[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 17]
[Senate]
[Pages 22731-22734]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                        FAA REAUTHORIZATION ACT

  Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, last evening the Senate passed a 3-month 
extension--until December 31--of the Federal Aviation Administration 
reauthorization bill, and I wanted to mention a word about that.
  The 3-month extension is necessary because the authorization ends at 
the end of this month, September 30. This is such an important issue, 
so I hope we are able to find time on the floor of the Senate--I have 
talked to the majority leader, Senator Reid, about finding time on the 
floor to consider the FAA reauthorization bill, which includes 
important provisions to modernize our air traffic control system.
  Let me talk about the process for getting a bill considered on the 
floor just for a moment. It has been difficult here to get things done 
on the floor of the Senate. Sometimes we have had cooperation, 
sometimes not. Sometimes on very noncontroversial things we have had to 
file cloture just on the motion to proceed. It takes 2 days to get 
cloture, have a vote on cloture, and then the minority has insisted on 
30 hours postcloture. So you have to take the better part of a week 
just to get to a piece of legislation, even the noncontroversial ones. 
So my hope would be that perhaps we could get more cooperation 
particularly when it comes to passing the FAA Reauthorization Act.
  The FAA Reauthorization Act is critically important because we need 
to modernize the air traffic control system. I chair the Aviation 
Subcommittee, and that is why I wish to bring this bill to the floor, 
along with my colleague, Senator Rockefeller, and move rather rapidly 
on the issue of modernization of the air traffic control system.
  We are still flying using ground-based radar systems that have been 
around for a long time. Previously, I described on the floor of the 
Senate that when flying began in this country and we started to haul 
mail by airplanes, planes could only fly during the day when the pilot 
could see. Then eventually they began flying at night by building big 
bonfires 50 or 100 miles out so the pilot could see the direction they 
were supposed to head. Then, with more sophistication, we developed 
ground-based radar and we put transponders in an airplane which send 
signals to a radar on the ground, and that radar then puts a little 
signal on a screen that says: Here is where the airplane is. Well, that 
is all fine, except in most cases it's actually: This is where the 
airplane was. Because for the next 7 seconds that jet is elsewhere. It 
is moving. So you have a single dot on a ground-based radar system, and 
the transponder says, here is where that jet airplane is, but it is 
really not there anymore. It is there for just a nanosecond, and during 
the rest of the sweep of the radar that airplane is somewhere else.
  We need to go to an entirely new system. Europe and the United States 
are both moving to a system that uses GPS so that we know exactly where 
that airplane is. It is a much more effective system and a safer 
system. It will save energy. It will allow airlines to fly more direct 
routes, so it will save time for passengers. It will be better for the 
environment because planes will be using less energy. All of that is 
true. But we can't get there until we pass the provisions that move the 
FAA forward with modernization that are part of the FAA reauthorization 
bill.
  I and others have worked on this for a long time. We extended the 
existing

[[Page 22732]]

reauthorization last evening until the end of the year, but between now 
and then we need to pass the reauthorization bill through the Senate so 
that we can conference it with the House and get a bill to the 
President.
  It also includes provisions dealing with safety. For example, I have 
chaired two hearings on the tragic accident in Buffalo, NY, with the 
Colgan Air flight in which many lives were lost. We have included in 
this legislation issues dealing with the FAA and the issues of pilot 
fatigue, crew rest, pilot training, and other issues dealing with 
safety that are very important.
  We also include the Passengers' Bill of Rights, which some of my 
colleagues have worked on for a long while. I included that in the mark 
that has now passed the Commerce Committee. It includes, for example, 
one little piece in the Passengers' Bill of Rights says that if you are 
on an airplane and you are stranded someplace on a tarmac, they can't 
keep you more than 3 hours without being required to take you back to 
the terminal. We have had examples--tragic examples, I should say--of 
people being stuck on an airplane for way too many hours and not 
allowed to come back to the terminal. Well, we put a provision in here 
dealing with that which relates to the Passengers' Bill of Rights.
  My point is this: This is important to passengers, it is important to 
the airlines, and it is important to our country to get this done and 
get it done right. My fervent hope is that we will get time on the 
schedule and get it through the Senate so that we can get it to 
conference with the House of Representatives and see if we can get done 
what should have been done 2 years ago. It is called the Air Traffic 
Control Modernization Program. It is part of the FAA Reauthorization 
Act, and it is very important for this country.


