[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 151 (2005), Part 12]
[House]
[Pages 16741-16746]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                       OUR NATIONAL ENERGY POLICY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Poe). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 4, 2005, the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Inslee) 
is recognized for 60 minutes.
  Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, I come to the floor tonight in part of a 
continuing discussion of our national energy policy, and I come 
specifically this evening to address some new science. There have been 
two new developments that are important to America in regard to our 
energy policy. One is some very new emerging science indicating that we 
need to change our energy policy and have one that is much more 
optimistic and visionary; and, two, the results of the energy policy 
bill that has come out of the House that is now in the conference 
committee that unfortunately has fallen very short of what this country 
needs.
  And, third, I will finish with an optimistic note about a discussion 
of how this country can adopt a truly new technologically oriented, 
optimistic, can-do energy policy that can help our country break our 
addiction to Middle Eastern oil, stop global warming, and grow jobs in 
this country with these new energy sources that we need to develop.
  But first I would like to start the discussion by talking about some 
emerging science. There really are three reasons that we need a new 
technologically oriented clean energy policy for America. We clearly 
need to break our addiction on Saudi Arabian oil that is a security 
threat to the United States. That is number one. And we can do it with 
a high-tech future.
  Number two, we have to stop global warming, which is a real threat 
and the science that I will talk about is in that regard. And, three, 
we need to grow our economy by having the next generation of 
technological development to truly have a new breakthrough energy 
policy for this country.
  But I would like to start tonight's discussion by talking about some 
new science that has come in just in the last several weeks that has a 
bearing on our need for a clean energy future in this country. This 
science has been accumulating for the last decade or so; but it is very 
interesting just in the last several weeks, we have had some very 
fundamentally profoundly disturbing scientific revelations that lead to 
the conclusion that our Nation needs to lead the world to a new energy 
future.
  I would like to set the stage, if I can, to talking about some of the 
things that have been known, at least on a gross basis, that are 
happening in the world today. And basically what is happening in the 
world today is in a real sense, it is melting. I want to refer to a 
picture of the Upsala Glacier in Patagonia at the southern tip of South 
America, a picture here taken in 1928. This huge glacier at the tip of 
South America. You can see it here, pretty vast field of ice in 1928. 
Same picture taken in 2004, basically showing the disappearance of this 
enormous multisquare mile field of ice that in this photograph has 
disappeared and now is essentially a bay at the southern tip of South 
America, an incredibly rapid, rapid change since 1928. This picture 
unfortunately is very typical of what is happening in glaciers around 
the world due to the warming of the Earth.
  A picture to show that it is not limited to South America. This is a 
photograph of the good old United States of America, one of my favorite 
national parks, Glacier National Park. On the left it shows a picture 
of the Grinnell Glacier in 1938. You can see it extends down into this 
basin, comes off this cliff, has a rather large area of flat glacier 
down in this area.
  Same picture, same observation point in 1981. You see that this 
extent of the glacier has now totally disappeared. There is a lake 
where the glacier used to be. The Grinnell Glacier is rapidly receding. 
There were 150 glaciers in Glacier National Park a hundred years ago. 
There are about 30 significant ones now. And the scientists project 
that in one of our most treasured jewels of our crown, we will have no 
glaciers of any significance in Glacier National Park 50 years from 
now.
  So, in fact, what we see is that due to a national or a global 
phenomenon, some of the most pristine treasures of America are being 
destroyed by global warming, and so our grandchildren, in hopes of 
having some some day, our great grandchildren will have to say we will 
take you to the park formerly known as Glacier because it will not have 
glaciers anymore.
  The point I would like to make is that this is not just an isolated 
regional occurrence happening at the southern tip of South America or 
in our treasured Glacier National Park. In fact, it is something that 
is happening all over the globe. We now know some information that 
shows the thickness of long-term perennial ice in the north, and we now 
have very, very conclusive evidence that that ice is melting 
significantly.
  This is a graph showing the extent and thickness of the ice cover in 
the Arctic in various locations during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s 
compared to the thickness with observations taken in the last 15 years. 
The blue, for instance, at the North Pole, shows the meters, just under 
4 meters of thickness of ice at the North Pole on average in the 1950s, 
1960s, and 1970s. The brown bars show the thickness in the last 15 
years. You see it has gone down to under 2\1/2\ meters of thickness, 
probably a 40 percent reduction in thickness at the North Pole.
  It is not isolated. In the Nansin Basin there was about 4 meters of 
thickness. It has gone down to about 2.25 meters. In the Eastern 
Arctic, it is even more pronounced, from about 3.4 meters down to about 
1\1/2\ meters. It is the same story all across the Arctic. The Arctic 
is melting. It is becoming less thick by factors of almost half. Just 
under half of the ice in the Arctic is gone as a result of global 
warming, something that we have grown up with, something that 15 years 
ago we could not have imagined could disappear.

