[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 3]
[Senate]
[Pages 3685-3687]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                             ENERGY POLICY

  Ms. MURKOWSKI. Madam President, last week I spoke on five of the 
steps we need to take to increase domestic oil production. Today I wish 
to take a few moments to speak more broadly about our Nation's energy 
policy as a whole, what the proper goals for such a policy should be, 
and the false choice between increased domestic production and reduced 
oil consumption.
  Energy policy has repeatedly been brought up as an area where this 
Congress and this President can find common ground. Knowing something 
actually needs to be done, however, is no guarantee it will be done. 
The truth is most of us know we can improve in the area of energy. With 
oil prices at above $100 a barrel and the price at the pump heading 
toward $4 a gallon, we need to develop a coherent national energy 
policy to find that common ground, and that need has taken on even 
greater urgency.
  So what makes for good energy policy and how can we ensure that 
agreement is finally reached on meaningful energy legislation? I think 
we should have essentially five goals, and those five goals are: an 
energy that is abundant, affordable, clean, diverse, and domestic. I 
realize these words, especially in combination with one another, don't 
lend themselves to a clever acronym or a catchy slogan, so maybe we 
need to rearrange them and figure out what word we can make. But if we 
follow these as our guiding principles and make sure our legislative 
efforts reflect each and every one, I believe genuine progress can be 
within our reach. So let's start with the concept of affordable energy, 
because that is certainly the most relevant topic right now.
  Times such as these serve as a wakeup call as to how important 
energy--and particularly affordable domestic energy--is to our Nation. 
Energy provides the base of everything we do; not just heat and power 
and light and transportation, but the food we eat, the clothes we 
wear--everything. Whether for a server farm or for a soybean farm, 
abundant and affordable energy is the foundation for a robust economy. 
But, unfortunately, there seem to be those who feel the key to clean 
energy is to make energy scarce and expensive. We don't need an 
experiment or an act of Congress to know an economic recession reduces 
emissions, and a depression, of course, would even do that more so. The 
current price of oil is a stark reminder that while making energy 
scarce and expensive may, in fact, reduce our emissions, it is an even 
more effective way to crush an economic recovery. That is not good for 
us.
  The President has proposed we should raise the taxes on oil 
companies, but in the middle of tough economic times, the American 
people are not open to those policies that will increase their energy 
costs. There is a better path that would do more to bolster our energy 
security, more to create jobs, more to generate government revenues 
and, equally, more to reduce our deficit. Instead of punishing one 
industry to promote another, let's use our tremendous reserves of 
conventional resources which account for more than 80 percent of our 
energy supply. Let's use these to fund the next generation of clean 
technologies. Let's prove up and produce our resources and then put 
these revenues toward--whether it is tax incentives, whether it is 
additional research, whether it is studies at our universities, you 
name it, but let's use these wisely.

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  Speaking specifically to the regulatory burdens on energy, I think we 
all recognize the Clean Air Act has made our air cleaner and certainly 
improved our health. Carbon monoxide, SOX, NOX, 
and a host of other pollutants have largely been removed from 
smokestack and tailpipe emissions. I think we recognize there is more 
we can do in terms of the regulation of HFCs and other greenhouse gases 
which, while they emit much lesser quantities, they certainly have 
potent greenhouse effects. But the Clean Air Act is not the proper 
legal framework for regulation of carbon dioxide, which is emitted in 
huge quantities by almost every human activity and whose effect cannot 
be confined to a nonattainment area, and which, in itself, is not 
harmful to health. All of us want a cleaner energy supply, but the 
approach taken over the last several years seems to have been one of 
all or nothing instead of the all-of-the-above approach, and I think it 
has been counterproductive. We need to seek out and accept policies 
that will lead to steady progress.
  We don't yet know the best way to provide energy that is clean and 
abundant and affordable, but what we do know is there is a whole myriad 
of opportunities. We have oil and natural gas; we have wind; we have 
solar; we have hydro; we have geothermal. We have coal, biofuels, 
fission, fusion. Just naming the types of energy and the subcategories 
within energy is a whole floor speech in and of itself. Whether it 
turns out to be fireflies we collect in a bottle or something we simply 
haven't even imagined yet, we don't know what source or what 
combination of sources will actually turn out to be best for America. 
That should be cause for those of us here in Congress to be 
extraordinarily careful in trying to predetermine what sources should 
either win or lose. We are always talking around here about we need to 
steer clear of picking winners and losers, and yet it seems that is 
what we do all the time. A diversity of energy sources provides the 
best proving ground and insurance against overreliance on any one 
source, and a healthy economy provides the best demand for the cleanest 
sources available.
  Winston Churchill once said:

       On no one quality, on no one process, on no one country, on 
     no one route, and on no one field must we be dependent. 
     Safety and certainty in oil lie in variety and variety alone.

