The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“ENERGY” mentioning the U.S. Dept. of Energy was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H13398-H13403 on Nov. 8, 2007.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
ENERGY
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 18, 2007, the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Inslee) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, I come to the House this evening to discuss our great irony about our position in the world right now, economically and environmentally.
The irony is that we face some real challenges that touch on our energy-based economy, and I think those challenges are obvious to us tonight, a challenge as oil approaches $100 a barrel, $3 a gallon, and there's no relief in sight.
Americans right now are feeling the pinch associated with fossil fuel costs going up. We have a challenge in that we still are addicted to Middle Eastern oil as a principal source of oil, and as long as we are addicted to oil we will have a problem being wrapped around the axle of the Middle East.
And we have the problem of global warming, which is something that is becoming increasingly clear to us, not with scientific research but with our own eyes. In fact, I was pretty stunned to see the photographs of the arctic this summer where 1 million square miles of the arctic disappeared this summer, totally shocking the scientific community. An area the size of six Californias disappeared, melted unexpectedly in the arctic this summer.
And, of course, that's a big concern because the arctic ice cap is sort of like a big sunshade. It reflects energy back into space. Now that it's gone in the summer, or substantial portions of it, the oceans are absorbing six to ten times more energy, having a pernicious feedback loop, making the problem even worse.
In fact, if you look at the projections prepared by the scientific community showing the arctic ice cap in the year 2000, if you project up to the year 2040, the scientific community basically has found the arctic ice cap will be gone in the late summer months, essentially in my children's lifetime certainly.
And the results of these three challenges that we have, increasing fossil fuel prices, our addiction to Middle Eastern oil and global warming, are certainly great challenges and ought to give us pause.
But I'm here to talk about optimism rather than fear because the great irony is that these three challenges have the capacity to ignite one of the most positive developments in the U.S. economy ever, and that is sparking the potential clean energy revolution that we're not accustomed to enjoying in the United States.
{time} 2230
Our situation is a little bit like it was in the 1960s. If you recall, in the early 1960s, when John F. Kennedy came and stood right behind me here on May 25, 1961, and said that we would put a man on the Moon in 10 years and bring him back safely, that was a very bold and audacious thing to say. At the time, rockets were blowing up on the launch pad, and our computers were in rudimentary stages. We were way behind the Russians. We just put Spam in a can up. We hadn't even invented Tang yet.
But we were driven to going to the Moon by a challenge, the challenge with the Russians, and the need for technological imminence that the Americans felt we deserved and had a destiny to fulfill. Indeed, we did fulfill that destiny when we went to the Moon in the original Apollo project.
Now we have these challenges involving oil and global warming that we can use to the same effect as Kennedy used the challenge in the space race, and that effect is to rally the United States of America to a brighter future and a higher destiny to use our technological genius to develop a clean energy future for the United States of America.
I am here tonight to share some of the good news that is extant across the United States in all 50 States where tonight there are men and women of genius and entrepreneurial perseverance and business acumen that are building the technology that allows us to beat global warming, break our addiction to Middle Eastern oil and, third, grow millions of new jobs in the clean energy economy that we intend to build.
I will here tonight, when we conclude, finish by saying we will be able to achieve the same level of technological leap forward as Kennedy achieved in space. We will do for energy what Kennedy did for space.
If I can, let me talk about some of the things I have learned in the last year. I have been proposing a bill called the New Apollo Energy Act for some time and, of course, writing a book called ``Apollo's Fire,'' I met a lot of people around the country who are now engaged in this great challenge. I would like to share with my colleagues and the public tonight what I found.
First I want to address the issue of our cars. We got great cars. My favorite is a 1956 Chevy, always was, always will be, but we know that we have a great problem that 40 percent of the carbon dioxide emitted as global warming gases come from our cars and trucks. We know that we are paying $3 a gallon and it's going to go up. We know that we are taking our money and putting it in the pump machine, and it's going right to the Middle East to finance people who are attacking us.
We need to reinvent the car. We need to take a bold leap forward in technology to find a new way to propel the car in a more efficient way. I am here tonight to say that we have the ability to do that in the immediate future.
I want to share with you a picture of a car called the General Motors Volt. This is a prototype of a car that General Motors hopes to have in mass production 5 or 6 years from now. It is a plug-in hybrid vehicle. A plug-in hybrid vehicle, this car is quite stylish, and this physically exists. I actually brought this car to show to my colleagues several months ago. Thanks to General Motors, it exists physically.
