[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 3]
[House]
[Pages 3515-3516]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                                 ENERGY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Inglis) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. INGLIS. Mr. Speaker, I understand that the word ``crisis'' in 
Chinese is written with two characters. The first means danger and the 
second means opportunity.
  It occurs to me that that's really where we are in our country today 
when it comes to energy. We've got both a danger and an opportunity. Of 
course, this may sound a little bit dated because, you know, 6 months, 
8 months ago on this House floor we were talking about prices of 
gasoline at $4 a gallon or something. Now, gas at $1.60 a gallon is a 
sleeper cell waiting to detonate, and it will eventually detonate. So 
we get this enormous danger.
  We saw the danger this summer. It became real and present, and we saw 
what happened when gas hit $4 a gallon. Now, it's going to get a little 
bit of a sleeper cell action going on here where it's $1.50, $1.60, 
$1.70. But what we've got there is a huge danger looming for us in the 
future.
  We've also got, though, this incredible opportunity. In this midst of 
this economic downturn, we're looking for jobs. We're looking for a way 
to create productivity for the future and to get beyond just stimulus 
and into long-term growth.
  So, in that regard, I had an opportunity to visit with the wind unit 
of General Electric Company in Greenville, South Carolina, recently, 
and they told me that 1 percent of the world's electricity is made from 
the wind. If it goes to 2 percent, just from 1 percent to 2 percent of 
the world's electricity coming from wind, it's $100 billion in sales, 
$100 billion. That's an opportunity.
  So we've got this danger in our precarious position with energy, 
dependent on foreign Nations, some of them that really don't like us 
very much. But we have also got this tremendous opportunity, which is 
the job creation opportunity by these fuels of the future.
  So the question is why don't we move quickly to those fuels of the 
future, and here's where I think folks from my side of the aisle can 
really add to this discussion because, you know, one of the strengths 
of Republicans is understanding free enterprise, how to make

[[Page 3516]]

a profit, how to make things work, how to create things, build things, 
grow things, make things work. That's our strength.
  And so when you're thinking about wind, for example, why isn't wind 
used more? Why isn't nuclear used more? Well, the answer is the price 
signals aren't there. It isn't cost-effective in a lot of cases to 
pursue those new technologies. What's cheaper? Well, the things we 
know: burn coal, burn natural gas, burn oil, gasoline. Those things are 
the incumbent technologies that have a market distortion going on. And 
the market distortion, which is something again that we Republicans 
understand very well, we understand about markets, the market 
distortion we've got going on is a free good in the air. That means I 
can belch and burn on my property 24/7 without any accountability for 
what it does on somebody else's property when it comes to greenhouse 
gas emissions.
  And so if you start attaching that accountability and saying to me, 
Inglis, listen, you're going to have to keep your stuff on your 
property--this is a biblical concept. It's an English common law 
concept. It's American common law, and it's part of our EPA regulatory 
regime. The idea is to be accountable for what you do on your property 
and hold those incidents on your property and not have the opportunity 
to belch and burn and dump on somebody else's because that creates a 
market distortion.
  Over the weeks to come, Mr. Speaker, I look forward to talking more 
about that market distortion and how it is we might change that and how 
we might use the power of free enterprise to create these jobs, to 
solve the environmental challenge and to address this national security 
risk. In my view, it's the triple play opportunity of this American 
century. It's something we should be very excited about, and it's a 
terrific bipartisan opportunity. I look forward to talking more about 
that.

                          ____________________