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.
“CLEAN ENERGY” mentioning the U.S. Dept of Agriculture was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H42-H49 on Jan. 4, 2007.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
CLEAN ENERGY
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentleman from Washington (Mr. Inslee) is recognized for 60 minutes.
=========================== NOTE ===========================
January 4, 2007--On Page H42 the following appeared: The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 4, 2007, the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Inslee) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
The online version should be corrected to read: The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentleman from Washington (Mr. Inslee) is recognized for 60 minutes.
========================= END NOTE =========================
Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, I come to the floor this evening on truly what is a historic day, the beginning of this Congress. Historic, I will mention two reasons: One, the first woman Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, something that certainly has caused a lot of joy here and across the country and it is something worthy of noting. But a second historic event arises from Speaker Pelosi's first address as Speaker of the House today that I think marks a pivotal moment in our future of the country when it comes to our energy policy.
Speaker Pelosi today, in some of her very first comments, made a commitment to the country that our Nation would start a titanic and historic shift from old technologies associated with fossil fuels that are now putting massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and towards the use of new technologies that can produce our mode of power for our cars and our planes and our buses and our homes and our computers, and even our hair dryers in a way that does not contribute to global warming. And this is her commitment and her very first comment, I think it was telling, that this House will pass a measure in very short order, in the next several weeks, that will shift a huge amount of our national resources away from work in these fossil fuels that are now contributing to global warming and put that money into a fund that will be dedicated to the use of new high-technological energy sources that can free us from Middle Eastern oil, create jobs in our country, and stop global warming.
This is certainly a three-fer. And the way that she has made a commitment that this House will do is that we basically will repeal some of the less prudent activities of the former Congress that gave $7 billion of taxpayer money to the oil and gas industry, a very imprudent move, an industry that is in tip-top form financially, making profits hand over fist, the most profitable corporation in American history, indeed, world history. And yet the last Congress saw fit to give billions of dollars of tax relief to these organizations.
And these organizations are good organizations. They have good people in them. But there was no reason to give that money away when it has higher purpose. And that higher purpose that Speaker Pelosi talked about today is to take those billions of dollars, those tax goodies given away to these corporations, repeal those giveaways and shift that money, shift those public resources, into a pool of funds that will be used to develop new high-tech, clean energy sources that we can go forward to build energy independence and reduce our contributions of carbon dioxide and other gases that are contributing to global warming. And I think this is a fundamental shift in American history.
We have had a steam revolution starting with American ingenuity, with Fulton and others. We had an industrial revolution led by American inventors, Ford and others. We have had an IT revolution led by many people in the software business. Many of them in my district in North Seattle and Redmond, Washington.
And now we are heading into a fourth revolution in the industrial base of America, and that is an energy revolution, where we make a transition from dirty fuels to clean fuels, many of which we will talk about tonight, and we will do it in a smart, prudent, fiscally sound way of using funds that are being wasted essentially on these old dirty technologies and shift them over, starting today with Speaker Pelosi's wise comments, towards these new technologies.
And in doing so, we will use the most fundamental character of Americans, which is technological brilliance, innovation, creativity, tinkering. We are the greatest tinkerers and inventors, not speaking personally but our country, in human history. And now starting today, we are taking the first step what I call the road down to new Apollo. We had the first Apollo project with John F. Kennedy where we went to the moon.
Today, with Speaker Pelosi's comments, we took the first step on the road to a new Apollo clean energy future for this country to move these resources into a clean energy future. And I am very excited about it because it will build upon the scientific prowess of America.
I would like to yield now to one of the Members of Congress who is a leader in the scientific community, a physicist with a history at Princeton, who personifies what science can do for this country, who has been a leader on these clean energy issues, for some comments on this issue, Rush Holt of New Jersey.
Mr. HOLT. Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend, the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Inslee). And I look forward to joining him again in the Apollo energy legislation as I did in the last Congress, and this time I hope we will get it through because the way we produce and use energy in the United States is the greatest insult to our planet.
There are a lot of things that we do that are dangerous, unclean, unproductive. But the way we produce and use energy is the greatest insult. And I think what we want to talk about is the word
``sustainable.'' We should be in this for the long haul for centuries to come.
As we look back on a day like today when we celebrate the ongoing experiment of the American republic, we should be thinking, as those who wrote the Constitution were thinking, about something that would last for centuries. We should be embarking on a sustainable energy path. Not just clean energy, not just renewable energy, but a sustainable energy path that is environmentally sustainable, that is economically sustainable, and that is climactically sustainable.
One of the big changes that has occurred, and I think Mr. Inslee would agree, in the last year or 2 is here in Washington, and I think around the country, we have come to the conclusion, some of us years ago, but most people very recently, have come to the conclusion that global climate change, human induced global climate change, is real. They have come to the conclusion that it is real and they have come to the conclusion that it is serious.
They have not yet come to the conclusion that it is harmful. I would argue that it is costly and deadly. They have not come to the conclusion that there is something that we can do about it. But, indeed, I would argue that there is a great deal we can do about it. Some damage has been done.