The way this car works is that it has a tremendous combination of advance battery technology and hybrid drive train technology that allows it to be plugged in at night. When you have this car, you will be able to take it home, put it in the garage, plug it in. The next morning you unplug it. You can drive it for up to 40 miles on total electrical propulsion, no CO2, no gasoline for the first 40 miles.
The beauty of that, and the importance of that, is that when you operate on electricity from the electrical grid, it may cost as little as 1 to 3 cents a mile for fuel. It costs 9 cents-plus a mile or more for gasoline now, and it's absolutely clean while you are driving the car. Now, obviously there is some CO2 involved in the production of the electricity, but I will get to that in a moment, so it's basically very inexpensive.
Because over 60 percent of all the daily driving is under 40 miles, over half of the daily trips that Americans take will be pure electrical propulsion. Then if you want to drive more than 40 miles before you get home to recharge, you have a hybrid engine similar to the hybrid engines now used in both domestic and foreign manufacturers, to basically use a combination of fuel, and right now it's gasoline, someday it will be cellulosic ethanol, and electricity residual in the batteries to drive until you fill up your tank again or you get back to get recharged.
When these cars are produced, we will get over 100 miles a gallon of gasoline. This won't be some small marginal increments, and you know right now we are debating whether to improve our corporate average fuel efficiency standards up to 35 miles a gallon in 10 or 15 years. These are going to blow right by that. It's going to blow right through the things we are debating right now and leapfrog that technology that is actually available today.
Cars like this are on the road today being driven. I have driven one. They use a lithium ion battery manufactured by the A123 Systems in Massachusetts. People have taken the Toyota Prius. I drive a Toyota Prius. It is a great car. I am 6'2", 200 pounds; comfortable, safe, quiet, works like a dream for us. Folks have taken these Priuses and converted them into a plug-in hybrid car today. They are driving around the streets of America.
I drove the first one that was commercially sold. We are going to have them in mass production in several years, and that's why it's important for this Chamber to send a signal to the auto industry that we are going to have a legal requirement that will improve the economy, and it will be simple to do and economical as well. Economical, because when these are in mass production, they may cost a couple of thousand dollars more than if you didn't have this technology, but you are going to save three or four times that amount in fuel costs later on.
A double bonus of these cars is that as you drive them, as the grid electricity gets cleaner, because as we move to solar thermal energy and wind power energy and other sources, perhaps clean coal energy, we will have less CO2 emissions so the car will actually get cleaner. I mean, except wine, this will be the only thing that gets better with age and put out less CO2 over time.
A triple bonus, according to people who have studied this, these cars have the potential to help the electrical grid where utilities can essentially use the batteries in the car in the garage at night to store energy. Your utility can be generating wind power at night or wave power at night or any kind of power at night, feed that energy into your battery and rent your battery in your garage.
Economists who studied this think the day may come when you are paid
$2,000 or $3,000 a year essentially for the temporary rental of your battery once your battery becomes part of the electrical grid. There are companies today in my town of Seattle, Washington, who are developing the software to do that.
The point I think is important to make is that as we talk about setting caps on carbon dioxide, as we talk about increasing mileage requirements for our cars, we ought to have optimism and we ought to have confidence and we ought to recognize what Kennedy did about the can-do spirit of America, that that spirit is going to build us cars that can radically improve our mileage and radically reduce CO2 and then become a source of exports so we can start exporting these cars around the world.
Why can't we sell these cars to China? We can, if, in fact, we will start sending the signals from this Chamber to the industry that this is going to be very achievable. It makes sense once we limit carbon dioxide.
Now, this isn't the only solution to our car woes. General Motors, Ford, Honda, various other companies are also looking at electrifying the car and using a fuel cell hydrogen source to essentially generate the electricity to run electrical motors. That may be as good or better as lithium ion batteries. It is probably a little further away from commercialization due to the storage issues of hydrogen and the distribution needs for the distribution system of hydrogen, but it is another alternative that at least one company intends to have commercially available in the next several years.
So we now are ready to have leapfrog technology. It's because of the genius of Americans, and it's getting ready to go, and we should not be fearful in this Chamber. We should be confident of our ability to reinvent the car, thanks in part to guys like Felix Kramer, who essentially built one of these in his garage in California and dared Detroit and the rest of the auto industry internationally to build one, and that's going to happen now.
