[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 19]
[Senate]
[Pages 26245-26247]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                             CLIMATE CHANGE

  Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, this is the week of two more 1,000-page 
bills. The House has produced a nearly 2,000-page health care bill 
which we are all looking forward to reading. The Senator from New 
Mexico and I are members of the Environment and Public Works Committee, 
and this week we have been spending almost all day each day on a nearly 
1,000-page bill on climate change.
  As I said on Tuesday when the bill was presented, I have no problem 
acknowledging the problem, but I do have a problem with the proposed 
solution. The National Academies of Science of 11 major industrialized 
countries, including the United States, have said that climate change 
is real and that humans are causing most of the recent warming. If fire 
chiefs with the same reputation said my house was likely to burn down, 
I would buy some fire insurance. I would buy fire insurance that 
worked. But I wouldn't buy insurance so expensive that I couldn't pay 
my mortgage or I couldn't pay my hospital bill. That is my concern 
about the solution that is a part of the Kerry-Boxer bill which we have 
been working on this week.
  The Kerry-Boxer bill is a high-cost clean energy plan that will make 
it hard for Americans to support their families.
  When the Boxer-Kerry cap-and-trade Bill is put together with the 
Energy Committee's Renewable Electricity Standard, it will be even 
bigger. It will be a combination of an economy-wide cap and trade and 
narrowly defined energy mandate. It will be a 1,000-page-plus bill of 
taxes, mandates, and surprises. But some things will not be a surprise.
  We have heard this week a good deal of detail about the costs. At a 
time of 10 percent unemployment in America--and that is likely to 
continue for a while--it will impose a new national energy tax that 
will raise utility bills and send manufacturing jobs overseas looking 
for cheap energy. It will collect hundreds of billions of dollars each 
year from American taxpayers for use in a Washington slush fund for 
politicians to play with. Already we have corporations all over the 
country with their hands out looking for their share.
  The economy-wide cap-and-trade, as has been said before our committee 
by very distinguished scientists, will be ineffective against fuel. 
Fuel is 30 percent of our carbon emitted today, which is a contributor 
to global warming. So the idea is that we put cap and trade on carbon, 
and it raises the price of fuel. But the testimony before our committee 
has been that it doesn't do much to reduce carbon emissions because 
even the large price increase in gasoline, for example, which will be 
passed on to those of us who drive cars, trucks, and fly in airplanes, 
would not be enough. It will be enough to cause a lot of pain, but it 
would not change much human behavior and reduce the amount of fuel 
consumed. The net result is higher prices but the same emissions.
  The EPA has done a quick look at this nearly 1,000-page bill. Its 
conclusion is that its costs and benefits are much like the Waxman-
Markey bill passed by the House of Representatives a few months ago. We 
know what people have said about that bill. President Obama's Budget 
Director, Peter Orszag, said in March that by giving the allowances to 
industry for free--instead of auctioning them--would result in the 
``largest corporate welfare program in history.'' That is President 
Obama's Budget Director.
  The Congressional Budget Office said that the House-passed Waxman-
Markey bill would cut up to 3.5 percent of our GDP by 2050. In other 
words, it will make us poorer than we would otherwise be. The Brookings 
Institute said the cost is likely to be $300 billion annually by 2030. 
Former Senator Wirth of Colorado has criticized the bill as a cap-and-
tax revenue raiser and said instead, it ought to focus primarily on 
utilities. James Hansen at NASA, who feels passionately about climate 
change and believes it is a problem, as I do, says the bill is less 
than worthless.
  So taken altogether, the strategy of this bill to deal with climate 
change is, taxes, expensive energy, and mandates, plus the President's 
goal of a national windmill policy--a combination of subsidies and 
incentives and mandates that would have as a goal making 20 percent of 
our electricity from giant wind turbines.
  Mr. President, I believe our dream for energy ought to be just the 
reverse. We should want large amounts of reliable, clean, low-carbon, 
or carbon-free energy, but it should be cheap energy not deliberate 
high-cost energy because that is the way we create jobs and avoid 
hardships for American families. Our dream throughout our existence in 
this world has been that someday we would have cheap, energy for the 
people of the world so they could get out of poverty. We are fortunate 
in this country. We are just 5 percent of the people in the world, and 
we have 25 percent of the wealth, and we use about 25 percent of the 
energy. We should be leading the way and not have a policy that 
deliberately raises the price of energy. We ought to deliberately lower 
it.
  So before we deliberately embark on a program to send manufacturing 
jobs overseas, which this unquestionably will--if you work in an auto 
plant or auto supplier plant or cement plant or aluminum plant, if this 
bill passes, your job is more likely to go overseas. Before we 
deliberately make ourselves poorer, we should try a low-cost strategy, 
and we have one.