{time} 2000
There is much more we can do.
Mr. INSLEE. We want to turn to the things that can be done, because one of the messages of the new Apollo Project is that we have a clear path to use technology to solve this problem. But before we launch into a discussion now, I just wanted to note three conversations on this issue about global warming I have had in the last two weeks, that I want to note about why this is so compelling to have new energy.
The first conversation I had last week was with a woman who was a leader in the first city in the United States that is being relocated as a result of global warming. That is the village of Shishmaref in Alaska; it is on the Arctic coast of Alaska. This woman told me that last week the city voted to move their city, I think it is about 13 miles off of a coastal barrier island, that is disappearing because sea levels are rising, the tundra is melting, and the ice that serves as a barrier protecting their village is melting, and their island is disappearing, right literally underneath them.
They are having to move their whole city at a cost of $150 million, onto an inland area, that is Shishmaref, Alaska. When we have to start moving cities in this country to start dealing with global warming, it is time to have a new energy policy.
Second, I had a conversation with the president of the Marshall Islands. It is an independent nation in the South Pacific of 60,000 people. The president of the Marshall Islands told me that they are in an emergency situation because of the rising seas and the increasing frequency of big storms which are literally overtopping their islands, which are just a few feet. They are built on coral reefs. Their coral reefs are dying because the oceans are becoming warmer and more acidic due to global warming. We have a whole country that may go under water as a result of global warming.
The third conversation I had last week was with a woman who was a climatologist, I may have butchered that word, meteorologist. She is an expert on the Arctic, basically. The University of Washington just published a study that said with a fairly high degree of probability the Arctic ice pack will have disappeared in months of September, disappeared with just marginal little bits of it hanging on to the coastline by the year 2050, with all of the changes that portends, including the disappearance of the polar bear, that even the current administration under George Bush agrees should be listed as a threatened species because the Arctic ice is going to disappear.
I just note these because since Mr. Holt and I last discussed this in the last Congress 2 months ago, these three changes have taken place. This is a dramatically rapidly changing climate we have that demands an answer to energy policy.
So I just want to set the urgency for taking steps, the first step.
Mr. HOLT. The gentleman makes a very good point, but this is not just a matter of the frost line moving a little bit north or spring coming a little bit earlier so you can get your tomatoes out sooner. No, it is much more serious than that. The pattern of storms, the pattern of droughts, even the pattern of freezes will change. Ocean currents are already showing signs of changing. That is what I mean when I say this is very costly and even deadly.
It is not just inconvenient. It does not just mean that, well, they are going to start growing sugar cane in Minnesota as the climate warms up. No, it means that lives will be lost and huge expenses will be incurred.
So that is the point. Let me just finish the two further steps we need to take in public understanding and, I would say, in legislative understanding. Once we recognize that human-induced climate changes, that it is real, that it is serious, that it is costly, and that something can be done, we have to figure out what those things are, and the new Apollo Energy Act of the last Congress that we will get in shape for this Congress will give you some of those ideas, I think. But then we have to convince ourselves that it is worth doing these things, that the benefits will be greater than the cost.
Well, I can assure you the cost will be great. But even more, we can make this a winner by stopping climate change, and we are in the best position in the world of all countries to do that because we have set the pattern for energy use for a century, and we can set the pattern for the coming century.
We are behind other countries, are doing more, we are buying windmills from Europe, not the United States, just to take one example, but we can go on and on. We could take the lead, and I can assure you, I can assure the gentleman from Washington, and anyone else, that it will be better to sell these technologies to the world than to buy them, and there is going to be a huge market for alternative sustainable technologies.
Mr. INSLEE. That point of being able to sell American technology to the world, I want to mention two companies, their CEOs I have talked to in the last month. One I talked to this morning is called Greenpoint Energy. It is a company in Boston that has developed a way to take coal and to process it into natural gas, then burn the natural gas in a way that eliminates the mercury emissions that typically come out of a coal stack, eliminates the sulfur dioxide that comes out of a smokestack and most importantly reduces carbon dioxide, the global warming gas by 60 to 65 percent.
Now, when I asked this young entrepreneur, who formerly did very well in the software industry, and is now into energy, what he saw as the future of this, he said it is unlimited. The reason it is unlimited is that we can take this technology that we build here, we can build these plants and sell them to China.
China is building one dirty coal plant a week, a 500-megawatt coal plant a week in China, which is creating massive CO2 contributing to global warming gas. Here is a company right now, they have got 25 employees right now, and 20 subcontractors, they can have thousands at some point when we start selling this technology to the Chinese.
Another company called Nanosolar in Silicon Valley, California, they developed a way to make a solar cell using a thin cell material that can increase the efficiency, or at least decrease the cost at least by 40 to 50 percent of solar energy, using a thin cell that is about 5 percent of the current thickness of a silicone-based solar cell. They want to sell this technology when we develop it. We have the first 450-
megawatt capacity plant they are building right now, as we speak tonight. They want to start selling these around the world.
So here is a tremendous opportunity for America to reverse our balance-of-payments problem and start selling things to the world rather than buying them.