So we know we can reinvent the car. But where do we get the energy for the electrical grid to energize these electrical cars? Well, the good news is that the genius of people building cars is matched by the genius of people figuring out how to generate electricity. I have been stunned in the last year, as I have studied this, and as I have gone around talking to people across America, I have been stunned with the rapidity of the developments that are taking place in the clean electricity field. You literally cannot turn over a rock in this country and not find someone developing a technology that is helping to find a way to generate electricity cleanly.
I want to relate a little story of a company I heard about months ago. It's a company called Ausra Energy, Ausra. Ausra is owned largely by a fellow named Vinod Khosla, who is a fellow who was very instrumental in the development of software, founded Sun Microsystems, was very successful, and now has taken his talents to the field of clean energy.
Mr. Khosla has now looked at all of the potential places where we can develop clean energy, recognizing that the world is going to demand these new technologies. He is a person, as many of the other people will talk about tonight, who did very well in software and Internet, and now see the same potential in the clean energy world as existed in software and Internet. They recognized a market opportunity, and they recognized that there are technological solutions that can fulfill these market opportunities.
A fellow named John O'Donnell sent me an e-mail, who is one of the leaders of the Ausra Company, and it was a really happy e-mail to get. I will tell you why. I was on this floor the first week in August when we were debating what's called a renewable portfolio standard, and in the energy bill that we eventually passed in the House in August, which is a great bill by the way, a good start on this proposal, we were working to get a provision that would call for 15 percent of our electricity to be generated by clean renewable sources by the year 2020.
Of course, we talked to each other on the floor, and I was talking to some of my colleagues from the State of Florida. They were explaining to me, and I was saying, well, you know, there are a lot of different sources of clean energy, biofuels, wave power, clean coal technology. Efficiency in conservation is a form of what we call the first fuel and solar power. When I said that, one of my colleagues from Florida said we can't do solar power in Florida.
I thought that was a little curious because I thought the license plate said Florida, the Sunshine State, but he explained that because they have some clouds in Florida, it's not as productive a solar field as perhaps the deserts of Arizona. In fact, that is true. Arizona might be 10 or 15 percent better than Florida.
But, a few weeks later, I was talking to Mr. Khosla, who told me that his technology has a perfect fit for Florida, it's called Ausra. This is a picture of the Ausra thermal solar generator. The way the Ausra system works is that it is an array of mirrors. These blue long lines are essentially flat-panel mirrors, long arrays. They are quite long. As you can see these mirrors concentrate the sun's energy on a little pipe. You can see this pipe running about here above the long mirrors, and these are all focusing the reflected rays of the sun on that pipe. It heats water and eventually creates steam, and the steam turns a turbine, just like a coal-fired plant would, and generates electricity.
Now, this Ausra technology could be and is, as far as we can tell right now, probably the least expensive of the solar thermal technologies that are being considered. The reason Mr. Khosla explained it to me is because they discovered a way to make these mirrors flat rather than concave, and they can make them a lot cheaper. The other provisions have a concave surface to them. They are much more expensive to manufacture.
{time} 2245
Well, as a result of these and other improvements they made, Mr. Khosla's company just signed for ten, I believe, hundreds of megawatts with the Florida public, with a Florida public power utility for the production of zero CO2 emitting solar thermal energy. So here we have a situation in a State that at least some folks didn't think we could produce solar energy, and within weeks we have a contract with a major league, a Florida utility to produce electricity for thousands of people in Florida. And this stuff's powerful. In every 2 acres of these mirrors, you can do somewhere between, you can provide enough electricity for somewhere between 750 and 1,000 homes. This is not just, you know, powering just your fan. It's real electricity.
And now I got an e-mail from Mr. O'Donnell 3 days ago that, in fact, a contract has also been signed, a major public utility in California. And the sky's the limit. Now, this power's a little more expensive than coal-based power now, but the folks who run this company believe that can be competitive in just a matter of a few years once the cost of investment capital comes down and their scales of economy, and the fact that the prices of fossil fuels have not exactly been coming down, witness the price of gasoline.
So in a very few years, this technology has the capability to be as inexpensive or less expensive than traditional fossil fuel-based systems with zero CO2 emissions without sending our money to Saudi Arabia and without digging up anything in the ground. That's a pretty good deal.
Now, there are other companies besides OSRA that have similar technology, and there are contracts being let around the country for them as well. So we have the potential, not the potential, but the existence of real energy. This is not a pipe dream. This exists in reality. And we have the right to be excited about it.
