[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 9]
[House]
[Pages 11869-11874]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                  THE AMERICAN CLEAN ENERGY JOBS BILL

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 6, 2009, the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Inslee) is 
recognized for 60 minutes.
  Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, I have come to the floor this evening to 
speak about a bill that we hope to have on the floor in the next couple 
of months that is going to be styled the ``American Clean Energy Jobs'' 
bill. It is the right name for the bill because it will jump-start, 
kick-start and initiate an economic recovery based on the growth of 
clean energy jobs in this country. And it is timely, it is vital, and 
we believe it is possible this year to really give a boost to the 
American economy by helping create the millions, and I say that with an 
M, the millions, not hundreds, not thousands, but the millions of new 
jobs that we can create if America fulfills its destiny to become the 
arsenal of clean energy for the world. America is a country with a very 
special destiny. We have fulfilled the destiny to bring democracy to 
the world. And later we served as the arsenal of democracy during World 
War II. We armed the rest of the world with the tools they needed to 
defeat the powers of darkness during World War II.
  And now we will have a bill on the floor shortly that will call on 
the American economy to produce the clean energy jobs and tools to 
essentially provide a new clean energy future for the world. And when 
we do that, we believe we will dramatically expand our economy, 
dramatically expand Americans' employment opportunities, and as an 
additional side benefit, dramatically reduce the pollution that today 
is threatening, in a very serious way, the way we live. We will also, 
at the same time, dramatically reduce our dependence on foreign oil. 
And as a side benefit, we will dramatically increase our national 
security, because we know that our addiction to foreign oil is a 
security risk to the United States.
  I want to start talking about this bill from its first job, which is 
to create jobs for this country. In the current economic malaise we are 
in, we have got a couple of choices. We can sort of roll over and play 
dead and not take bold action to jump-start the American economy by 
seizing this opportunity to start new businesses in this country that 
can create employment. Some people in this Chamber still think that is 
what we should do, which is nothing. They are unwilling to make the 
investments both in governmental action or in the dollars that it is 
going to take to really create these clean energy jobs.
  We think they are wrong. We think inaction is not the American way. 
We think America should take bold action to create clean energy jobs 
and that Congress has the responsibility to create the policies that 
are going to help create those jobs in this country.
  So if I can, let me just start this discussion tonight by talking 
about just some very simple samples of the kind of jobs that we believe 
need to be jump-started in this country. I will start in Michigan, a 
State that has been so hard-hit right now with some difficult times in 
the auto industry. I will mention a couple of companies that if we do 
the right thing can really expand employment.
  One is General Motors, which is going to bring out a car called the 
Volt in a year or two. The Volt is a plug-in electric car. The Volt is 
a car where you can plug it in at night and the next day run it on all 
electricity for about 40 miles, which is really cheap. It is about 1 
cent a mile, maybe a little more to run, compared to 7 or 8 cents a 
mile for gasoline. And 60 percent of all the trips we take a day are 
less than 40 miles. But if you want to go more than 40 miles, then it 
will run on the internal combustion engine that is in the car as well. 
And you can drive it for 250, 300 miles, bring it home at night, plug 
it in again and you are off to the races the next morning on very 
inexpensive electricity, very quiet electricity and very nonpolluting 
electricity.
  Now at some point, they may use some batteries by another company. It 
is a Massachusetts company called A123 Battery Company. And A123 
Battery Company now, because of some policies we just adopted in the 
stimulus bill, we hope to be able to open a manufacturing plant in 
Michigan to provide the advanced lithium ion batteries that we think 
can be the backbone of an American electric car industry.
  Now those two companies, General Motors, we know they are in 
difficult times, and A123 Battery Company, have the potential to employ 
thousands of Americans in high-paying manufacturing work if--if--
Congress takes a path of action to develop the clean energy policies we 
need to drive investment into those companies.
  And that is what is at stake tonight. What we are talking about is 
making sure that those jobs of the future don't go just to China, where 
China has a very aggressive national policy to build electric cars. We 
need some national policies to make sure that they are done here.
  I go to Washington State and I hail from Washington State. Take a 
look at the McKinstry Company, which is a little company that just 
started providing advice on how to do efficiency. And then they figured 
out that they could save corporations millions of dollars a year by 
teaching companies how not to waste energy, how to save energy. That 
company has now grown to hundreds of people who are working in Seattle, 
Washington, basically teaching companies around the world how to save 
energy. And that company is now probably the leading energy efficiency 
company in the world when it comes to teaching companies how to save 
energy. And hundreds of my neighbors and constituents are working there 
saving energy. That company needs policies that will continue to drive 
investment into efficiency and away from waste. And we need this clean 
energy jobs bill that we will be introducing on the floor shortly to 
make sure that that happens.