Mr. HOLT. The Chinese will be buying technology. There is no question. They would prefer not to pollute their skies. They are trying to clean up for the Olympics; but they are growing fast, they need the power, they would welcome cleaner power. As evidence of that, I would say that their auto fleet is already more efficient than ours.
Because the technology is available, that is what they are buying. It would apply across the board in energy technologies, China, Southeast Asia, India, yes, and Europe.
The gentleman from Washington spoke about American ingenuity. You know we in Jersey call it Yankee ingenuity, but no aspersions on those from Southern States or Western States. That is what it was known as, or good old American know-how. We can do it.
The new Apollo Energy legislation that I joined the gentleman in the last Congress, talked about incentives, demonstration projects and investments and research and development. They are, indeed, investments that would pay off big.
Mr. INSLEE. You mentioned transportation. I just want to note what I consider to be a very exciting development in the last 7 days in this country in transportation. I want to yield to a real leader in there, Mr. Blumenauer.
But when it comes to cars, we have not improved the efficiency of our cars in 25 years. We get less mileage today in our cars than we did 25 years ago. But in the last 30 days something very dramatic happened in the auto industry.
General Motors announced that they were going to start developing a plug-in vehicle in the next 5 years where you can go home at night, plug in your car, charge your batteries off your electrical grid from one to two cents, effectively, a mile, you are now spending ten to fifteen. For one to two cents a mile off the grid, you can run your car for, we hope, for the first 20 miles. Then after you run out of juice, if you drive more than 20 miles, and 60 percent of our trips a day are less than 20 miles, but if you go more than 20 miles then you start burning either the gas or the ethanol that you got from corn and soybeans and rye grass. You have a flex-fuel vehicle, you plug it in at night, you are off to the races. That is the first thing.
The second thing is the Department of Energy last week issued a study which concluded that there is enough energy-generating capacity in the United States, excuse me, it was a Pacific Northwest laboratory out in Washington State, actually, an arm of the Department of Energy. They concluded there was enough electrical generating capacity today to fuel 85 percent of our cars and trucks using a plug-in battery system and not build a single new generating plant.
In other words, we could fuel 85 percent of all of our cars once we get a plug-in battery system developed without building a single new dirty plant coal or even a clean coal, for that matter, because you have all of this excess capacity at night that is sitting there that we don't use. We have all these plants that just sit there unused at night. We can use them to charge our cars. These are two very exciting developments using home-grown technology if Congress acts to move these subsidies away from the oil and gas industry, as Speaker Pelosi pledged to do today, and move them into support for these new businesses and consumers to get the new end higher energy.
I want to yield to Mr. Earl Blumenauer, who has been a real leader in trying to bring transportation, particularly public transit which is a very, very effective way of reducing our pollution and making our transportation more efficient.
Mr. BLUMENAUER. I appreciate your courtesy, Mr. Inslee, in permitting me to speak on this. I appreciate your continued leadership in spotlighting issues of global warming, energy efficiency, and the difference it will make for Americans across the country.
I too was impressed today with the clear, articulate vision set forth by our new Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, reemphasizing the commitment that the Democratic leadership and our caucus has to deal meaningfully with problems of global warming, energy independence and efficiency.
Having an opportunity this evening to focus on this is important because for the first time in a dozen years we won't just be talking about this. We have legislative leadership that is committed to action, to dealing with the redirection of vast subsidies that have been given to people who need them the least, and, instead, rationalizing investments in areas that you have championed with alternative energy, wind, solar, biomass and, particularly, conservation.
You are right, tracking the problems of transportation is central to dealing with greenhouse gases, global warming and our alarming dependence on oil imported from increasingly unstable areas of the world.
I appreciate the conversation that you and Mr. Holt have had about the positive impact, the President and the Republican leadership in the last half dozen years have been baring their head, claiming that we can't deal with problems of global warming, climate change, energy conservation because of the economic disruption.
You have cited examples from our Pacific Northwest where there are entrepreneurs ready to go, rolling up their sleeves, with things that will make a difference, creating jobs in this country, that will, in fact, conserve resources and save money.
{time} 2015
Our ability to invest in wise, diverse transportation choices for the American public has the opportunity to put money in the pockets of Americans while it fights greenhouse gas. We consume approximately 10 percent of the world's petroleum supply each year driving our SUVs to work and back. The commitment to make sure that the Arctic wildlife refuge is the last place we drill, not the next, that makes energy conservation more available to Americans, and unlocks the economic potential of a whole array of new technologies and products.
I look forward to continuing our conversation here over the next few minutes. I, personally, am committed to continuing, as I have in both of your districts in the past. I know you both have constituents that are concerned about transportation choices. This Congress might be able to do something to provide equity, for instance, for cyclists, people who burn calories instead of petroleum, but are treated differently in our Tax Code for their commuting costs, for instance. I look forward to working with you to make these a reality and make a difference to enhance the planet, protect our national security and put money in the pockets of the American taxpayer.
Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Holt.