  Winston Churchill was talking about oil, but his words are just as 
applicable to our need for diversity in all of our types of energy.
  Finally, the need to make our energy domestic to the greatest degree 
possible is something we have all known--we all know we need to do 
this--but we have failed to do anything about it for decades. It 
shouldn't take an upheaval in North Africa to convince us that sending 
billions of dollars a day out of our economy to countries that are not 
our friends is a bad idea.
  We know it is a bad idea. Yet we continue year after year after year. 
We need to focus on two parallel tracks: increased domestic production 
and decreased consumption. We absolutely should reduce our dependence 
on oil. In our early days of the automobile, we saw a wide range of 
experiments as inventors and entrepreneurs strove to find the best 
approach. Again, I think we are on the verge of a renaissance in 
vehicle technologies where we explore electric vehicles, biofuels, fuel 
cells, efficient diesels, natural gas, propane, and other approaches. 
But for right now, today, we use 20 million barrels of oil a day, and 
for the vast majority of its uses there is no imminent substitute.
  I said last week in my comments that for the sake of our national 
economy, for the sake of our Nation's security, and for the sake of the 
world's environment, we should produce at home the highest possible 
percentage of the oil we do consume.
  Domestic production is currently being stifled by those who engage in 
what I guess you would call magical thinking--that if only we stop 
producing oil in the United States, then the world's need for oil is 
going to go away and Skittles are going to fall from the sky and 
unicorns will prance in the streets. It is just not real.
  The harsh reality is our foreign oil dependence contributes to 
conflicts where young men and women die or come home without limbs, and 
we wreck our economy. There always will be future conflicts in the 
world, whether in the Middle East or elsewhere. As a nation, we will 
have to decide on our proper role in each. We can and should do 
everything possible, however, to eliminate foreign oil dependence as a 
strategic consideration.
  Madam President, none of this is due to America running out of oil. 
In Alaska, my home State, we have estimated reserves in excess of 65 
years' worth of Persian Gulf imports. So, again, in Alaska alone--one 
State--we have reserves in excess of 65 years of what we take from the 
Persian Gulf. There are also, of course, tremendous reserves in other 
States and, of course, offshore.
  For decades, opponents of domestic production have argued that we 
should not produce more because we are not going to see this come 
online for years to come. If, 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago we had 
ignored those who had said ANWR was unacceptable because it would take 
a decade to develop, we would now, at this point in time, be enjoying 
another 1 million barrels of domestic production per day. But we said, 
10 years ago, 20 years ago, it is going to take too long to bring that 
ANWR oil online, so we just ought not do it. Look where it puts us 
today.
  Opponents also like to say that a policy of increased domestic 
production will have no immediate effect on oil prices. We don't even 
want to waste time arguing the folly of trying to dismiss good national 
energy policy because it is long term. I also note that using the 
Strategic Oil Reserve to mitigate high oil prices--to maybe push them 
back below $100 a barrel for a short term, a couple weeks--should be 
unacceptable to us. We need a viable long-term answer, not a short-term 
and shortsighted political alibi.
  There is nothing that OPEC fears more than America committing to the 
twin tracks of increased domestic production and reduced consumption. 
Were we to do so, we would see OPEC doing everything in their power to 
drive down world oil prices to make us abandon our policies and, once 
again, hamstring ourselves and make us reliant upon them for our oil.
  I want to offer an important perspective. Even if we cannot accept 
that America increasing production and decreasing consumption would 
affect global oil prices, remember, price is not the only reason to 
advance such a policy. Right now, the high price of oil works against 
America, and it works for every nation that deliberately produces its 
reserves. Production provides them with jobs, it provides them with 
revenue for their government, and it provides better trade balances and 
national security, but all at our country's expense.
  We are the only country that has identified a huge resource base and 
then absolutely refused to produce it. So often we hear on this floor 
discussion about China eating our lunch in clean energy, about Japan 
and Germany outpacing us in wind and solar technology. But does anybody 
think if those countries had a Gulf of Mexico or an ANWR, they would 
not be drilling in those areas as we speak? Does anyone think those 
nations demagog nuclear power or refuse to permit coal plants? Their 
energy policies are on a better track than ours. They are not just 
looking at what is happening today; they are looking at tomorrow, at 
today--they have an energy policy that carries them out.
  There is an article in the Wall Street Journal of yesterday by Nansen 
Saleri. He concludes his article with this statement:

       The U.S. does not have an energy problem. It has an energy 
     strategy problem.

  Think about that. It is not lacking the resources; it is the strategy 
for how we develop our energy resources.
  During his campaign, President Obama liked to quote Dr. Martin Luther 
King and talk about ``the fierce urgency of now.'' There are few issues 
more important or more fundamental to our Nation's long-term success 
than a viable energy policy. People are very correct when they say that 
parts of this will take time, and parts will take a longer period of 
time. But now is

[[Page 3687]]

never more fiercely urgent than when we have such an important and long 
journey ahead of us. If we are ever going to take control of our energy 
future, now is the time to come together and support policies that 
promote abundant, affordable, clean, diverse, and domestic energy. It 
is critically important to us.
  I look forward to these conversations that we will continue on the 
Senate floor as we talk about ways we not only work to reduce our 
budget, ways we not only work to create jobs in this country, but ways 
that we truly build a strategic energy policy for the long-term for 
this country.
  With that, I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. ENSIGN. Madam President, 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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