[[Page 11870]]

  Right up the street from that company a few miles is the Bio Novartis 
Company. Bio Novartis has figured out a way to help an algae-based 
biofuels company make essentially gasoline and other automobile and 
other fuels out of algae. And they figured out a way to get light to 
the algae using a glass tube to provide light into these algae pools 
that one day will power our cars. And they are not the only company 
doing it. There are other companies. I met a guy in a ferry boat in 
Seattle who has a company called Sapphire Energy that does the same 
thing. They are doing their work in New Mexico and San Diego.
  These companies need policies, though, that give them a level playing 
field viz-a-viz the old type of energy we had, which was gasoline. They 
don't have a level playing field right now because the deck is stacked 
in the law right now to favor gasoline, the old kind of gasoline, 
rather than the new kind of fuel. And we will talk tonight about how 
this bill will level the playing field.
  The list goes on and on about the companies. About 4 miles from that 
other company is a company called AltaRock. It is in northern Seattle 
in the Greenwood district. And they have the potential of hiring 
hundreds and thousands of employees doing what is called ``engineered 
geothermal.'' Engineered geothermal is a new type of way to produce 
electricity. What you do is you drill a hole down in the Earth. You 
pump water down. It picks up the heat that is in the Earth's crust. You 
bring it up hot, about 300 degrees, and you use that water to generate 
steam and then electricity. Zero pollution, all American energy, using 
pretty old technology. They have got to improve their pumps to make 
sure they can pump under high temperature positions. They have to do 
some geological testing to see where this works best. But drilling 
holes isn't totally rocket science. AltaRock has the potential to 
generate enormous job creation in this country.
  You go about 5 miles from that company to downtown Seattle and there 
is a little company I met called Glosten Engineering. They are a marine 
architecture firm. It is a relatively small company now. They have 
about 65 employees. They are now starting to work on how to design 
offshore wind turbines, where we can put wind turbines off our 
shorelines, say 10 miles off our shorelines, where there is enormous 
wind potential where we might be able to provide 10 or more percent of 
our electricity from offshore wind. This company can grow and provide 
employment in the construction, not only the design, but the 
construction of these offshore wind turbines. They are going to design 
floating platforms for these 200-foot towers to be offshore. And that 
is going to require massive construction for cement, iron workers, 
steelworkers, machinists and the like.
  Now what do all these companies have in common? What they have in 
common is they have great ideas. They have the potential to create 
nonpolluting energy in America and grow thousands of new jobs in this 
country. But what these companies need is a kick-start. And they need 
some messages from Congress that we are going to treat them fairly. 
Now, right now they are not treated fairly. The cards are stacked 
against these small businessmen and women, these entrepreneurs who are 
creating these new technologies. And the reason they are stacked 
against them is that the laws essentially, right now, allow a cost to 
be imposed on Americans by polluters that the polluters don't have to 
pay but citizens do. Citizens today have to incur the costs of what is 
happening because of pollution.
  Pollution is going to be costing Americans big-time in the next 
several decades. It is going to cost them in loss of jobs associated 
with the decline of our forests, because we are putting too much 
pollution, carbon dioxide, in the air. That is changing the weather. 
And the weather is killing our forests. And people are going to lose 
jobs in the forest products industry because of the deaths of our 
forests. And costs are being imposed on our citizens right now that the 
polluters aren't paying, citizens are paying, and loss of jobs and loss 
of revenue. Fishermen are going to lose their livelihoods, and costs 
are being imposed on them because we are going to lose our salmon 
stocks because of changes in precipitation. We are in a prolonged 
drought right now in the West. And we have already experienced some 
decline in salmon stocks associated with no water in the rivers during 
the summer months, plus the threat of ocean acidification because 
pollution goes into the atmosphere, goes back into the ocean and 
changes the acidity of the ocean. Costs are being imposed and not paid 
by polluters.
  We are going to experience very substantial costs caused by polluters 
when we get sea level changes associated with melting that is going on 
right now with the Arctic and potentially Greenland that will be 
relatively slow but will require very significant expenditure of 
infrastructure improvements. So right now, costs are being imposed on 
citizens that the polluting industries are not paying.
  We are going to do a couple of things in this clean energy jobs 
program. We are going to basically make sure that investment goes to 
these new companies to create these jobs and that the cost of this 
pollution is put where it should be, not on the citizen, but on the 
polluting industries. And we are going to do this in kind of a simple 
way. It sounds complex, but it is really quite simple. We are going to 
do, right in this bill, a bill that will essentially do what we have 
already done in America for pollutants in several ways. In sulfur 
dioxide, for instance, several years ago, we had an acid rain problem.