                              {time}  2215

  It is not just the thickness and it is not just in the Arctic. If you 
look at Greenland, and Greenland for reasons I will talk about is one 
of the great question marks about what is going to happen to the world 
in the next century. Greenland is an enormous reservoir of ice, 
thousands of feet thick covering the continent. But what has happened 
in 2002, this is a map of Greenland, basically showing where the melt 
has been in 2002 in these red areas. And you see a rather pronounced 
area where you have had this very significant melting along the 
periphery of the Greenland ice sheet.

[[Page 16742]]

  What scientists have found is a very disturbing phenomenon that has 
occurred in Greenland and that is that there have been these fissures 
or crevasses open up that allow this melt water to melt down which 
lubricates the glacier which hastens the seaward spread of the glacier 
which can even accelerate the melting even further. This is of 
tremendous concern. This may get technical but let me notice it.
  This is a hidden time but when it comes to climate in Greenland. The 
reason is off of Greenland is the Atlantic current that operates 
because of the saltiness, what is called the Halcyon Cycle of cold salt 
water sinking that creates this current that warms northern Europe, 
warms the northern Atlantic States of America.
  If this ice melts in Greenland it can shut down the Gulf Current. In 
fact it has done that thousands of years ago. It happened at least once 
before, shut that current down and actually precipitated, and here is 
one of the great ironies, a little ice age in the northern hemisphere. 
That is why the Europeans are terrified of what is happening in 
Greenland today of this ice melting, making the water fresher, possibly 
shutting down this Atlantic current, causing this enormous change in 
our climate factor, a situation in the north Atlantic.
  I want to point out these are not hypotheticals, these are not 
theories. These are not suggestions. These are not abstractions. These 
are facts. The things I have talked about today are direct 
observations. No scientist in the world questions them. They are 
unequivocal and there is no use arguing about them.
  So what we have is a rather pronounced worldwide melting of ice and 
the question now is why is that? Well, there is a clear reason that has 
now been answered by the scientific community from the international 
panel of scientists, of over 1,500 scientists from around the world, 
from every bent, from every philosophical standpoint, geophysicists, 
geologists, physicists, climatologists, you name it, in the largest 
gathering of world scientists ever dealing with a climatic issue.
  They have said with great confidence that human factors are causing 
the climate to change, are a significant factor in that change. The 
National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, and I am 
proud of the United States of America, we are the world's greatest 
scientific authority in the world. Our National Academy of Sciences, 
the people to whom we trust the scientific intellectual treasure trove 
of America, a few months ago came out with a conclusion that human 
activities are a significant cause of the climate change that the world 
is now experiencing. These are not fruitcakes, crackpots or small 
granola eaters. These are the people that helped put us on the moon, 
develop nuclear energy, and basically are the reason the United States 
leads the world today. We need to listen to them when they tell us 
something very dangerous is going on in the world today.
  What is that? It is global warming caused by gasses that we, all of 
us, put into the atmosphere, and I would like to talk about that for a 
moment.
  There is a phenomenon that actually is a really good thing. The 
presence of carbon dioxide is really important for us to live. Right 
now, carbon dioxide, we need to reduce the amount we are putting in the 
air because carbon dioxide and methane and a few other gasses are 
causing this global warming. But do not forget it is actually vital to 
human life on the planet, because carbon dioxide warms the planet. If 
carbon dioxide and water vapor and other things were not in the air, we 
would live on a frozen planet. So having the right amount of carbon 
dioxide is very important. Too much is a problem and that is what we 
are experiencing now.
  The reason this works, carbon dioxide, it is like a greenhouse. You 
have heard of the greenhouse effect. It very much is like a greenhouse. 