[[Page 26246]]

  Republicans--all 40 Republicans--have a 4-point, low-cost clean 
energy strategy, which I believe many Democrats agree with, and I 
believe President Obama agrees with a lot of it. So rather than this 
economy-wide, high-cost energy strategy, why not the following 4-point 
strategy:
  No. 1, create the environment in which we could build 100 new nuclear 
powerplants in the next 20 years. That is the same number we have 
today--104. We built those in 20 years, between 1970 and 1990. Those 
plants produce 70 percent of our carbon-free electricity today. Wind 
and all of the renewable energies--except for hydropower produce 4 
percent. So 100 more nuclear powerplants is No. 1.
  No. 2, electrify half our cars and trucks in the next 20 years. This 
can happen. Almost every major automobile manufacturer is making 
hybrid-electric cars today. I drive a plug-in hybrid. I plug it in 
every night when I go home, and I put gas in my car about every 6 
weeks. So we can electrify half our cars and trucks in 20 years. We can 
do it by plugging them in at night, when we have so much spare 
electricity. We can do it without building one new powerplant. That is 
according to the testimony of a former Brookings Institute scholar who 
is now in the Obama administration as Assistant Secretary of Energy.
  No. 3, we can explore offshore for low-carbon natural gas and for our 
own oil. Natural gas has suddenly become in abundant supply, and the 
price is low. We can use more of it for energy, for electricity. We 
need to be careful with that. We did that once before and the price 
went up to $15. But we have a new abundant supply of natural gas. It is 
our own and it is not overseas. We should find it and use it. It is low 
carbon. While we are at it, we should find our oil. Even if we drive 
half our electric cars--which will reduce our oil from overseas by one-
third--we will still be using 12 or 13 million barrels of oil a day 
just for transportation, and we will be better off if we use our oil 
instead of oil from places overseas, from countries who don't like us.
  The fourth item is to launch four mini Manhattan Projects like the 
one we had in World War II. Secretary Chu, the distinguished physicist 
who is President Obama's Secretary of Energy, calls them ``innovation 
hubs.'' We can launch four Mini Manhattan Projects, or innovation hubs, 
to find ways to recapture carbon from coal plants. We know how to take 
nitrogen, sulfur, and mercury out of coal plants. We need to find a 
commercially viable way to take the carbon out.
  A mini Manhattan Project could make solar power costs competitive. 
Today, it costs four or five times as much as other electricity. It is 
too expensive to use in a widespread way.
  Germany, which has invested much of its future in solar power, gets 
less than 1 percent of its electricity from solar power. We are nearly 
at zero in the United States. We need a mini Manhattan Project to make 
electric batteries better so that our cars can go 400 miles instead of 
100 miles with electricity, a mini Manhattan Project to recycle used 
nuclear fuel in a way that doesn't isolate plutonium.
  This strategy, as I said, is supported by all 40 Senate Republicans, 
and many Democrats and, I believe, some of that the President embraces: 
nuclear powerplants, electric cars, offshore exploration for natural 
gas and oil, and double energy R&D for four mini Manhattan Projects for 
carbon recapture, solar power, electric batteries, and recycling used 
nuclear fuel. This strategy doesn't drive manufacturing jobs overseas. 
It doesn't put an ineffective cap and trade program on fuel and raise 
the price of gasoline without reducing much carbon.
  That is much better than a national windmill policy, which is what 
the Obama administration and our current subsidies basically have in 
store for our future. Let me say what I mean by that. To produce an 
additional 20 percent of our electricity from nuclear power, we would 
need 100 new nuclear reactors on 100 square miles. Most of them could 
be built on sites where we now have reactors. We have been doing this 
successfully since the 1950s. We have a nuclear Navy. We produce 19 
percent of our electricity from the 104 reactors we have today. But the 
proposal of the administration is to build 20 percent of our 
electricity from wind power. That would require 186,000 50-story wind 
turbines whose blades are the size of a football field. It would 
require 19,000 miles of new transmission lines from remote places, 
through your backyard, over your scenic viewscape, to bring that 
electricity to your house. It would require $170 billion in taxpayer 
subsidies over the next 10 years, while the subsidy for the same amount 
of nuclear power would be about $6.8 billion, according to current law.
  It would turn our ridge tops and coastlines and treasured landscapes 
into junkyards in the sky. According to statistics from the American 
Bird Conservancy these turbines could kill more than 1 million birds a 
year. These turbines would work one-third of the time. That means we 
would have to build nuclear power natural gas plants, or coal plants, 
to back up these 186,000 turbines that would cover an area the size of 
West Virginia. That is a project for our country that ranges from 
impractical, to expensive, to preposterous, especially when we have 
available the possibility of doing what we did before--adding 100 new 
nuclear reactors, which the rest of the world is doing.
  What happened to nuclear power? If we were going to war with the 
successful nuclear Navy created 60 years ago and it was doing exactly 
what we wanted it to do as the world's leading military, with thousands 
of our sailors living safely on top of those reactors, why would we 
stop building nuclear ships and start using sailboats for our national 
defense? That is tantamount to what the current administration's energy 
policy is doing with a national windmill policy.
  We should build 100 new nuclear powerplants as rapidly and as safely 
as we can. It is the cheapest and most reliable way to reduce carbon 
and deal with climate change, and it is the fastest way to do that--
just as electrifying half of our cars and trucks would be a fast way to 
reduce foreign oil and reduce emissions in the transportation sector. 
We invented nuclear power. It is one of our great technologies--maybe 
the most important technology in the last 100 years, and we haven't 
built a new nuclear powerplant in 30 years--even though the old ones we 
have are producing 70 percent of our carbon-free electricity.
  What is the rest of the world doing? China is building 132 new 
nuclear powerplants. The head of a French company that makes large 
turbines for powerplants was in my office the other day. He told me 
China is starting a new nuclear plant every 2 to 3 months. France is 80 
percent nuclear and has among the lowest electric rates and carbon 
emission rates in Western Europe.
  We hear a lot about green jobs. Spain has a lot of green jobs. 
Unfortunately, many of the rest of Spain's jobs are going to France 
because the electricity rates are lower in France, and they are high in 
Spain because they favor unreliable and expensive renewable electricity 
over nuclear power. Japan is 35 percent nuclear and growing. Taiwan, 
India, and the United Arab Emirates are building them. Russia is 
building two nuclear plants a year so they can use their natural gas as 
currency with the rest of Europe. But we invented nuclear technology 
and we haven't started a new nuclear powerplant in 30 years.
  Why don't we go full speed ahead? We believe this is a more sensible, 
practical, low-cost solution for dealing with climate change. I will 
speak for myself; we have many different views on climate change in the 
Republican caucus. We have the whole spectrum. Not everybody agrees 
with me that it is a real problem and humans are causing it and we 
ought to deal with it as rapidly as we reasonably can. But here is the 
way we should do it.
  If we, by 2030, build 100 new nuclear plants, and if we electrify 
half of our cars and trucks, we would be producing about 40 percent of 
our electricity from nuclear. Natural gas would be about 25 percent, 
hydro would be 10, wind and solar maybe 5 to 10. With these two 
efforts--nuclear power and electric

