[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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