Mr. HOLT. If the gentleman would yield, I would like to elaborate on a point that Mr. Blumenauer made about transportation. Not only do we use a lot of energy going to and from work, we waste a lot of energy that no one wants to use sitting in congestion. There are some parts of the country, we certainly see it in my State of New Jersey, where an enormous amount of energy is lost. And if we could avoid that congestion, it would make everyone happier, I can assure you, not just at a sense of savings, but it would remove the aggravation.
Well, it is a whole lot easier to move electrons than it is to move chunks of metal. Smart transportation systems that take account of where the traffic is and where it can go, and compute in real time where you should go, rather than you running a car-sized computer system where you are trying this and you are trying that and you have got a million cars in this computer system in real-time trying to figure out the best routes. You can do that with smart transportation system cheap, relatively, save energy, save money, save aggravation. That is just one example of what we should do.
Mr. INSLEE. I would like to point out a shining example of what Mr. Holt is talking about, and that is in Portland, Oregon, in part, because of the leadership of Mr. Blumenauer, Portland, Oregon achieved two very significant milestones in the last year. First, it was the first city ever to essentially meet the Kyoto targets for reduction of carbon dioxide. This proves it can be done.
A smart transportation policy and a smart energy policy can be both good for your economy and meet these targets to reduce carbon dioxide. Portland, Oregon has achieved that, and one of the reasons is because of their second accomplishment, the first city in the last 30 years in America, has had less miles driven per individual in the last several decades. It is the first city that has ever accomplished that by developing a very sophisticated public transportation system and developing a living system that can reduce the need for some of our long commutes. And I want to point out Portland's success on this has been an enormous benefit to its economy, because Portland, Oregon's economy has been booming. The value of property has been booming as a result of these smart energy choices it has made, and people want to live there. And it is because of some of the smart choices that have been made in order to use energy more efficiently.
Mr. HOLT. If I may just insert, some of those choices have been made by our now-colleague, Mr. Blumenauer. Much of the success of Portland traces back to some of the decisions that he had a part in some years ago.
Mr. BLUMENAUER. If the gentleman would yield
Mr. INSLEE. Yes.
Mr. BLUMENAUER. I appreciate your positive words about our community. And I do take pride in essentially having reached 1990, emission levels for carbon dioxide and actually having reductions in per capita emissions for each of the last 4 years. And it has been done, not at the expense of economic development and choice, but rather, as a result of providing it. And this is a point, I guess, that I am eager for us to pursue. And I appreciate the leadership that you gentlemen have exercised, both in terms of looking and investigating what's going on in Oregon and providing leadership in your own States and in your own communities.
The average American family, today, pays more for transportation than anything else in their budget, except for housing. And for Americans who make less than $40,000 a year, typically, they pay more for transportation than for housing. So our being able to have sensible development patterns where people can live closer to where they work, employing what Mr. Holt was talking about in terms of smarter technology to let people know what they are getting into in terms of congestion, and giving people choices. This is not about saying you can't drive a car.
But when I go to other communities, and since I have been in Congress, I have been in more than 200 communities across the country working on issues of transportation, land use and affordable housing. What I find is that people are complaining not that we are trying to take away their choices, but because they have no choice. Too many communities, people can only drive to work in a single occupant vehicle. In many of these communities, 90 percent of the children cannot go to school safely on their own by bicycle or walking. And what we are talking about here is giving back choices to the American public about where they live, how they travel, choices that will not only reduce congestion, improve air pollution, it will put money in the pockets of American families.
Mr. INSLEE. If I can allude to a choice, another sort of choice, I think that is a very fundamental principle that we want to give people choices in their uses of energy. But I want to allude to a choice, if you do decide to drive a car, what kind of fuel you use. And it is a Democratic Party principle now under the leadership of Speaker Pelosi that Americans are going to have more choices about what fuel you use because as part of our effort to move money away from this giveaway to the oil and gas industry that have enslaved Americans, you are a slave to the oil and gas industry if you have got a car right now, to move it over to give more fuel choices to Americans. We intend to develop a vision for this country that you have the same freedom that Brazilians have, because in Brazil today when you pull up to the pump you are not a slave to the oil and gas industry, you are the boss because when you pull up to a pump in Brazil you decide whether you want gasoline or whether you want domestically manufactured ethanol made from sugar cane in Brazil and soon to be made through cellulosic ethanol, through corn and wheat and corn stovers and switch grass and who knows what kind of products we are going to develop so that consumers can decide what product they are going to put into the tank. And when we do that, we are going to create thousands of jobs across the country, particularly in the agricultural belt.
I got an e-mail just as I was walking over here tonight about a little article about a company in Wisconsin that are building sort of the foundations for wind turbines. They can't hire people fast enough. Right down the road, at the Chippewa Valley co-op they are brewing ethanol in Minnesota to give people a choice to put ethanol in their tank rather than gasoline, and they have created source of jobs in this little town in Minnesota that was sort of a declining town at the time. We want to give choices to people.