                              {time}  1945

  So we decided and Congress passed a law that essentially limited the 
amount of acid that could be put in the atmosphere, sulfur dioxide, 
because sulfur dioxide went into the atmosphere and then made acid 
rain.
  We are doing the same thing right now with carbon dioxide that is 
making acid oceans. It is doing the same only on a much, much larger 
scale. But there is a loophole in our law. This pollutant, carbon 
dioxide, is not covered by our antipollution laws. And as a result, 
citizens are going to have to pay for that unless we change that law.
  So what this bill will do is exactly what we did for this other 
pollutant, sulfur dioxide, and it put a cap on the amount of pollution 
that is going into the atmosphere every year, and it will make the 
polluting industries pay for permits to be allowed to put that 
pollution into the atmosphere. And that money, significant parts of it, 
will then be recycled back to American consumers to help with their 
utility bills.
  So three things will happen under this bill. And they all will result 
in what we want to achieve which is the creation of American jobs in 
these clean energy technologically driven companies. These three things 
that I am about to describe will all drive investment into these new 
jobs.
  Number one, the creation of this cap once we limit the amount of 
pollution going into the atmosphere will immediately make these new 
jobs much more cost effective and much more attractive to investors 
because once there is a cap on some of these old polluting ways to use 
energy, now the new, clean energy companies become much more attractive 
because they are not subject to this cap.
  The engineered geothermal jobs of the future will not have to buy a 
permit because they are not putting out pollution. The lithium ion 
battery producers in Michigan will not have to buy a permit because 
they are not pollution. The Bio Novartis Company with algae-based fuel 
is not going to have to buy a permit because they are not putting out 
pollution. And those jobs will immediately become much more 
economically tenable. That is the first way it will work.
  The second way it will work is that it will put the cost of this 
problem where it belongs, which is on polluting industries. No longer 
will that be borne by citizens, John and Sally Citizen. It will be 
borne by the polluting industries. They will have to go out and they 
will have to buy permits from the government to be allowed to continue 
putting

[[Page 11871]]