Carbon dioxide allows energy in but does not allow energy out. It is 
like a pane of glass. Just like a pane of glass it has a certain 
attribute. And scientists taught me this and I will share with you this 
trick, how this works.
  CO2 is like glass in that it allows light energy to come 
in but not go out. It is like a one-way door. And the reason it is like 
that is that CO2 molecules block ultraviolet rays of light, 
light at a certain spectrum, excuse me, allows it in, allows 
ultraviolet rays from the sun in to the Earth, and that is the warming 
component coming in. But when light bounces back into space, it bounces 
back at a different frequency, at infrared frequencies.
  It holds the energy in and that is good to a certain degree, but the 
problem is now is that the carbon dioxide levels in the air have gone 
up dramatically and so we have a thicker blanket on the Earth trapping 
this energy to a significant degree. Let me talk about now how 
significant that is.
  The numbers I am now going to talk about are also fact. They are not 
abstractions or hypotheticals. This chart basically shows the 
CO2 concentrations in a red line. This is the most 
disturbing red line that I know of in the world today in the long term 
because what it shows is for the last thousand years what the carbon 
dioxide levels were on this red line, and that is expressed in parts 
per million, how many molecules of CO2 per million there are 
in the atmosphere.
  If you see a thousand years earlier it was about 280, 278 parts per 
million on the left side of the chart. We know this because it is 
pretty amazing. We have air from that period, because there are trapped 
air bubbles that were trapped by these glaciers a thousand years ago. 
Scientists drill a core into the ice and they get those little air 
bubbles and they put them on a devices that measures the concentration 
of CO2 and you know exactly how much CO2 there 
was. So this is a very precise measurement.
  So we know a thousand years ago CO2 levels were 278 or 
280. You will see the next hundred years are about the same. The next 
hundred about the same. The next hundred there are some minor 
deviations 500 or 600 years ago. They are staying about the same. Then 
about a hundred years ago we started to see an uptick of CO2 
levels starting to rise. Something happened about a hundred years ago 
or a little more than a hundred years ago causing carbon dioxide levels 
to rise.
  What happened is we started to burn coal and oil. When we burn coal 
it puts carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. So those levels of carbon 
dioxide started to go up, and they kept going up and now they are going 
up at a rate unprecedented in global history. As far as we know this is 
the fastest rate of CO2 acquisition or increase in global 
history. And what we see now is we are now up to about 370, I believe 
it is about 378 parts per million. So we have gone from about 275 a 
thousand years ago and just in the last hundred years we have gone up 
about half of that again up to about 373, 378 parts per million. So we 
were a third or half, depending on how you categorize that number, 
higher than we were and what are called pre-industrial times.
  Now, why is that important? Well, it is pretty obvious. If 
CO2 captures heat and it traps heat and you increase the 
carbon dioxide, you are going to increase the energy that is trapped in 
the Earth and the temperature of the Earth if it is not used in some 
other fashion. And that is indeed what has happened. We see 
temperatures spikes shown in these blue areas. And the blue shows the 
variations and, of course, the temperature does vary to some degree 
from year to year and even decade to decade. But what we see is we have 
had a corresponding increase in temperatures on the Earth as well.
  The scientific community has come together to tie those two together, 
and frankly it makes sense to me that if you increase carbon dioxide by 
a third, as much as you had in pre-industrial times, it is likely you 
are going to trap energy in the Earth, and that is exactly what has 
happened.
  It is not just the last thousand years that this correlation has 
taken place. I want to show a chart which is also observational 
evidence. This is a chart that is very similar. It shows carbon dioxide 
levels again in the red line and temperatures in the blue only it goes 
back 400,000 years. It takes us back further in time. And what we see 
is that 400,000 years ago we were about 250 and