And we have another leader here tonight on those issues, Representative Kaptur from the great State of Ohio, that has been a leader in an effort to make a transition from just an oil and gas economy to one based on biofuels. And I have to tell you that I am very excited about this because I have been talking to scientists who tell me that we now have the possibility of having two to four times more bio fuels per acre than we even have today, and with our corn usage today that is certainly being successful with a consequent reduction of carbon dioxide that Representative Kaptur can tell us about. I would like to yield to Representative Kaptur.
Ms. KAPTUR. I want to thank Representative Inslee for taking this special order tonight on the very first night of the new Congress, the 110th Congress which is going to be so historic. And Speaker Pelosi's remarks today about energy independence for our country just rang so true. In a district like ours, which is a major new solar manufacturer, as well as wind turbine manufacturer and research region of the country. Coming from the auto belt, you don't think about that. But yet we are a biofuels leader. We have four plants being built now, both soy diesel and corn-based ethanol within our radius of 25 miles of our major community of Toledo, and in fact, some of them right in Toledo.
And I wanted to just take a few minutes, if I might, and I thank Congressman Blumenauer and Congressman Holt. These gentlemen who are with us tonight are really the new age energy thinkers for our country, and I am really so happy to join you on this first night that we are here together.
And I just wanted to put on the record some interesting information that I have been sharing in the committees that I serve on. This particular chart talks about total petroleum consumption in our country, and looks at the growing share of imported petroleum as a percentage of everything that we consume.
And of course, since the beginning of the Bush administration, America is consuming one billion more barrels of oil per year, largely imported. Imports now constitute nearly three-quarters of what we use in this economy. Americans need to understand that. And over a period of time, from the beginning of the 90s, the share of imports has just risen until where now it comprises a majority of what we consume. This is a diminishing resource. Actually it is a dirty resource.
And I wish to place on the record tonight an article that was in The Financial Times back in December that lists the major companies in the world that are privately held. And I won't read the whole list tonight, except to say, of the top 20 companies, three-quarters are all oil companies, and they are not based in the United States. So all this money that the United States is spending on an imported product could be invested here at home in the new technologies that these fine gentlemen and I are talking about tonight.
Just to give you an idea, Saudi Aramco is number one on the list. Its value, estimated market value, is three-quarters of $1 trillion. $781 billion. And of course, Saudi Arabia has been a very important back up supplier to our country. I wish it were not so, but we have become very addicted to that supplier.
Petroleos Mexicanos, that oil and gas company worth $415 billion, our hard earned dollars flowing to that privately held company.
I won't go through all of them, but the next, Number 3 on the list, and the gentleman discussed Latin America, is Venezuelan Petroleum, valued at $388 billion.
Go down to Kuwait Petroleum, Number 4, $378 billion. Malaysian Petroleum, $232 billion. The idea is you go down and then you get into the companies financing this import, such as the Carlisle Group which has moved up now at $71 billion to Number 22 on the list. So I would like to submit this to the Record. The top three-quarters of these companies, the top 20 largest privately held companies in the world are all oil and gas. I wanted to make sure this was placed on the Record tonight, and to say that as the author of the first title in any farm bill in American history, a biofuels title, Title IX, we have been incentivizing at a very small level, about $23 million, not billion,
$23 million dollars a year, efforts to try to help agriculturalists across this country own the future. It has been such a fight. And I heard the gentleman saying earlier this evening, finally, I think Mr. Blumenauer said, after 12 years, we finally have a chance to uncork this really developing answer for our Nation. And we hope that with the new farm bill and with the leadership of Congressman Colin Peterson, who is the right man at the right time in the right committee in the right country, from the Red River Valley of Minnesota, in the farm bill that will be produced this year, that we will be able to piece together the solutions that we know exist.
FT NON-PUBLIC 150
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Estimated
Market
Company Country Sector Value as of Type Type (1)
Dec 2005
($bn)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1....... Saudi Aramco....... Saudi Arabia....... Oil gas............ 781 S State owned
2....... Petroleos Mexicanos Mexico............. Oil gas............ 415 S State owned
(Pemex).
3....... Petroleos de Venezuela.......... Oil gas............ 388 S State owned
Venezuela SA.
4....... Kuwait Petroleum Kuwait............. Oil gas............ 378 S State owned
Corporation.
5....... Petroliam Nasional Malaysia........... Oil gas............ 232 S State owned
Berhad (Petronas).
6....... Sonatrach.......... Algeria............ Oil gas............ 224 S State owned
7....... National Iranian Iran............... Oil gas............ 220 S State owned
Oil Company.
8....... Japan Post......... Japan.............. Postal services.... 156 S State owned
9....... Pertamina.......... Indonesia.......... Oil gas............ 140 S State owned
10...... Nigerian National Nigeria............ Oil gas............ 120 S State owned
Petroleum
Corporation.
11...... Abu Dhabi National UAE................ Oil gas............ 103 S State owned
Oil Company
(ADNOC).
12...... INOC............... Iraq............... Oil gas............ 102 S State owned
13...... Libya National Oil Libya.............. Oil gas............ 99 S State owned
Company.
14...... Sparkassen- Germany............ Banking............ 98 P Association
Finanzgruppe*.