                                 Energy

  Mr. President, I want to talk just for a moment about energy. I know 
we have been spending a lot of time dealing with health care. I believe 
the Finance Committee is meeting and working on a health care bill, as 
we speak, and that is important to continue that work. Another 
important issue for the Senate to address is energy. I want to talk 
just for a moment about the need for an expanded energy program in this 
country and a new set of energy policies. Just as we have reported an 
FAA reauthorization bill, we have also reported a bill out of the 
Senate Energy Committee. I worked with Senator Bingaman and others on a 
bipartisan bill, and we have reported a very important bill out of the 
Energy Committee which is now on the Senate calendar. If we can pass it 
in the Senate and House, resolve the differences, and have the 
President sign it, this legislation can move us in the direction toward 
addressing the climate change. But it also makes us less dependent upon 
foreign energy, thus improving our energy and our national security 
situation.
  Here are the issues. We produce millions of barrels of oil every 
single day by sucking it out of our planet. We stick little straws in 
the dirt, and we suck oil out at a rate of about 85 million barrels a 
day. Think about a globe in your office or someplace at school and look 
at where we are relative to the size of the planet. Even though we 
produce 85 million barrels a day for the world, one-fourth of it comes 
to this patch called the United States of America. We use one-fourth of 
all the oil that is sucked out of our planet every single day, so we 
have a prodigious appetite for energy.
  That is not surprising. Everything we do uses energy, and we are an 
advanced industrial country. We get up in the morning and turn on a 
switch and the light goes on. We plug in an electric razor and shave. 
We use it for the coffee maker or for the toaster by using electricity. 
We open the refrigerator which keeps the food cool all the time. We get 
in our cars, put a key in the ignition and ignite an engine with 
probably 250 horses to take us to work or to get a doughnut and coffee. 
We are unbelievable users of energy, and we do not even think much 
about it. But if tomorrow morning we awoke and none of that energy were 
available, our lives would change in a dramatic way.
  Now think of this: Although we need one-fourth of 85 million barrels 
of oil today, brought to this country, almost 70 percent of the oil we 
use is produced elsewhere. Some of it is produced in countries that do 
not like us very much. Then in addition to nearly 70 percent being 
produced elsewhere, about 70 percent of the oil in this country is used 
in the transportation sector. So those are the elements of things that 
ought to concern us. How do we deal with all of this?
  What we need to do is produce more energy at home. We also need to 
produce different kinds of energy. I happen to believe we ought to 
produce virtually every kind of energy to the extent that we can do so, 
and do it with an eye and understanding on how that impacts climate 
change issues. We should be attending to and producing more renewable 
energy--including wind, solar, biomass and other renewable resources. 
Developing renewables will move us in the direction of addressing 
climate change.
  So here is what we have done in the Energy Committee. We have 
produced a piece of legislation that maximizes the use of renewable 
energy.
  Here is a picture of wind turbines. They are plentiful in my State 
and in many other States as well. We are taking energy from the wind 
and producing electricity. When we put up a turbine, it can blow for 10 
years, 20 years or 50 years so that we are getting energy from the 
wind. It is renewable, increasingly reliable, carbon free, and very 
protective of the environment.
  By producing electricity from the wind, solar or biomass resources, 
we are capable of extending and expanding our energy supply and in many 
ways, making us less dependent on foreign oil or energy that comes from 
foreign sources. This is especially true as we work to electrify our 
transportation system.
  One of the things we did with respect to wind energy is, for the 
first time in the Senate Energy bill, establish a national renewable 
electricity standard. We said we believe there ought to be a 
requirement of how much of our nation's electricity should come from 
renewable energy. So we have a 15-percent requirement. When we get a 
bill to the Senate floor, we ought to increase it to a 20-percent 
requirement where 5 percent is for energy efficiency and 15 percent is 
for renewable energy. I would like to see if we can strengthen that 
standard which came out of the Energy Committee. But at least the first 
renewable electricity standard of 15 percent is in the committee passed 
bill. It is very important that we a starting point for where we want 
to be.
  There is this old saying: If you don't care where you are, you are 
never lost. That is very true for public policy in this country. If you 
don't care where you are, then you don't set goals. But we should set 
goals because we are unbelievably and dangerously dependent on energy 
from other countries. That doesn't make any sense to me, so we must 
maximize the production of renewable energy.
  The problem is where the Sun shines or where the wind blows and where 
we can produce electricity from the wind and the Sun may not 
necessarily be where we most need the energy. What we need to do is 
produce energy where we can and move it to the load centers where they 
need the electricity. So we have a transmission piece in this energy 
legislation which is very important because it essentially will create 
an interstate highway of transmission capability to maximize the 
production of renewable energy and move it to where it is needed, the 
load centers.
  We cannot seem to produce or build transmission capabilities at this 
point to the scale we need it. We have--we built 11,000 miles of 
natural gas pipelines in the last 9 years in this country to move 
natural gas, but we have only been able to build 668 miles of 
interstate, high voltage transmission lines. We just can't get it done. 
There are 100 different ways for people to say no. We put a 
transmission piece in this legislation which will move us down the road 
to maximize the production and the movement of renewable energy. This 
is a positive step for this country.
  Here is a chart that describes what has happened with domestic 
production