acid into our ocean and pollutants into our atmosphere that is changing 
our planet. That seems fair to me; and it also seems fair to my 
constituents.
  And the third thing that will happen is that the money that the 
polluters pay for these permits, some of it is going to go into 
research, some of these clean jobs; some of it will help industries 
clean up their act. But a bulk of it is going to go back to consumers. 
It is going to go back to citizens either in their paycheck or some tax 
credit, or perhaps a direct distribution to them.
  So the bulk of the money that the polluters will have to pay will go 
back to citizens to help them with their utility bills. So this will 
mean that Americans in this bill will get more jobs. They are going to 
get help with their utility bills, and the polluters will pay for that.
  What I am here to report to those who may be interested in this 
subject, and there are those here who still resist this idea because 
they are still fear mongering because they resist change. People who 
resist change, they try to create fear. They are going to try to create 
fear that this is going to drive people into bankruptcy for doing this.
  But I will tell you, when you ask Americans do you think it might be 
a good deal for you to get a tax credit and the polluters have to pay 
for that and we increase our energy independence and decrease our 
pollution, we have asked Americans what they think and by margins of 
somewhere between 20 and 40 percent margins, people realize it is a 
good idea, even if it requires some up-front investment. And this will 
require some up-front investment. It will require some costs, but 
Americans' common sense understand that makes sense because Americans 
understand you don't get something for nothing.
  What we are getting here is job creation, a clean future for our kids 
and our grandkids and our great grandkids, increased energy 
independence, and help with our utility bills. And Americans by huge 
margins favor that kind of an approach. We have asked them what they 
think.
  Now, we have had some experience with this before. In the next 
several weeks, and already you are hearing the fear mongering that is 
going on. Some people in this Chamber are trying to scare Americans to 
think that the sky is falling if we take this approach. They have tried 
to drum up fear that this is going to cost Americans numbers that they 
pull out of the air that are pretty fantastic, thousands of dollars 
that are not substantiated by the economic analysis, and, secondly, are 
not substantiated by what America is about. What America is about 
fundamentally is innovation and optimism. What we have always learned 
through our experience in this country is if we put our minds to it, we 
can innovate our way out of almost any challenge.
  The best example of this is what happened when we have seen this 
movie before, and we have seen this movie before. This movie played out 
in the Clean Air Act where people said that if we did exactly what we 
are doing right now, if we put a limit on the amount of acid rain and 
sulfur dioxide going into the atmosphere, and if we charged polluters 
for permits to put that pollution out, people came to this Chamber and 
said if you do that, it will drive Americans across the country into 
bankruptcy because utility bills will skyrocket and you will be facing 
huge, double, triple prices of your utility bills because the utilities 
will have to increase their costs. They will pass it on to utility 
ratepayers, and there will be these desperate economic conditions. That 
is exactly what people said in this Chamber.
  What happened in reality? What happened in reality was that good old 
tried and true character of Americans kicked in, which was to innovate, 
to invent new ways to reduce this pollution. And very bright American 
scientists went to work and invented ways to capture sulfur dioxide, 
make sure it did not go up the smokestacks, at half the cost or less 
than what was predicted by the fear-mongers.
  The other thing that happened is that we cleaned up our lakes, and we 
saved our lakes for our grandkids, where there might be some fish in 
them. It was a hugely successful program at less than half the cost 
predicted. And why is that? It is not because Congressmen and 
Congresswomen are smart or even lucky. It is because American 
businessmen and American scientists are smart and ambitious and 
creative, and they created the technologies to solve this problem. That 
is what is going to happen when we pass this bill now. American 
businesses, some of which I talked about tonight, are going to get the 
investment and they are going to create these clean energy jobs. They 
will get out there and figure out a way to produce electricity in a 
cost-effective way to in fact have the potential over the long run to 
reduce our utility rates.
  The reason I say this is we really have two choices that will be 
presented to Congress in the next month or so. One choice is the status 
quo. And, unfortunately, a lot of my friends on the other side of the 
aisle are going to advocate for the status quo. In the status quo, we 
remain addicted to oil from the Middle East. I can tell you over the 
long run that price is not going to go down. It is going to go up and 
down over time, but over the long run, we are facing limited supplies 
of oil and increasing demands on oil. When the Chinese start driving 
cars, as they are starting to do, over the long run, with the limited 
supply of oil and an increasing demand in China and India and other 
places, don't predict that prices of gasoline are going to go down. 
They are going to go up over the long run.
  The status quo, people who are against this bill who don't want to do 
anything about this problem, who just want to use fear to prevent 
people from acting, they want to remain hooked to oil. They want to 
remain slaves to the needle of oil addiction. We have to break that 
addiction. It is our only path to job creation in this country.
  What we are saying is we have got to get out there and create new 
sources of energy. We are going to be burning oil for some time. There 
is no question, this is not going to happen overnight. But we have to 
start the transition where Americans can start to have their own energy 
sources that are beyond oil, frankly. And, fortunately, we now have the 
ability to do that.
  By the way, those people who think electric cars are just some kind 
of Tonka toy, take a ride in a Tesla. I got in a Tesla in Seattle the 
other day. It is a little sporty thing. It goes zero to 60 in 3.9 
seconds, which is faster than a Porsche. I rode in one and of course we 
obeyed the speed limit because I am a Congressman and I always do, but 
it was like getting into a rocket sled to feel that acceleration. I 
haven't been in a car that quick since I was 17 years old. That car is 
expensive right now, and not many Americans are going to be driving a 
Tesla. But a lot of Americans are going to be driving a Ford Focus, 
which is going to be all electric, and a lot of Americans are going to 
be driving a General Motors Volt, and a lot of Americans are going to 
be using electricity generated by wind power and solar power from the 
BrightSource Company.
  By the way, we have this power all over the country. I talked to the 
BrightSource Company. I met them in California last weekend. They now 
have either hundreds or thousands of megawatts under contract. They do 
what is called concentrated solar energy, and they use mirrors to 
capture the sun's energy and they reflect the sun back up into a 
central tower that is about 100 feet tall. On top of this tower is a 
canister of oil or some product, it might be sodium, and they heat it 
up to terrific temperatures, and then they create steam and electricity 
from that. This company is going gang-busters, but what they need is 
fairness competing against some of the other technologies that are 
still allowed to put their junk in the air for free.
  I have another company called Ramgen up in the State of Washington. 
They are building a compression technology that might allow us to burn 
coal and take the CO2 from the coal and bury it underground 
and sequester