15...... State Grid China.............. Electric utilities. 87 S State owned
Corporation of
China.
16...... Nippon Life Japan.............. Insurance.......... 87 P Mutual
Insurance Company.
17...... Kohlberg Kravis United States...... Private equity..... 83 P Partnership
Roberts Co.
18...... Qatar Petroleum.... Qatar.............. Oil gas............ 78 S State owned
19...... State Farm Mutual United States...... Insurance.......... 76 P Mutual
Automobile
Insurance Company.
20...... European Investment Luxembourg......... Banking............ 73 S State owned
Bank.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ms. KAPTUR. I will attest and sort of end with this. In our district today, Dr. Al Campaan, the head of Physics at the University of Toledo, has a solar-powered house from equipment made in Toledo. He takes his truck, with six batteries home, maybe eight, every night. He drives it from the university back home and he plugs it into his house. The technology exists in Toledo, Ohio. He drives it the next morning, a fully charged truck, back into the University of Toledo.
As we move to develop the technology of future, I would just recommend to those who are listening tonight, here in the Chamber and elsewhere, a wonderful book by a former decorated CIA agent, Robert Baer, for whom I have great admiration. He retired. He is in his 50s. We have probably had no better human intelligence officer throughout the Middle East and Central Asia. He wrote a book, Sleeping with the Devil.
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When I read that book, I thought I have to meet this man, because he is speaking my language. The life he lived is very different than the life that we have lived, but he looked the problem straight in the eye. The subtitle of the book is: ``How Washington Became Addicted to Saudi Crude.''
And I think it is important to note that the American people know this. They want us to do something. They want us to help transform the country. And I thank all my dear colleagues for allowing me these few minutes on the floor this evening. I was not intending to come here, but you have hit sort of the bull's eye of what this Member of Congress has been involved in for several years, and you could not be on a more important job creation, environmentally right set of initiatives for this country, and it will be a joy to be here working with you on this.
Mr. INSLEE. We appreciate the gentlewoman from the State of Ohio. We know the State of Ohio is going to do some great work on energy under the leadership of the new governor, Ted Strickland, who is committed to this agenda. And he would have been here tonight, but he is serving as governor, or will be in about a week.
I want to make two comments on the transition to a biofuels economy in the United States. First off, some people have said, well, we should not use fiber or plants for fuel. We have to use it only for food. I want to point out the fallacy of that argument. Right now we are exporting an enormous percentage of the foodstuffs we grow. We send it around the world and they send us the cash. What do we do? We take the cash and send it to Saudi Arabia.
Let us cut out the middleman. Let us grow our own. This is time to grow our own. We are sending it all over the world and then sending the cash to Ridya and Saudi Arabia. Let us keep it right here. Let us grow our own fuel.
By the way, this is no pie in the sky. The Department of Agriculture has concluded we could have 30 percent of our fuel easily in the next 20 years, easily, using very conservative efforts. This is a very achievable goal.
The second point I want to make is that this may happen eventually without Congress's help, but it will be too late. Brazil took 30 years to make this transition to an energy independent condition using their biofuels. They use sugar cane there. They took 30 years. We do not have 30 years to wait. We have a problem with al-Qaeda tonight, we have trouble with global climate change tonight, and we have trouble with a loss of a manufacturing base in America tonight. We do not have 30 years. So we need to act and we need to do some things that the past Congresses and the current administration have not done.
Let me just mention three of them. Number one, they have not given loan guarantee assistance to get some of these plants going. The first cellulosic plant in the world, commercial cellulosic plant in the world is a company called Iogen. They are ready to build a plant. They have contracts with 300 farmers to grow a plant using the leavings of wheat to use cellulosic ethanol in Idaho, but they can not get the loan guarantee to get the job done.
We want to get that job done and get that plant up and running in Idaho. And this is going to be three or four more times effective per acre with increasing profits to farmers as a consequence.
Second, to give Americans this freedom to choose what fuel to use, they have to have cars that burn both gasoline and ethanol and, frankly, the industry has not been willing to do that. So we need to have some requirement to make sure that they make cars that burn gasoline or ethanol. They make a car for less than $100 to burn either one, so it is basically nothing to the manufacturers. We need to require that to be done. Now, they say they are going to do more of them in years, but we do not have years.
Third, we need the pumps that pump either gasoline or ethanol made from midwestern corn or wheat or biodiesel. But the folks in Brazil will tell you that companies do not like putting those pumps in, because now you're competing with their gas and oil. They have a monopoly on gas and oil, and they are not crazy about putting in a pump that competes with them.
So we are going to need to require that Americans be given a choice in pumps. Maybe we start by saying 10 percent of the stations have to have an alternative pump of ethanol, if you have 25 stations. We do not want the moms and pops that have to do this, if they cannot afford it. But if you have a big chain, why not have 10 percent of your stations at least have one ethanol pump so Americans can have that choice.
We took the first step in this journey tonight when Speaker Pelosi said we are going to start making a shift from giveaways to oil and gas towards these new clean energy futures, and I am looking forward to making progress.