[[Page 26247]]

cars--we would reach the Kyoto protocol goals for carbon emissions by 
2030 without a significant increase in energy prices.
  If in the meantime our mini-Manhattan projects for research, solar, 
carbon recapture, recycling nuclear waste, and electric batteries 
worked, we would be even more successful in reducing emissions, all 
without a national energy tax.
  One might say: What is going to make all that happen? I would say two 
words: Presidential leadership. President Obama is very persuasive. He 
can set a goal and mobilize the country. That is part of the 
President's job: See a need, develop a strategy, and persuade half of 
us he is right. I think he can get a lot of Democrats.
  He could start removing barriers to nuclear plants, speed up approval 
of designs for them. If China can start them every 2 or 3 months, we 
ought to be able to do so as well. He could provide incentives, such as 
$100 billion in loan guarantees--and those would all be paid back not 
just for nuclear but for all clean energy. His budget could fund the 
mini-Manhattan projects. Dr. Chu has recommended we do that.
  At a town hall meeting recently, President Obama said the United 
States would be ``stupid''--those were his words--not to use nuclear 
power. I was glad to hear him say that. I was disappointed when he went 
to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in New York and 
lectured the other countries about not doing more about climate change 
and he didn't mention the words ``nuclear power.'' Meanwhile, Chinese 
President Hu Jintao said his country would ``vigorously'' develop 
nuclear power to combat climate change and they are building 132 
nuclear plants. But I was glad to hear what President Obama said in New 
Orleans.
  As we move through the Senate on the debate on climate change, I ask 
colleagues on both sides to look carefully at this economy wide cap and 
trade. We have had some experience with cap and trade on small dollars 
for coal plants and sulfur. That does not translate very well to what 
is being proposed here. It does not work on fuel, which is 30 percent 
of our carbon. It raises the price without reducing carbon emissions, 
it drives manufacturing jobs away, and it raises utility bills. We 
don't need to do it.
  With Presidential leadership, we could build 100 nuclear plants, 
electrify half our cars and trucks, find new low-carbon natural gas, 
launch the mini-Manhattan projects, and meet our clean energy goals 
without a national energy tax, without running jobs overseas looking 
for cheap electricity.
  All 40 Republican Senators agree with this agenda. So do many 
Democrats. President Obama agrees with much of it. Then why are we 
pushing a high-cost national energy tax and subsidizing 186,000 
windmills when we should all agree on a low-cost, clean energy plan 
that will create good jobs and power our economy for the 21st Century?
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Franken). The Senator from Pennsylvania.

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