[[Page 16743]]

the red line went down and went up and went down and it went down and 
it went up. And you will notice corresponding changes in the 
temperature at the same time. When carbon dioxide has gone down, the 
average temperatures have gone down. Notice we have had some deviation 
over the 400,000 years.
  Carbon dioxide levels have gone up and down. But also notice this, 
they have never in the last 400,000 years been as high as they are. 
This is the highest they have ever been, number one. And, number two, 
the rate of increase is now on this graph essentially a vertical line. 
The rate of increase of the amount we are putting of carbon dioxide is 
unprecedented in global history.
  So if we look the projection is that if things remain the same we 
will be up to 550 parts per million by 2050, my kids' lifetime. And by 
2100 we will be up to 1,280 parts per million taking a worst case 
projection. So however you slice it, we are going to have somewhere 
between a doubling of carbon dioxide and a quadrupling of carbon 
dioxide in the next hundred years compared to pre-industrial times.
  This is bad news for the Earth because we have a system built on a 
climate regime consistent with somewhere around 300 part per million. 
And our crops, where our fish are, where we live, how much air 
conditioning we use, whether we are comfortable or hotter than heck 
will all change as these CO2 levels skyrocket.
  Now, these are observational issues, observational facts as well that 
I have given you. Obviously, this is a projection but one that is based 
on the best available scientific evidence that we have.
  Now it just in the atmosphere? No, it is not just in the atmosphere. 
One of the categorical things that our own oceanographic folks in the 
United States Government have been studying temperatures in the ocean 
as well because the ocean is a very efficient sink of energy. It is a 
storage battery for energy. What they have found is that ocean 
temperatures as well, and this graph is expressed in heat content 
rather than temperature, and that is watts per year per meters squared.
  The ocean essentially going back from 1993 has had observational 
changes that have gone up dramatically, as this graph would show, to 
2003 as well. And this is actually a piece that had fallen into the 
scientific puzzle to answer this question when we have recently found 
huge amounts of energy essentially stored in the ocean.
  Now, this is a concern because the ocean expands as it gets warmer. 
And if you live on the coastline as I do, the State of Washington, or 
around Florida or anywhere else for that matter, you need to be 
concerned about rising ocean levels, not like a tsunami but on a 
creeping basis, that could inundate significant parts of our coastline 
in the next hundred years. That expanding phenomenon of water is also 
increased by the melting of Greenland. And we have projections of 
anywhere from several centimeters to several meters in the next 100 to 
150 years potentially inundating our coastlines. So we have not just 
the air but the water associated with these problems.
  Now, I want to note how this, the things that have happened in the 
last 4 months that have nailed the nail in the coffin of debate about 
whether or not global warming has been caused by human, in part, by 
human-caused action.

