind these microphones and actually understand the problem, 
understand the math, and then focus on that solution. Because often 
around here I believe a solution is a problem for us because the very 
thing that we got elected on, that we love coming and complaining 
about, oh, dear heaven, what happens if we solve it?
  So let's actually talk about something that is part of our pop 
culture right now, but it is a real issue. For someone like myself, I 
grew up scuba diving. I love scuba diving, and I have been blessed to 
do it in a lot of really neat places. Ninety percent of the plastic in 
the world's oceans come from 10 rivers. Eight of these rivers are in 
Asia, and two of those rivers are in Africa.
  Ninety percent of the plastic in the ocean comes from 10 rivers. If 
you give a darn about plastic in the ocean, banning straws in your 
community is theater. It is absurd math. It may make you feel better 
and get you in the local newspaper, but you didn't do anything.
  This body here immediately should figure out what aid programs we 
have, what research, what we can do to go to those 10 rivers that are 
90 percent of the plastic in the ocean and help, instead of complaining 
about it and instead of doing a nice video of going out and saying, I 
am going to pick up plastic off a beach.
  No. If you care, it is 10 rivers, we know where the problem is. If 
you really want to have an impact, go where it is coming from. This is 
a simple example of we talk, talk, talk, talk, and talk around this 
place, but if we solve it, then we don't get to actually talk about it. 
But solving is the most ethical thing we can do as a body.
  Policy that is made with math and policy that is made with facts can 
do amazing things for our country, my 3-year-old little girl, and for 
this world. Policy around here that is done by folklore, by an 
anecdote, and by feelings, time and time again, when we look back, it 
may have been well-intended, but ultimately it hurts people.
  If we get our math right, if we actually understand the underlying 
basis of a problem, figure out an honest solution that continues to 
grow our economy and continues to provide opportunities instead of this 
sort of constant Malthusian echo around here that says that we can't 
grow anymore, we can't do this--they are wrong, and the folks who 
embrace that philosophy have been wrong for centuries now.
  There are technology breakthroughs happening all around us. You 
actually saw the latest one on this. Finally, we have broken the code 
on a plastic that truly breaks down. Let's incentivize that. There are 
solutions. This body is an honorable body, but it needs to become one 
about solutions instead of theatrics.
  Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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