[[Page 22733]]

and use of petroleum in our country from 1981 to today. It is pretty 
clear from this graph what has happened, and this ever growing gap is 
what makes us dangerously dependent on foreign oil. We use a lot of 
oil, and we are unbelievably dependent on foreign oil. As I indicated, 
some of it is from countries that don't like us very much, and that is 
not smart at all.
  The Energy bill passed in the Energy Committee awaiting floor action 
is legislation that contains an amendment I successfully offered that 
would open access to the eastern gulf of Mexico which is closed for oil 
and gas production. It would open it for oil and gas production. That 
is very important because there are substantial amounts of production 
available to us in this region.
  Down in the Cuban waters we have this misguided embargo against Cuba 
for the last 50 years that has not worked. It continues, and at the 
same time, the Cubans are opening their waters for oil and gas 
production to companies based in other countries. We understand there 
is about a half million barrels a day for production available in these 
waters. The Spanish are there, the Indians are there, Canada is there--
they are all seeking to develop the resources, but American oil 
companies can't because of that embargo. That makes no sense to me, and 
we ought to remove that embargo, in my judgment. But the point is, the 
bill I have just described actually opens a substantial area for 
additional oil and gas production that came from an amendment passed 
with bipartisan support.
  Here is another chart describing where we get our energy. It includes 
coal, petroleum, natural gas, hydroelectric, renewables, and nuclear. I 
happen to think to the extent that we can, even as we take action to 
protect our environment, we ought to consider all types of energy to 
make us less dependent on foreign energy.
  Coal--I recognize, by using coal to produce energy, we release carbon 
into the atmosphere. That is difficult when we are dealing with a need 
to address climate change. In the appropriations committee I chair on 
energy and water, what we are doing is making sure we are investing in 
finding ways to remove the carbon from fossil energy. I believe it can 
be done. I believe one day we will have a near-zero emission, coal-
fired, electric-generating plant.
  I think we ought to do a lot of everything and do it well. I believe 
there are so many exciting things going on that will alter our future, 
if we just keep investing in them and make them happen.
  I want to show a chart that is kind of a Byzantine chart, actually. 
This might not mean much to anybody at first glance, but this is algae. 
It is single-cell pond scum. We have all seen in very common places, 
especially those of us who grew up in rural areas. In a pond when the 
Sun shines we will see this film develop, this green slimy stuff in a 
pond. It is pond scum, right? Algae.
  When I became chairman of the Energy and Water Appropriations 
Subcommittee, I restarted the algae research work that had been 
discontinued for 15 years. Why would we research algae? Here is why: 
Because if CO2 is a problem in coal-burning or fossil-fired 
plants, what we can do with it is take the CO2 from the 
facility and feed it into a big old greenhouse. We can grow algae 
because algae grows with sunlight, water, and CO2. We get 
rid of the CO2 by feeding it into and growing the algae, 
then harvesting the algae and producing a diesel fuel. We take the 
CO2, which is a problem because we want to protect the 
atmosphere.
  There is research going on right now in which I believe Exxon and Dr. 
Craig Venter are working on for new algae research. They are taking the 
algae and excreting the lipids which, with little manipulation, would 
then become petroleum projects. Dr. Venter was also one of several 
leading scientists involved in the research to map the human genome 
which gave us the first owners manual for the human body. Dr. Venter 
and Dr. Francis Collins are remarkable Americans. He is now doing 
research in which people are trying to determine how to create 
synthetic microbes that would consume coal and, in the process of 
consuming coal, leave methane gas behind.
  Isn't that interesting? Isn't it something, if we could have 
synthetic microbes turn coal into gas by consuming the coal? I don't 
know what the future holds for all of this. I do know this. The Energy 
bill we have passed in our Energy Committee builds on a lot of these 
interesting and important ideas, and I believe does it well. While I 
haven't mentioned nuclear, there are loan guarantee funds and other 
incentives that Congress has already passed to try to build some of the 
first few nuclear projects, which obviously don't produce carbon.
  I think it is important that we recognize we should do a lot of 
things, do them well, make us less dependent on foreign oil, protect 
the environment, and provide greater national security and energy 
security as a result. That is the point of it all.
  The reason I have described all this--I come from a State that 
produces a lot of energy and I am on the Energy Committee. I am the 
second ranking Democrat on the committee. I am also chairman of the 
appropriations subcommittee that funds all energy and water projects, 
and that is a great opportunity for me because I come from a State that 
produces a lot of energy. We have virtually every form of energy. In 
the western half of that State, we produce a lot of oil and natural 
gas. We produce a lot of coal. We also have a great deal of wind and 
biomass. In fact we have more wind than any State in America. According 
to the Department of Energy, we are the Saudi Arabia of wind.
  Also, we have a plant that uses lignite coal and produces from 
lignite coal synthetic natural gas. It is the only plant of its kind in 
the United States. We take CO2 from that facility, put it in 
a pipeline to inject into the oil fields in Canada. We are taking 
CO2, sequestering it, selling it, using it in enhanced oil 
recovery because a very small amount of oil a new oil field is actually 
brought up until we use additional means to move it. We can do that by 
injecting it with CO2 which stays in the ground. Then we can 
bring up a lot more oil. We are doing all these things.
  The reason I wanted to talk about this today is we need to get that 
Energy bill to the floor of the Senate, get it passed, get it to the 
President for signature. It is a significant first step in the 
direction of addressing climate change but is also a significant step 
in making us less dependent on foreign oil.
  Senator Bingaman and Senator Murkowski, the chairman and ranking 
member of the Energy Committee, worked with me and other Members for 
many months to produce this legislation. Some say let's merge it with 
climate change.
  We should put this energy bill and climate change together and bring 
it to the floor for a debate. Well, you know what. I have said I think 
it would be far more beneficial, as a matter of practical policy, to 
bring the Energy bill to the Senate floor, pass it, put that progress 
in the bank because it is a significant stride toward addressing 
climate change, then follow that up with a climate change bill behind 
that.
  I know some have interpreted my remarks as saying I do not support 
climate change legislation. Well, I have already spoken on the floor to 
clarify that point. I do not support a cap-and-trade bill as it relates 
to the market trade portion of cap and trade.
  I do not intend and do not have any interest in consigning the price 
of energy tomorrow to the decisions in a $1 trillion carbon securities 
market that will be populated by investment banks and speculators today 
that are going to tell us what they believe the price of carbon should 
be tomorrow.
  I have had way too much acquaintance with markets that are broken and 
markets that do not work in recent years to believe that is what we 
ought to do. I do believe there is something significant happening with 
respect to our climate changing. I believe this country should take, at 
a minimum, a series of important ``no regret'' steps in addressing 
those issues.