[[Page 11872]]

it. This is a compression technology that will decrease the cost of 
doing that.
  But what they need is this bill that will create American jobs by 
creating a cap on the amount of CO2 going in the atmosphere. 
This bill will do some other things to help the emergence of these 
companies.
  It is going to create a promise to Americans that we are going to get 
a certain percentage of our electricity from clean energy sources. And 
22 States or more have now adopted these laws. Every single one of them 
has worked. Every single one of these States that has set these goals 
for a percentage of their electricity is on target to meet those goals. 
We have one in the State that I am from, in the State of Washington, 
that was adopted by popular vote. Now we need a national goal that is 
called a renewable energy standard. We are talking amongst ourselves to 
figure out what that number should be right now, but it should be 
somewhere in the neighborhood of a fifth of our energy by 2025 to get 
from renewable sources, and this is eminently achievable.
  The Department of Energy and various other entities have evaluated 
this, and this is an achievable goal. We know that, again, once we put 
these innovators to work and let them loose, we are going to get 
tremendous technological innovation to get this job done.
  We are also going to create mechanisms to help these small businesses 
do this research. You know, we know what Uncle Sam can do. Uncle Sam is 
only going to play a part of this. Most of this will be driven by 
private enterprise. Most of it is going to be driven by private equity 
and lending from the private sector. But Uncle Sam does have a role to 
play in some of the over-the-horizon technologies.
  Like in the original Apollo Project when we went to the Moon, Uncle 
Sam promoted the research and development, and we went to the Moon.
  In World War II, Uncle Sam invented, with its nickel weapons systems 
that were incredibly powerful, and that was as a result of Uncle Sam's 
research and development.
  Now Uncle Sam needs to step up to the plate and do the research and 
development that can now jump-start these clean energy jobs.