                              {time}  2230

  Basically, I think that one of the major newspapers I was seeing had 
a headline that said ``The Debate is Over: It's Fact.'' And I think 
that pretty much summarizes the state of this situation.
  Arguing about whether or not global warming exists right now is a 
little bit like arguing gravity. It is something you could do several 
hundred years ago, but not today. We have a lot of questions about the 
extent, the rapidity, the rate of change, how much coastline will be 
inundated, how fast the West Nile virus will move north, how fast the 
tundra will melt. There are a lot of questions about how much and how 
fast; but the fact it is occurring, clearly, number one, is true; and, 
second, it is great cause for concern.
  These are not abstractions. Our lives are changing today because of 
this. The ski industry in the Cascade Mountains in Washington 
essentially was shut down this year. My son is a ski patrolman. He 
worked for 3 days this year. There was no snow. And having no snow is 
consistent with what the models predict will become a significant 
problem for us in the future. And it is not just skiing; we get our 
irrigation water from there. We run our power in the Pacific Northwest 
from there. We are experiencing these problems today.
  I talked to a friend of mine who went fishing off the coast of 
Washington. Not many salmon, because the water is six to eight degrees 
warmer than it has ever been. In fact, we are getting species that have 
never been seen off the Washington coast. Tuna. Certain species of tuna 
never seen before off the Washington coast before are now moving north 
along the coastline because of these warming temperatures.
  If you go to Alaska, you will see houses that are falling down 
because the tundra is melting. And that is significant because the 
tundra, and this is what is called a multiplier, a feedback effect, 
when the tundra melts because of warming, it releases enormous amounts 
of methane. Methane gas is frozen and stored in the tundra, and when it 
is released, methane gas itself is a global-climated gas. It is four 
times worse than CO2. So when you melt the tundra, you 
accelerate the rate of change. Just like when you melt the ice, you 
accelerate the rate of warming.
  And that is why the North has warmed up so much, because the ice has 
melted and now the light is absorbed by the dark land rather than 
reflected back into space. It is called the feedback loop that 
accelerates the rate of warming that is going on. So we have the native 
populations in Alaska now having to move their villages because of the 
collapse of their coastline. And they are seeing the day when they may 
not be able to hunt for seals any more because the ice is not coming 
close to the shoreline to support the sea life.
  West Nile virus. You have seen these maps that show where West Nile 
virus has invaded the United States. It is not an accident that some of 
these diseases are moving north that are carried by mosquitoes, because 
those insects are moving north. It is not an accident that you are 
seeing these horrendous fires in the western United States, because the 
trees have no moisture in them and they are also dying because of 
beetle infestations.
  Why did these beetles all of a sudden show up? These trees have been 
there for eons. Why all of a sudden are these forests being killed by 
these insect infestations? Well, one thing we can say is that the 
milder winters allow these insects to live. So our forests are 
significantly affected by this situation.
  The point I am making is that when you grow a garden in Seattle, 
Washington, right now, you notice that flowers are coming up earlier. 
That might be a good thing, but it is not so good a thing if it means 
we are not someday going to be able to grow wheat in southern regions 
of the Midwest because it will not support that type of vegetation. So 
the point is there are real things happening today; and, sadly, we are 
not responding to them.
  Coming back to the pieces of the puzzle that have come into play very 
recently, there has been a lot of debate about global warming; and as 
many things in science do, we have advanced from questions to 
hypotheses to theories to observations to arguments to debates to 
consensus. There is a consensus in the worldwide scientific community 
that humans are now playing a role in climate change that is assuredly 
affecting the globe. And in the last several months, there have been 
several major studies by very well accredited organizations that have 
come up with pieces to that puzzle.
  For instance, in the last 2 weeks, the Royal Academy of Science in 
Britain completed a study of the acidity in our world's oceans. Now, 
the acidity of our world's oceans are affected by the

[[Page 16744]]

amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that is then dissolved in 
the ocean. Because carbon dioxide, through a chemical reaction, can 
make the world's oceans more acidic. They are a little bit alkaline-
based now.
  Now, the Royal Academy of Sciences goes back to Isaac Newton, I 
think. Talk about a prestigious group. How are you going to argue with 
this group? They have concluded that there is a very significant 
increase in the acidity of the world's oceans because of the increased 
carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere. That amount, if I understand 
this correctly, is almost a 30 percent increase in the acidity. It is 
still alkaline, but it is becoming more acidic, and it is going down in 
a PH level from, and my numbers may not be correct, if you want to 
check this, you can go on a Web site called realclimate, it is either 
dot-org or dot-com, which should give you the numbers. But it is a 
logarithmic scale. You can see it has gone from 8.5 to 8.2 or 8.1.
  Now, that does not sound like much, but it is a logarithmic scale, 
which means about a 30 percent change, which is significant. And that 
is significant because life in the ocean, our coral reefs or shellfish, 
or anything that makes calcium-based covering, like shells and corals, 
depends on that level of acidity to allow their life forms to exist.
  Our coral reefs now are in deep trouble because of temperature. We 
have had massive bleaching, which is basically the death of coral 
reefs. They have a life form that builds the reef, and those have died 
just because of the warmer water. But the changes in the acidity 
levels, the PH levels, is also a means of mortality for our reef 
system. Many scientists are very concerned that this could greatly 
upset the balance of life in our oceans associated with anything that 
essentially uses calcium that is affected by the PH levels in the 
water.
  So there is one thing that has changed. The National Academy of 
Sciences, secondly, America's most prestigious organization, and a 
pretty conservative group, not known for wild ideas, in the last 
several months came out and said that they had a consensus that human 
activity is a significant factor in global warming. A significant 
second thing.
  Third thing. A study done of the world's oceans by a third group 
concluded that the salinity of our oceans is changing significantly 
because of this fresh water melt coming off from Greenland. When 
Greenland melts and the Arctic melts, that fresh water goes somewhere. 
It goes in the ocean and changes the salinity levels because that ice 
is melting.
  Fourth. We have seen significant localized temperature differences of 
varying significant degrees, six to eight degrees off the coast of 
Washington, for instance. Those are just things in the last several 
months that are occurring.
  Now, what they add up to is a picture of a changing globe, one that 
we are partially responsible for and one that we do not know exactly 
where it is going. I talked to a scientist down in South America who is 
studying the rain forest; and he is finding that the vines, now this 
was in Panama, and he was one of the first guys that had a crane and 
they put these big cranes up and the crane goes around, they have a 
little basket and they can look at the top of the rain forests. I went 
up in one of those cranes. They cover about 2\1/2\ acres of ground. It 
is amazing being up there.
  This scientist told me that in studying the rain forest, what they 
have found is that the type of vegetation in the rain forest is 
changing dramatically because of the increasing CO2 levels 
in the atmosphere. What we see on this chart at first seems like an 
abstraction; but when you see these CO2 levels going up 
dramatically in the atmosphere, that is not just an intellectually 
interesting point. It means a change in our world.
  What it means in the rain forest, this scientist told me, I think his 
name was George, though I cannot remember his last name, is that 
certain plants metabolize carbon dioxide better than others and they 
grow faster than others. What they found is the parasitic plants, the 
plants that basically use other plants for a structure, like vines, and 
the vines are called lianas, and the lianas are increasing their rate 
of growth explosively and are sort of taking over the canopy of the 
rain forests.
  So when we went up there, you could see these places where the canopy 
of the rain forest was just covered with vines. He told me that 25 
years ago that was simply not the case. So what we are seeing is major 
changes in vegetation patterns in certain places associated with carbon 
dioxide as well.
  So what do we conclude from this? Well, I think that we need to 
exercise common sense. What this scientist told me, and I thought his 
characterization of this problem was one of the most sort of 
commonsense ones I have heard, he said we are now engaged in the 
largest experiment in human history, and we are the guinea pigs. And he 
meant by that that this whole global warming experiment that we are 
conducting in the world, we are the ones likely to be affected by it in 
ways we cannot fully predict.
  In other words, we cannot fully predict the year we will not be able 
to grow wheat in the southern Midwest. We cannot predict that. We 
cannot predict the year we will not be able to power our electrical 
turbines in the Pacific Northwest because of the lack of snowpack, or 
the year that we will have a 20 percent reduction. We cannot predict 
when that will happen. We cannot predict the year that malaria will 
spread significantly north in various environments. We really cannot 
predict when that will be. We cannot predict when we will have to move 
the villages in the Arctic because of the receding shoreline. We cannot 
predict the dates those things will happen, but we are running this 
large craps game about what we are doing with our Earth by continuing 
in this course of putting carbon dioxide in the air in this steady 
curve.
  And now I am going to come to what this Congress has to do with this. 
What the United States House of Representatives, and there are 435 
people who work here, 100 over in the Senate, and there is one 
President and one Vice President, what that group has decided pretty 
much, at least the majority at the moment, what they have decided is 
that this explosion of carbon dioxide, this enormous ramp-up of carbon 
dioxide that has never happened before in the Earth's history as far as 
we know, that is having these prolific changes on life forms across the 
world is just hunky-dory and that we can just take our chances.
  This U.S. Congress has decided to just roll the dice and let it 
happen, no matter what is going to happen. We do not have either the 
insight or the instinct or the willingness to do anything about this 
problem. And I stand here tonight to say that anybody that spends just 
a few minutes, just a few minutes acquainting themselves with the 
recent science on this issue will come away with the conclusion that 
inaction on this problem is massively irresponsible to our 
grandchildren and our great grandchildren, and in some parts of the 
world to ourselves.
  That is the situation that is happening in the U.S. Congress because 
we do not pay attention enough to the science that has shown the 
conclusion that we have a problem on our hands. This Congress has done 
nothing about this problem. The President is not willing to deal with 
this problem. Disappointing. He ran for office saying he was going to 
support a carbon dioxide cap so we could put at least some limitation 
on the carbon dioxide we put out. He ran for President telling the 
American people he would do that, and he has not done a single thing 
about global warming in the 5 years he has been in office.
  There is no excuse for that dereliction of duty. None. He owes us 
better. And we are capable of doing better because we are the smartest, 
most technologically oriented people in the world. We owe ourselves and 
our kids a solution to this problem.