And I yield to Mr. Blumenauer.
Mr. BLUMENAUER. Thank you. And I am intrigued with the conversation, the way that it is going at this point. We talked a moment ago about giving Americans more choices as to how they transport themselves. We can avoid the disastrous policies of this administration and the past congressional leadership of picking winners and losers and picking the wrong ones to win.
What you have described I have seen in my own State. There are people going gung ho in terms of biomass, in terms of wave energy, and technology that is emerging around the country in colleges and universities, in small businesses and large to take advantage of the opportunity.
If we just level the playing field, if we shift the massive subsidies away from the people who do not need it and do not deserve it, and help level the playing field for these emerging technologies dealing with biomass from any of a variety of fuel stocks, of dealing with electrical, solar, wind, wave, if we level the playing field, if we give them a fair and predictable tax treatment, which we do not do now, we can take these subsidies that are frankly not buying us anything.
It was interesting, the report that was suppressed by the administration for a year, that revealed we actually would have done more for energy supplies in this country, rather than lavishing tax breaks on the most profitable corporations in the world, the oil companies, selling the most profitable product, oil and gas, we would have been farther ahead just buying it up.
By our redirecting these investments, we can help this nascent technology grow around the country and we can have unleashed the potential of making a difference and allowing the free market to work after we level the playing field, after we enable them.
As you indicated, we are probably going to need to have some rules of the game to be able to jump-start these markets. But I really appreciate what you are talking about here.
I was in over a dozen States this last fall working on behalf of a number of our new colleagues, including in Ohio. I am intrigued that they to a person are concerned about global warming, to a person they understand before they become Members of this body what you are talking about here, and it makes me think that we have a real opportunity to tap some creative energy in this body to finally, as I say, stop talking about it and actually do something.
Mr. INSLEE. I would like to note that when Mr. Blumenauer talks about leveling the playing field, I think that is very, very important. Because when you look at these entrepreneurs, small businessmen and women that maybe have 10, 15, or 20 employees who are working out of their garage or a little warehouse they have rented somewhere and they are developing some new way. For instance, there is a company called Fiber Forge in Colorado, and they are developing a new way to use composites to build the body of an automobile that can be four times stronger than steel and weigh 30 to 40 percent as much.
Now, the challenge in doing this, we are building a composite airplane, the first one ever, the Boeing 787, but the challenge is how do you do that quickly in mass manufacturing, because it takes a lot of hand labor right now. Well, here is a little company called Fiber Forge and they are developing a way to manufacture this using mass production methods that will decrease the cost so you can build cars someday, the body of a car, out of composites that are stronger and weighs about half as much. Do not hold me to that exact number, but significantly less. But they are not getting subsidies, tax breaks, or help, whereas the giant oil companies of the world are getting those huge tax write-
offs given to them by Congress.
I want to mention two other subsidies the oil and gas companies have that these new competitor businesses do not have. Subsidy number one. Probably a third of our defense budget is dedicated to the protection of our oil lanes to protect the oil these companies get and then sell to us at $3 or $2.50 a gallon. That is a multibillion dollar subsidy to the oil and gas industry that solar, wind, biofuels, clean coal that we can dig up and hopefully someday burn cleanly, they do not get that subsidy at all. That is number one.
Subsidy number two. The solar people, the wind people, the clean coal people, the wave power people, the transit people, people who do not put carbon dioxide in the air, they are competing with a company that is using the atmosphere as a free dump. The oil and gas companies today, and those using dirty coal today, are using the atmosphere as a free dumping ground to put their carbon dioxide in and they are not paying a penny for it. These other business people do not have that subsidy.
We have to do something about that so that there is some cost associated with using the air we breathe as a private dumping facility. When you go to the garbage dump now it costs us 25 bucks to dump a bunch of stuff out of your pickup into the dump, but these industries can put it into our air for free.
Now, we fixed that with sulfur dioxide and we fixed that with nitrous oxide, we have a cap and trade system, but there is a giant loophole, a giant loophole that these companies use for carbon dioxide. It is the most serious pollutant in the world today, but there is a loophole in our laws that does not impose any cost associated with putting that pollutant into our atmosphere. That needs to get fixed as well.
Now, we are going to have a long discussion about the best way to do that, but we have to do it.
I would yield to Ms. Kaptur.
Ms. KAPTUR. I want to agree with what the gentleman is saying, and look back at the last century, which was the century of hydrocarbons. This century will be the century of carbohydrates and unlocking the power of the carbohydrate molecule in a way we have never understood it before.
Those who came before us were on this track but got derailed from it. In the early part of the 20th century, in our district, we had a car that was kind of famous called the Clyde car. It was built by the Clyde Bicycle Works, and it was built around 1898 or 1902, somewhere in there. You see this Clyde car and you look at the steering wheel and it has two levers on it. One lever is for alcohol-based fuel. You know, they knew how to build stills back then. And the other is for petroleum-based fuel. And I have been amazed to open the trunk of the car and see two different fuel tanks and think, my gosh, how did we move from that, which was what the gentleman was talking about, choice at the pumps and choice of vehicles, and where we are today. Because certain people made certain choices.