                              {time}  2000

  So who's going to pay for that research and development? Well, in 
this bill, the people who are going to pay for that research and 
development in the amount of about $15 billion a year are the polluting 
industries that are putting the pollution in the atmosphere today, 
unchecked, unregulated, in infinite amounts, at zero cost. They're 
going to pay for this research and development, not the taxpayer, not 
the individual American citizen. Because when these permits are sold at 
auction for these pollution permits, that money is going to be taken 
and put into a fund that will go to research and development to help 
these companies develop these over-the-horizon technologies. Now, 
that's the way it should be because we know we can be creative and we 
know that's the place that should fund this.
  So the long and the short of it is that, by creating this limit on 
pollution, we make these jobs more economically competitive, number 
one. Number two, we create a financing mechanism to help the companies 
that are going to hire these people in these new jobs paid by the 
polluters.
  Number three, we create a standard, a legal standard that utilities 
will need to meet of at least a portion of our energy will be 
guaranteed to come from clean energy sources. Those are the first three 
things that we do.
  Fourth, we create a thing called a low carbon fuel standard, which 
will create a standard which will call for Americans to have more 
cleaner fuels over time so that companies that sell transportation 
fuels will be able to have--they will be required basically to provide 
cleaner energy sources to America and put out less pollution over time 
on a transition period.
  Fifth, we're going to create in this bill, I hope, and it's not a 
done deal yet, but I hope we will be creating a thing called a green 
bank, where Uncle Sam will provide a revolving fund that will provide 
lending for some of these businesses at what is called the ``valley of 
death.'' A lot of these businesses, you get the people in a garage, 
they come up with a brilliant idea. They get some venture capital, 
create a prototype of their device. It works. They scale it up, but 
when it comes time to put it in the factory, to the build the first 
factory, they can't get a loan because banks just won't loan on sort of 
the first commercial-sized projects.
  So in this bill financed by polluting industries, from these permits 
we will be creating a revolving fund. So in this credit crunch that 
we're now experiencing, these business will be able to, in fact, get 
access to capital.
  This bill is going to be action-oriented. This is change. It is big 
change for our economy. And when you are in moments of crises, as we 
are, and when you think about it, we're sort of in a perfect storm of 
crises right now. We have had this enormous economic challenge that 
we're experiencing, huge reductions in capital so these businesses 
can't get capital--not just clean energy businesses, but any businesses 
right now--very high unemployment. So we have got an economic 
challenge.
  We have a national security challenge. We're involved in two wars 
right now, and it is not accidental that one of those is in an area 
where the oil comes from. It's not accidental that a lot of the threats 
this Nation faces are from oil-rich areas. It's not an accident. It's a 
fact. Until we wean ourselves from our addiction off that oil that 
comes from that region, we're always going to be embroiled in these 
security threats.
  So we have got a national security threat. We have an environmental 
threat that is also a national security threat. We have got a letter 
from 20 generals who have told us that if we don't solve this problem 
of global warming, we're going to have a national security threat of 
mass migration, because as droughts continue to affect the areas south 
of us and in the northern and sub-Saharan areas of Africa, you're going 
to have mass migrations of people and you're going to have collapses of 
governments, and you will continue to see what we're seeing in North 
Africa right now, of governments that just don't function because their 
society has literally dried up and blown away with their topsoil.
  These generals are telling us that global warming is a security risk 
to the United States over the long run and have urged us to take action 
to limit the amount of carbon dioxide going in the atmosphere. So we 
have these multiple crises right now that are all hitting us all at 
once.
  Now, it seems to me that when you're in that kind of situation, 
Americans want action. And that is what this bill, the American Clean 
Energy Jobs bill, will give Americans, which is action. Inaction is not 
an option here.
  Unfortunately, at the moment, and I hope this will change, my 
colleagues across the aisle have insisted, No, no. Things are good 
enough. We will just leave them the way they are. We don't need these 
clean energy jobs by the millions. We don't need clean energy. We don't 
need to address our national security threat of addiction to oil. We 
don't need to address global warming, and we don't need to address the 
Chinese.
  I want to address this for a minute. We are also in an economic race 
with the rest of the world. I don't mean to single out China, but I 
will just start the discussion with China.
  We are in a race today to create these clean energy jobs, and we're 
not really winning that race today because other countries around the 
globe have got the drop on us. They're out of the gate first with 
policies that will support the creation of clean energy jobs in their 
countries, not ours.
  That's got to stop. I am tired of Germany leading America in the 
production of solar energy because Germany has adopted what's called a 
feed-in tariff, which essentially creates something like we're going to 
create, which is a demand for clean energy. We have a little different 
version. We call it a renewable electrical standard. And they're now 
leading America.

[[Page 11873]]