                              {time}  2245

  Now what has the President said he was going to do about this 
problem. Here is what he said he is going to do.

[[Page 16745]]

He says he is going to have a voluntary program where he will ask major 
players to volunteer to solve this problem.
  Well, you can run a PTA bake sale on a voluntary basis, but you 
cannot reorient the energy policy of America on a volunteer bake sale. 
It is a joke. It is a sham. We would rather have the President just 
admit that he refuses to do anything about this problem. That would be 
straightforward. But this volunteerism is nothing but a scam. We need 
to act. We need to do some common-sense things to deal with this 
CO2.
  Why am I suggesting we have a cap on carbon dioxide. The reason is 
what we have found is when we cap these pollutants, it works. We have 
had what is called a cap-in-trade system now for over a decade for 
sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide. That has been very successful. It 
has limited those two pollutants without damaging our economy one hoot. 
And yet this pollutant, the one that is going off the charts, the 
President refuses to do anything about. We need a CO2 cap to 
lead us in ways that we can reduce our contributions of CO2.
  Now there are some other common-sense things we can do. 
Unfortunately, we have not done them. We can improve the mileage we get 
from our vehicles. The reason we know that is we have done this. We 
know that Congress can effectively increase the mileage of our 
vehicles. If you look at this graph that shows the mileage our vehicles 
have gotten, as we increase our mileage, we reduce our CO2 
emissions.
  In 1975, our cars got 14 miles to a gallon. And then the Congress and 
the President acted in a bipartisan to increase mileage. In 1984 it got 
up to 24.5 miles a gallon. Trucks also went up. The average almost 
doubled. We almost doubled our mileage because we decided to do so. We 
took some common-sense measures to increase our mileage.
  Then in 1985 the Federal Government went to sleep and the Federal 
Government refused to take any further action to increase mileage, and 
mileage went down. The average mileage of our total fleet, cars and 
trucks, had gone down in 1985. Since 1985, we have mapped the human 
genome, we have invented the Internet and applied it to great usage, 
and yet the mileage manufacturers provide us has gone down since 1985. 
We can do better than this.
  I am 6 feet 2 inches, 200 pounds and driving a hybrid car that gets 
in excess of 40 miles a gallon. It is safe, it is comfortable. We can 
do better.
  If we inflated our tires to the manufacturer recommended level, we 
would save more gas than we will ever get out of ANWR if we destroy 
that area through drilling. So there are things that we can do.
  I want to suggest a solution, and that is we can pass the New Apollo 
Energy Project, a bill that I have introduced with other Members of the 
House. The New Apollo Energy Project will have an aggressive 
technologically based way to solve this problem, and it will do that by 
using what America is great at, which is our creative genius. And the 
reason we call it the New Apollo Energy Project, it is to kindle the 
spirit that we had when John F. Kennedy stood right behind me on May 9, 
1961, and he challenged America to go to the moon in 10 years and 
return a man safely. That was very daring. We had not even invented 
Tang yet, and our rockets were blowing up on the launch pad. But he did 
it because President Kennedy understood one thing about the American 
character, he understood that Americans are genius when it comes to 
innovation, and that Americans love a challenge.
  We need now a bold vision and a challenge to America to invent our 
way out of this difficulty, to invent the new clean, renewable energy 
sources that can help solve this problem, to invent the new, more 
efficient cars, refrigerators, air conditioning units, building, 
houses, you name it, in a way to use energy more efficiently.
  We know if we do that, and the New Apollo Energy Project will do 
that, we will harness the talent of America to get that done. The 
reason that we are suggesting this is not just global warming, there 
are two things that the New Apollo Energy Project will do.
  Number one, it will break our addiction to Middle Eastern oil. We 
know that the energy bill that passed the House, a sordid affair that 
gave 94 percent of $8 billion, 94 percent of the bill that this Chamber 
passed, I voted against, 94 percent of the $8 billion of taxpayer money 
went as a direct subsidy to the oil and gas industry, to the most 
profitable industry in America, to an industry that is getting over $60 
a barrel for fuel.
  Hooking our wagon to the oil and gas industry to try to drill our way 
out of this problem is simply doomed for failure. The reason it is 
doomed for failure is that the oil is not here, it is elsewhere. We 