[[Page 22734]]

  But I have great difficulty with those who believe we should do the 
cap-and-trade bill when you talk about carbon marking trading, given 
the experience we have had in recent years in other markets. We have 
discovered that time on the Senate floor is evaporating quickly because 
health care is taking longer than one would have expected.
  We must also do financial reform. I would hope that financial reforms 
come after health care. My own view is we do financial reform first 
this year because that would have established the foundation by which 
people could have confidence in the system that steered this country's 
economy into the ditch. I have expressed this to the President.
  But I understand health care is a very serious problem as well. So we 
need to consider health care and financial reform. I also hope we can 
consider the issue of FAA reauthorization; all these things and others 
are needed to be done before the end of the year. The majority leader 
understands all of that, is working very hard to try to fit the pieces 
of that puzzle into the time available.
  My only point for expressing the point on the floor is that I would 
very much hate to lose some important work on energy that affects 
virtually every form of energy, including energy efficiency, the first 
ever national RES, more transmission, additional access to oil, and 
more that will make us less dependent on foreign oil and start to 
address climate change.
  All of that is part of a plan that I think is a plan that will 
advance the interests of this country. So my hope is that in the coming 
weeks, as we think through and talk through what should be our agenda 
in the near future, my hope is we can find a way to move these 
important parts of an energy bill.
  This, I think, should represent a significant opportunity for 
bipartisanship at a time when there has been precious little. Too 
little bipartisanship exists right now. But if there is any area in 
which most of us would believe our country's best interests reside, it 
has to be producing more energy and doing it the right way, protecting 
our environment at the same time. That is very much what this Energy 
bill strives to do.
  It will advance our country's interests, and so my hope is that when 
the calendar turns for the new year, we will have sent to the 
President's desk an energy policy that has a lot to commend in it for 
this country's future. I visited personally with the President, the 
Majority Leader and others about this idea and commit to working with 
them on it.
  I yield the floor and I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Kaufman). The clerk will call the roll.
  The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. DORGAN. I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum 
call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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