  We created these technologies in our country using American capital 
and American smarts. We invented solar energy, but the Germans are 
commercializing it and leading the export market around the world 
because Congress has sat on the dime and hasn't created these policies 
like the German Government has. I'm tired of that. We need to change 
that.
  I'm tired that the Danish Government, because they created policies 
to drive investment into wind turbines a decade and a half ago, that 
the little country of Denmark, with 45 million people, is outproducing 
us, until very recently, in wind power. Now, we just passed them a 
couple of months ago, but with 300 million people in America and the 
most brilliant people in America, we should not be allowing the Danish, 
who I love as a people--and a shout-out to Sven Auken, a friend of 
mine. He was the environmental minister who led this movement in 
Denmark. He saw something two decades ago coming, and they created some 
policies to help clean job creation in Denmark. But I want those jobs 
right here.
  Now we're getting them back. The Clipper Wind Company in Iowa, the 
Gamesa Company in Pennsylvania. We have one of the largest wind farms 
in my State in Washington, but not fast enough. I'm not satisfied.
  Take a look at what China is doing. I met in California last weekend 
a senior advisor to the Chinese Government. He told me just matter of 
fact, We're going to build electric cars. Unless you change in America, 
we're going to dominate this field. And the Chinese and Chinese 
Government are making massive investments now in developing the 
electric car.
  We are going to be in a race with China to figure out whether we're 
going to make the electric cars in Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee, and 
maybe the Carolinas, or whether they're going to be made in China, and 
we lose again to an Asian country that got the drop on us in 
technology.
  I will not stand here and allow the Chinese to become dominant in the 
electric car industry. My side of the aisle is going to insist that we 
adopt policies to build those cars here.
  Now we have started down that track. In our stimulus package, we put 
$2 billion in to assist the development of the domestic electric 
battery companies so we can make those batteries and cars here. 
Yesterday, I was at the White House--time flies around here--meeting 
with President Obama about how we do this energy bill. He urged us to 
pass this energy bill. I agree with him on this.
  We reached an agreement yesterday in a program called Cash for 
Clunkers. We, on my side of the aisle, are going to put a Cash for 
Clunkers provision in this bill, which will basically tell Americans if 
you're driving kind of a clunker that gets substandard mileage, below 
18 miles a gallon, if you turn in your car and buy a new car with 
higher gas mileage, at least the CAFE standard, you will get a $2,500 
voucher from Uncle Sam towards buying that new car. And that amount 
will go up the more fuel efficient the car is. I think it's up to 
$4,000. Don't hold me to this, but I think that's the amount it goes up 
to.
  So Uncle Sam is going to give Americans an incentive to buy a fuel-
efficient car and get off the road some of these inefficient cars to 
create jobs in this country. And that's one way we're going to help 
Americans in this clean energy transition.
  It's not the only way, because Americans are also going to get cash 
in their pockets, either through a tax credit or some other mechanism 
that we're designing right now.
  So we're going to take measures that make sure that America gets in 
this game of creating clean energy jobs in this country, and we 
recognize that we don't have the luxury of time like some of my friends 
across the aisle think. They think we can wait another 20 or 30 years 
to do this. We cannot wait to do this. We have got to do this right 
now.
  We have got to create clean energy jobs right now or the Chinese, the 
Germans, and the Danish are going to do it. I mean, again, no 
disrespect to these other countries. They're great countries. They're 
competitive. They're eager. But we should not allow our technology to 
be mastered by them.
  I want to talk right now, because we have some very important people 
in the Chamber right now that have just entered the Chamber, about the 
ability to use coal in our future.
  Right now, we have great Americans who are working in the coal 
industry, and they're working hard and they're producing huge amounts 
of energy for Americans today. The problem is, unfortunately, that we 
need to find a way that we can use coal in a way that will reduce the 
amount of pollution going into the atmosphere. To do this, we think 
that there's an opportunity to be able to find a way to burn coal in a 
way that doesn't put massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the 
atmosphere.
  So what we are doing in this bill, in this Clean Energy Jobs bill, we 
will be taking money from polluting industries and creating a fund 
which will go to researching how we can find out a way to do what is 
called carbon sequestration. It's a fancy word for taking the carbon 
dioxide out of the coal-fired plants, electrical generating plants, and 
take that carbon dioxide and burying it in the Earth permanently.
  If we can figure out a way to do this, we will find a way to use coal 
for decades. If we can't find a way to do this, it's going to be 
difficult to use all the coal we have, because if we burn all the coal 
we have, it will be good, cheap power, but it will also essentially 
change life as we know it in this country based on climate change.
  So what we're doing in this bill is we're creating a fund that will 
help the coal industry have a long-term survival in this country, and 
they will be able to have assistance in this bill to generate over a 
billion dollars a year for research into coal sequestration technology.

                              {time}  2015

  Now, the reason I point this out is I think some very good people 
here in Congress are being a little shortsighted, and they are not 
seeing the benefit of generating funds that can go to the research and 
development of this new technology, technology that we clearly need to 
solve this problem. If we don't generate this money to create this 
technology, people in the coal industry eventually are going to have 
difficulty because of the inevitability of the climate change that we 
face.
  Now, if I can, just for a minute I would like to address that issue 
of why we can create jobs while simultaneously dealing with climate 
change. First, I want to address a little bit the problems we face on 
climate change.
  Climate change is now a fact, not a theory or hypothesis. We have 
direct observational evidence that carbon dioxide in our atmosphere has 
skyrocketed during the industrial revolution. It has gone from about 
250 to about 360, 370 parts per million. It will continue to rise to 
double the levels of carbon dioxide. This is simply a fact.
  Now, the problem with carbon dioxide is you can't see it, you can't 
smell it, you can't taste it. But it has a nasty little attribute, and 
no scientist today anywhere who has a scientific degree will disagree 
with this statement: It has the attribute of trapping a certain 
spectrum of radiation that can go in as one spectrum of radiation but 
can't go out when it is reflected off the surface of the Earth. All 
scientists of any repute recognize that.
  So we are now involved in this massive experiment where we are the 
guinea pigs of what happens when you double the amount of carbon 
dioxide in the atmosphere. Now, unfortunately, we are seeing what 
happens when you do that, and we are seeing it right now with our own 
eyes.
  The Arctic is melting. The Arctic in the last several decades has 
decreased by 40 percent, and many scientists believe in the next decade 
or so it will disappear in the late summer months almost in total; it 
will just have a fringe of the Arctic.
  We are seeing tundra melting rapidly in Alaska. We are experiencing 
droughts. We are experiencing by the millions of acres death of our 
forests because it doesn't get cold enough to