Now, there are many other ways to produce potentially clean energy. One of those potentially is clean coal technology, and research is going on, as we speak, in the potential of being able to take coal, gasify it, draw off the carbon dioxide, take the carbon dioxide and inject it underground into permanent geological sequestration, and then burn coal without any CO2 emissions of any significant amount. And that research is expensive, and it is not a guarantee that this tip of technology will be commercially viable. But it is a distinct possibility.
In fact, an MIT researcher that reviewed this believed it was probable that this type of sequestration technology, putting CO2 underground in either large saline aquifers underground or in two or three other types of geological formations, that we would be able to do this in many, many places in the United States in commercially viable costs.
Now, that technology's being developed too. There's a company called Ramgen Corporation in Seattle, Washington, that has developed a compression technology that costs 30 percent less money that could make this commercially viable to allow true clean coal to occur. And it strikes me that research to make that determination whether this can be done is appropriate investment.
Now, this is to be distinguished from something you might hear called coal-to-liquid, which is a very different thing. Coal-to-liquid is turning the coal into a liquid and then burning the liquid. When you just burn the liquid, for instance, in an airplane motor or a car motor, you end up putting CO2 right back into the air. So coal-to-liquid is not an improvement from a global warming perspective.
What we call clean coal, where the CO2, from its production is actually sequestered underground, is a marked improvement in global warming, and that's another technology that we are looking at. But there are a host of others, and some of them are off our coastline. And I learned about these technologies in the last year in the course of my research and in the preparation of the new Apollo Energy Act that I've cosponsored.
Off of our coastline in our estuaries, we have enormous amounts of energy in the waves and in the tides. And I have a picture here of some of the technologies that are now under development to harness that energy. And to have a, just to get a sense of the energy that is in our waves, if you've ever been thrashed in the surf like I have, you get some sense of how much energy is in a wave. But it's truly awesome.
In a 10-by-10-mile stretch of the coast of the Pacific, just in a 10-
by-10-mile square, there is enough energy in the waves that could power all the electrical needs for the State of California. That's big-time energy. And the Department of Energy has concluded that if we can commercialize wave power technology, it could produce even in excess of 10 percent of all the electrical needs of the United States. So there's an awesome amount of energy off the waves.
In fact, the Pacific Coast of the United States happens to be the, happily, the single most beneficial prospective place for wave power in the world. This has actually been mapped. There are maps of the wave power all around the world, and the best in place in the world is off the Pacific Coast.
So now we have brilliant Americans developing technology to harness that. We have a picture of some of them here. A buoy developed by Ocean Power Technology. As this buoy bobs up and down, it compresses air that then compresses, essentially, hydraulic fluid and drives an electrical generator.
There are others from a company called Finavera that uses a system as the buoy bobs up and down, it pressurizes a column of water that then turns a generator. There are others that look like these large snakes. As they undulate and move up and down, they, through mechanical transference of energy, basically run a generator that then through a wire sends the electricity back to the coast.
Now, the first of these in the Continental United States has now gone in the water off the coast of Oregon. We have them off the, actually powering Navy bases in Hawaii right now that have been in the water now for over a year. We're learning a lot from them. We're learning that there's a lot of energy there. And, in fact, as you might imagine, we've learned that you've got to make them incredibly strong to withstand the forces of the sea.
Now, people, we cannot guarantee that this technology is going to be commercially viable. It is an infant industry. But we know, with the energy available in the waves, and we know the advances we can make, I think it is a reasonable opportunity that justifies investment in this technology, and, in fact, the private sector is making a very large investment in this technology.
Now, there's another type of power called tidal power which involves currents, harnessing the currents that are driven by the tides, by the Moon, of course. You know, this is kind of lunar energy. The Moons run the tides. And we now have technology using turbines that look like underwater wind turbines. There's a picture of one here manufactured by a company called Verdant that is now in the East River in New York.
These essentially work like wind turbines that you've seen. As the tide moves in and out, and of course it's very predictable and happens every day, it spins this turbine very slowly, so it has a minimal impact on marine life and generates the electricity. And these are actually in the water.
Now it's interesting, we found out there's so much energy in these currents these have had to be rebuilt, which is a good sign, essentially, because we found out there's more energy than we knew. So we have substantial energy off of our coastlines that we have potential for capturing.