only have 3 percent of the world's oil supply, but we generate 25 
percent of the world's CO2 production. The oil simply is not 
here. Dinosaurs went somewhere else to die, actually leafy vegetation 
material. They went mostly to the Mideast, to Venezuela and Indonesia 
and off the coast of Norway, but not here. So we are chasing a losing 
proposition here to try to drill our way out of this problem.
  Besides, even if it was here, we would be competing with China now 
with this huge new economy to compete for this new resource. No, this 
is a failure just waiting to happen. So this 94 percent solution is 
money that is not going to solve our energy problems.
  The New Apollo Energy Project, by contrast, will say we do not have 
to think about what the Saudi Royal House thinks about our public 
policy. When we make a decision on the Middle East, we will be free of 
that. We will not have to face the prospect of our sons and daughters 
dying in the Middle East again. We have lost enough. Now it is time to 
get serious about this, and an oil and gas driven policy is not a 
serious energy policy, it is a sham.
  But this New Apollo Energy Project will have a third and very 
important benefit. It will grow jobs in this country. You have to ask 
yourself why are we letting the jobs to build fuel efficient cars go to 
Japan. Those cars should be union jobs here in the United States. Why 
are we letting jobs go to Germany for solar cell production, they 
should be here in the United States.
  The New Apollo Energy Project is as American as apple pie because it 
means American jobs. Two causes for optimism in that regard, and a lot 
of people think when we talk about new energy that somehow it is just 
pie in the sky, but they really have not paid attention to look at the 
science that is going on in new energy.
  What we find, and these are graphs of the prices of renewable energy 
systems in the last 30 years or so. What we see is that all of these 
new technologies have come down in price dramatically. We look at wind 
here that in 1980 was 30 cents a kilowatt hour, is down to about 4, 5, 
6, and is projected to continue to go down.
  In my neck of the woods, wind is a huge new growth industry. We are 
putting in North America's largest wind farm in southeast Washington, a 
utility very close to where I live. It is essentially market based in a 
lot of places.
  We see photovoltaics have gone by a factor of about 5 in the last 30 
years, from 100 cents a kilowatt hour down to about 22 now and 
projected to go further.
  Biomass has gone from 12 down to 7 or 8; solar thermal has 
experienced the same thing.
  What we have found is while oil has been going up, renewables have 
been coming down, and renewables are somewhat more expensive today, 
most of them still, than fossil fuels. But that is not going to last 
long because China is coming on, and if you have seen what has happened 
to the price of oil, we are going to be in an international bidding war 
with the Chinese economy, and that price is going to continue to go up. 
We have something cheaper in these technologies which have become more 
cost based because they have become more efficient, and we use scales 
of economy. Every time we build one of these, the price goes down.
  Let me show you the house of Mr. and Mrs. Alden Hathaway in Virginia. 
It was built for about $365,000. A little more expensive than a normal 
house,

[[Page 16746]]

although not much. By using solar panel roof, passive energy, an in-
ground heat pump, decent design, net energy consumption used by fossil 
fuels is zero. Zero.
  It is a comfortable home. I have seen it. It would not stand out in 
any neighborhood, a place to be proud of, and has zero energy 
consumption. And the secret is they have net metering. When the sun is 
shining, and even through clouds it works, certain levels of clouds. It 
feeds electricity back into the grid and their meter runs backward. You 
sell your energy back to the utility, and they have to pay you for it 
when we pass my bill, the New Apollo Energy Project.
  The point I have is this is real. It is out there today. It is 
happening. I read in this morning's newspaper about a fellow developing 
a senior citizen housing complex with essentially the same technology 
in Thurston County, Washington. This is with us. All this Congress has 
to do is to listen to the science, be optimistic about American 
technological development, and have just a little bit of common sense 
to act in a positive way in the future.
  Unfortunately, it has not done that yet, but I stand tonight to say 
that with this emerging science, with the clarity that has emerged 
about the threat of global warming, with our positive view about the 
confidence we have in America's technological ability, we are going to 
solve this problem. It is doable, it is achievable. The New Apollo 
Energy Project will help to do that.

                          ____________________