[[Page 11874]]

kill the beetles, and they then kill the trees.
  We are seeing changes in patterns of migration of our animals. We are 
seeing off my coast in the State of Washington creatures we have never 
seen in the State of Washington before off our coastline.
  And, importantly, we are seeing increases in the acidity of the 
ocean. The oceans are becoming more acidic. And this isn't related to 
temperature; this is related to carbon dioxide, which comes out of our 
smokestacks, drifts over our oceans, goes into solution; and, when 
carbon dioxide goes into solution it makes it more acidic. The oceans 
today have 30 percent more acidic ions in them than they did in pre-
industrial times. So we know we have to deal with this problem. By the 
way, there is no debate about ocean acidification. And even if we could 
solve the global warming problem, unless we create these green collar 
jobs and green energy jobs, we won't solve this problem. So we intend 
in the next several months to succeed, as we have always done, and by 
innovating to create these clean energy jobs.
  Now, people are going to talk about: If we do this, that this is 
going to cost Americans, this fear factor that people are going to try 
to scare people in, they are going to tell Americans it is going to 
cost thousands of dollars a year. It just doesn't hold up to any 
economic analysis, an analysis by MIT, which by the way has been 
incorrectly cited by some of my colleagues here. We have a letter from 
the MIT professor that basically said the total cost to the U.S. 
economy averages out to about 18 cents a day for the investments that 
will be involved in changing this. The EPA studies that have looked at 
this have concluded it will be in the $200 to $300 range a year of 
investment that will create millions of clean energy jobs.
  These investments we know succeed because we have confidence in 
American businesses and American workers and American scientists to 
create these new clean energy jobs; and when we give them the 
investment they need, they will produce what we need, which is new 
technology. And this bill will be the largest jump-start of American 
technology since the original Apollo project.
  Now the Democratic members of the Commerce Committee went to the 
White House to meet with President Obama yesterday, or the day before, 
and we talked about this bill. We are shaping this bill in a way that 
is fair to every region and takes into consideration the needs of 
certain industries.
  By the way, I will point out something that is very important in the 
bill. We want to make sure that jobs don't go overseas as a result of 
this bill. And if some electrical rates go up as a result of this, we 
don't want to see jobs in steel mills or cement plants or aluminum 
plants go overseas to places where electricity may be cheaper. So what 
we are doing is we have a provision that Congressman Mike Doyle of 
Pittsburgh and I have worked on which will give benefits, free permits, 
to the steel, aluminum, other energy intensive, trade sensitive 
businesses. They will get free permits. The reason we are doing this is 
so they will not have a disincentive for keeping those jobs in this 
country. We are designing this bill in a way that is sensitive to make 
sure we keep jobs in this country and this does not distort our job 
creation, and it is being carefully designed to achieve that.
  What President Obama talked about, I just want to cite one thing he 
said. He said that Members of Congress come here for a reason, and that 
reason is to very rarely and infrequently have a chance to do something 
historic.
  This is a truly historic moment for America. It is a moment where we 
have the opportunity to seize the destiny of this country, to create a 
clean energy future for the country, to reduce pollution, to increase 
our energy independence. And that only happens when men and women of 
good faith come together to find a consensus that will create clean 
energy jobs, will limit pollution, will require polluting industries to 
pay, and will in fact move this country with a great, great leap 
forward in technology.
  You don't do that by doing nothing. Doing nothing is not an action. 
We will be doing something historic in this bill, and I look forward to 
working with my colleagues to pass this clean energy American jobs 
bill. I look forward to the many ribbon cuttings that we are going to 
have as a result of this bill when these companies start up and start 
hiring Americans and start manufacturing the electric cars and wind 
turbines and solar cells and engineered geothermal and all of the 
things we are going to do to help create job creation in this country. 
That is a future worthy of this country. That is a bill worth passing. 
I look forward to it.

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