Now, a lot of people thought ocean energy is where wind energy was about 20 years ago. About 20 years ago, people started to put up these wind mills and generate electricity from them. And when they started, a lot of people thought they were kind of wacky. It was very expensive at the time. It was a new idea and the oil and gas folks kind of laughed at them. That was 20 years ago.
During this succeeding 20 years, we've had continuing improvements of the technology, and now we have wind turbines over 300-foot in height powering over 1,000 homes apiece, producing electricity that is as cheap as any electricity in the Nation.
Today, in the State of Washington, where I hail from, in southeast Washington, we have the largest wind farm in the Western Hemisphere producing electricity as cheap as coal-fired electricity. And now it is the largest most rapidly growing form of energy in the United States, and it has still huge potential to grow because we have enormous resources of wind. In fact, it's growing so fast that the wind turbine manufacturers cannot keep up.
And I'd like to tell the story of an American company called Clipper Wind. Clipper Wind tonight has several hundred Iowans working in Cedar Rapids building clipper wind turbines; good, well-paid American jobs now spinning, and these are also being exported around the world, producing exactly zero CO2 emitting wind energy. And these are American jobs.
And that's what this is about. Whether it's plug-in hybrid cars or solar thermal technology, or wind turbine technology, these are American jobs that we're building. But we're only going to build them if Congress starts to adopt the policies that drive investment into these technologies, rather than just the fossil fuel industry. And that's why we need to take some of these subsidies we've given to the oil and gas industry and we did it in the House bill we passed some time ago, $16 billion, reel it back in and put it into a fund to help some of these nascent industries grow.
And we need a renewable portfolio standard to send a message to the investment community that they can invest in these technologies, because we know there's going to be a demand for them. And we need a cap and trade system so that we don't allow polluting industries to put their carbon dioxide and their pollution in unlimited amounts into the atmosphere. And when those things happen, there will be a gold rush, a flood tide of investment capital into the companies that are developing these technologies. That's what they need. They've got the brilliance. As soon as they have the investment capital, they're going to take off. And as soon as the demand is obvious, investment capital will flow.
I talked to a fellow named John Plaza. He was here three days. John has a really interesting story. He was an airline pilot, and he said he sort of got bored going back and forth. I know what it feels like because I fly back and forth every Monday and Friday. And he decided he wanted to try something new. So he went out and decided he was going to start brewing up biodiesel fuel, literally in his garage, and started to figure out a way to make biodiesel. And he actually came to believe it was commercially viable. So he went and found an investor, a fellow named Martin Tobias, who was successful at Microsoft; raised some capital, built a little plant on the shores of the Duwamish River in Washington. Really wasn't much to look at. Just your typical little tilt-up warehouse.
John was pretty creative. He went to the Rainier Brewing Company, the iconic Big R in Seattle, and he bought two big huge brewing vats from the Rainier Brewing Company, and he moved them down to this little warehouse and he designed a way himself on how to filter some of the material out of biodiesel when you refine it. And he started refining biodiesel, and he started selling it.
Well, that was last year. This year he is leading and has constructed the largest biodiesel plant in the world that puts out 100 million gallons of biodiesel at Grays Harbor, Washington, a town that's experienced some economic hardship because of the decline of the timber industry. And John, in his genius and his business acumen, has built a business hiring people in Washington State, now going to be shipping biodiesel all around. They just signed a deal with a distributor to start distributing it. And the very first committed biodiesel pump from this group called Propel was installed in Ballard, Washington, just a couple of weeks ago.
So here's good old American know-how, can-do spirit, developing a whole new industry. And the biofuel industry has a very bright future.
{time} 2300
I would like to talk just for a moment about biofuels. We know we have corn ethanol today in abundance, and 23 percent of all the corn grown in the United States now goes to ethanol. And it's been productive. The price of gasoline actually would have been worse if we hadn't had that ethanol available. It's bad enough as it is.
But the good news I want to share with you is that we have tremendous cause for optimism that we are going to grow second, third, and fourth generations of ethanol. They're going to be much more productive than corn ethanol that we are using now because the corn ethanol we use now only uses the kernel, a very small part of the total plant. Scientists have now developed ways to use the entire plant, all of the carbohydrates in the plant, what they call the corn stover, switchgrass, and some advanced feedstocks that have the capability to be four or five times as productive per acre as corn.
And I was at a company called Mendel Biotechnology in Hayward, California, a few weeks ago that have developed a grass called Miscanthus. Miscanthus grows about 10 or 12 feet high, a real thick-
looking plant. When you harvest it, you take the whole plant. They take it, they chop it up, they expose it to heat and enzymes that breaks down the cell wall and freezes the carbohydrates that then could be distilled into an alcohol. Ethanol is an alcohol. And that feedstock has the potential to produce four or five times as much per acre as existing corn ethanol with less fertilizer and less water needed.
We're also making tremendous strides in enzymes. And there are ways to do this even without enzymes. The very first cellulosic ethanol plant in America had the ground broken 2 days ago, I believe, the Ramgen Company, another company owned by Vinod Khosla that I talked about, and we have five others that are going to begin construction shortly. So conservative estimates are that within the next 20 years, we will be able to have 25 to 30 percent of all of our transportation fuels fueled by biofuels. And the best is yet to come.
Last night I learned about a company called Solazyme. Solazyme is developing a way to make biodiesel from algae that is 50 times as productive as corn per square meter or acre in its productive capability. Now, it's not commercialized yet. It's quite aways from commercialization. A lot of work has to be done. But when that is done, Katie, bar the door when it comes to biofuels. And when we do that, we are going to have plug-in hybrid cars that we can plug in, run for 40 miles, then burn cellulosic ethanol or potentially biodiesel, and have an infinite number of miles per gallon of gasoline because we won't be using it. We will have a decarbonized car. The car may become total electric, but even if it doesn't become total electric, it can become decarbonized by a combination of plug-in hybrid technology and biofuels. And of course biofuels are zero CO2 emitting net because you don't put any more carbon into the atmosphere than the plant takes out of the atmosphere. It's just a little circle. The plant sucks the CO2 out of the atmosphere, photosynthesis kicks in. You make carbohydrates, build the plant, chop the plant up. You make it into biodiesel or cellulosic ethanol. You burn it, and then CO2 goes back up and the cycle is repeated. There is no net CO2, unlike coal and oil. We are taking stuff out of the ground that has been there for a million years, and that has enormous net increases to the atmosphere.
So here we have existing technology that is on the cusp of commercialization and American know-how is going to do it. And that is why we in this Chamber and my colleagues who might be listening tonight, should that be the case anywhere in this fair country, we ought to have confidence that we can move forward with the host of these clean energy policies that we are now considering and realize that the American economy is going to grow as a result of these policies, not shrink, because the world is going to need this clean energy. And it ought to be America that is selling it to China and the rest of the world, and we have every possibility of doing that.
Now, there is another place where the clean energy revolution is going to be really important, and that is in our homes, in a lot of different ways. And some people think that to make our homes electrical-generating units or to make them zero CO2 emitters is sort of a Buck Rogers fantasy, and I have learned that that is anything but true. In fact, on the mall 2 weeks ago, we had a solar decathlon where 13 colleges sent kids, and anybody under 40 is a kid to me now, but these college students that came in and built these zero CO2 emitting solar-powered homes. And they were just delightful to look at and fascinating to behold what these young students had created.
Now, they did look a little different than my home and maybe yours look like because they had the absolute avant guard technology in them.
But I want to show you another home in one of the rainiest parts of Washington, up north in Redmond, Washington. This is the home of Mike and Meg Towne. Mike is a teacher at Redmond High School. And several years ago Mike was talking to his students about the importance of dealing with global warming and all the whiz-bang technologies that he thought was going to come on to help solve this problem. And one of his students said, Mr. Towne, if this is so cool, why aren't you using it? And he said to himself, well, maybe I will. So he and his wife, Meg, decided to go out and build essentially a zero net CO2 home that's solar powered, and they did it. And they did it for very little more than it costs to build a typical home. And here's their home in Redmond, Washington.
I want to note this is a very unusual day because it was not raining when this picture was taken, and it tends to rain a little bit where I live, and it rains even more where Mike lives. This is up towards the foothills of the Cascade Mountains, and it's just a very damp, gray environment. But even in that environment, they put up these solar cells, and you will see that they are incorporated into the roofing material. You can just put them on. Mike put them on himself. They used a little extra insulation, decent windows, designed it in a way to minimize heat loss. And right now they have zero electrical net usage because they feed back into the grid frequently of electricity they are not using, and they netted out to zero. And Americans are going to have that right if a bill that I have been working on for 4 years called the Net Metering bill passes, so that when you generate electricity and you feed it back into the grid, you get paid for it.
The point of this is that this exists today in rainy climates. It's possible almost anywhere in the country. And we are going to do it. And we have a bill in the House that we have now passed this August that will establish building codes that will decrease energy use by 50 percent in our homes and our businesses in the next 10 years of new construction. That is possible to do. We are doing it. Mike and Meg Towne did it. And we are well on our way as part of an important part of the clean energy revolution.
And, by the way, this is going to create jobs, because when we retrofit our homes, when we put in new insulation, when we put in weather stripping, when we put in more efficient heating systems, all of those things generate jobs. And a conservative estimate of the new Apollo Energy Act that I have sponsored is that it will create 3 million new jobs in the next several years.
So what we have seen tonight is a host of new economic opportunities for America. And what I started out with, I was talking about that this is an irony. The irony is that these great challenges of global warming and addiction to Middle Eastern oil and the huge increase in the cost of oil and gas are actually disguised opportunities. And if this Chamber will act, and we would like to do it in a bipartisan basis, to adopt this signal to the market, these technologies are going to blossom.
And I would like to talk about one policy that is of overriding interest, and that is the cap-and-trade system that we need in this country to drive investment in these technologies. Right now we have a broken market. We have a great market failure. And that market failure is that we are allowing polluting industries to use our atmosphere, a scarce resource, and put unlimited amounts of their pollutants into the air for no cost whatsoever. And that is not only morally wrong; it's economically wrong, because when you have an asset, if somebody uses it up, they ought to pay for that; right? And there ought to be some limit on it. But right now when a utility burns coal and they dump the CO2 in our atmosphere, an atmosphere we have in common, it's like a city park. And we would not allow a utility to back their dump truck into the city park and dump their trash in the city park. We would not allow some refinery putting CO2 into the atmosphere to drive up to the city park and dump their sludge in the city park. But that's what we are doing right now by allowing unlimited amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And that has to stop. We have to develop a limit on the amount of carbon dioxide that goes into the atmosphere. And a cap-and-trade system does that. When we develop a cap, we will put and guarantee Americans that only a certain amount of carbon dioxide can go into the atmosphere every year. It's common sense. We can't continue to put this into the atmosphere without very devastating ramifications. And we need to charge for that as well.
Europe made a big mistake. When they did this, they just handed these permits out, and the utilities took them and then took a huge windfall profit by charging rate payers for an asset that was just given to them. We can't do that. We need to have an auction of those permits to create a price for carbon and to use the market to determine who really needs them and what they will pay for that scarce resource.
And this is a resource owned by the taxpayers. The taxpayers own the atmosphere, not the corporations. The citizens of America own the air we breathe, not the utilities. The Congress has a responsibility to our citizens to take care of that asset, and we are not doing it yet. And when somebody uses that asset, they need to pay for using that asset.
So what we would propose to do is have an auction and let the market determine what the cost of those permits are for polluting industries. And the sooner we do that, the better; the more powerful impact we will have in driving investment to these new technologies, and the sooner that taxpayers will get a break getting paid by something that they own mutually. And that money can then be used for further research and development into these technologies. It can be used to help lower-
income folks with their heating and cooling expenses. And it can be used as part of the clean energy revolution. And we need to increase that R and D. We are spending 25 times more in Iraq today than we are spending on trying to solve this energy problem. We spent seven times more on the original Apollo Project than we are spending today on this energy problem. We have got to ramp up our Federal R and D as the private sector does as well.
So in closing, Mr. Speaker, I would like to say that if people come to know the people I have known during the last year; the folks who are developing solar thermal; the folks who are developing clean coal; the folks who are developing advanced forms of cellulosic ethanol and advanced forms of biodiesel; the folks who are developing wind and tidal power; the people who are developing what's called the SIPs industry, the structural integrated panels, where they have built these panels now that you can build a house with them and you can reduce your usage by 40 percent at no additional cost; the people who are developing the plug-in hybrid car, these are the Americans that we need to listen to and have confidence in that they are going to solve this problem. And that is why in the next few weeks in this Chamber I hope we will pass an energy bill that is as bold and as visionary and as optimistic as Kennedy's original Apollo Project. And America deserves nothing less than that because we are just as capable, we are just as smart, and we are just as technologically ambitious as we were in the 1960s. And if we do that, America will produce. It is our destiny. The New Apollo Energy Act will solve these problems and grow our economy at the same time.
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