I just mention that particular example and say that as our industries and our small businesses try to bring up these new technologies, what the gentlemen are saying tonight, Mr. Inslee, Mr. Blumenauer, and Mr. Holt about financing and the tax aspects of this, if you look at certain farmers in Ohio who have tried let's say to raise the capital to build a plant, amazing things are happening that are not so good out there.
The big buck players come in and they offer people on the board money so they never bring up that production, because there is an effort by those who are currently big buck dealers, in alcohol-based fuels, let's say, to want to control the market just like the oil companies are controlling the market. We see that some farmers do not have the organizational structure that they need in order to own some of this so that our rural communities across America will be able to find new value added and lift themselves to a new economic future.
I think, and I am not sure that everyone on the Agriculture Committee agrees with me on this yet, but we need some type of loan guarantee program or long-term financing in a structure like the Federal Land Banks or our Rural Electrics, which we started years ago, so that we have a system that is long term and permits them to stay in business so that some big buck operator does not come in, drive the price down in a given small market, and not permit them to be able to bring up and let this industry flower.
So the tax and financing aspects that we have been talking about are very, very important.
I also just wanted to say something about the science, as a member of the Agriculture Committee. It is amazing that in 2007, we do not know, in terms of row crop production, how to get the most yield out of a carbohydrate-based plant and a planting system that does the least damage to the atmosphere and yields the most combustible product.
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For example, everyone is into ethanol from corn because we have subsidized corn up to here. But what about beans that have more oil? What about canola? What about castor? We stopped growing castor beans because of the by-product of ricin. But could we biogenetically take ricin out of castor beans and get more oil per acre?
We have got to do the science of planting, and we are just at the beginning of that age. We only have a glimmer of what that could be like. This is a major area for research where we could make a huge difference.
Mr. INSLEE. I just want to comment on that. I think basically a way to say this is that our current biofuels economy, which is very productive, and I believe is at least a small improvement on net CO2, is really a first generation of biofuels. We have a second and third generation that are very close to coming.
One of them is this cellulosic ethanol that I have talked about. There is a company called Logen, there are several other companies doing this, to use a cellulosic method in an enhanced way of breaking open the cell to get at the carbohydrates. When we do this, this second generation of biofuels is really going to kick in and make this competitive.
I want to mention one thing before I yield to Mr. Holt, and that is we have just Democrats participating in this discussion. But our fellow Republicans are also involved in this discussion. I, myself, and others are talking to some of our Republican colleagues, developing a bill to try to enhance this second generation of ethanol.
We do want to make this, and believe we can make this, a bipartisan effort now that we have new leadership that will free us from the chains of the oil and gas companies that have shackled the Congress to date. We are going to have some colleagues on the other side of the aisle work with us, too.
I yield to Mr. Holt.
Mr. HOLT. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman. For years, ethanol was dismissed as a net energy loser. It cost more energy to grow the crops and ferment them and produce useful fuel; it took more fuel than it provided. It was a net energy user. So it was easy to dismiss that and not invest much money in distribution systems and so forth.
Then, because there were not distribution systems, there was not much motivation to develop more efficient catalytic processes, to work with the waste, as you would be doing with cellulosic ethanol, for example. It really was, if we may mix an agricultural metaphor here, a chicken and egg problem, and we need to step in.
This is the sort of thing that the government can do at low cost without picking winners and losers by actually providing more choice, by making it possible for people to distribute the fuel as the new technology makes it economical and efficient to produce that fuel. It is a matter of investment in research and investment in infrastructure. Some of this is done through incentives, some of it is done through demonstration projects, some of it is done through direct investment of research and development. We can break out of this self-defeating chicken and egg cycle, or chicken and egg restriction.
Mr. INSLEE. I want to note too, as we do that, we want to do in a way that is fiscally responsible. One of the things we have done is to pay for these things by repealing some of these tax breaks that have gone to the oil and gas companies, and then shifting them over to these investments, to do this in a fiscally responsible way.
We also want to do it in a way that helps businesses rather than hurts them. Some of the incentive programs that have been done in the past have been done in a way to ensure their failure.
For instance, some previous Congresses have been in the terrible habit when they do tax incentives that are intended to help businesses grow, they have done it for one year at a time or two years at a time; and venture capitalists, and I have talked to many of them, say we are not going to make multibillion dollar investments, realizing the rug can be pulled out from under us.
That has been done because Congress has tried to hide the deficit, so they have tried to make these things seem like they are short term.
We only have about two more minutes. I would just like to yield to anyone who has a closing comment.
Mr. BLUMENAUER. If I could briefly comment, I appreciate what you have each indicated in terms of the new generation of dealing with biofuels. I think this is an example of how we move forward.
You are absolutely right in terms of being able to zero in on the research, to squeeze out of this, to have tax incentives that are uniform, predictable and deal with the second and third generation of ethanol development and dealing with what might happen in terms of unlocking the power of biology here.
I have been struck by how there are many opportunities for us in the new farm bill to redirect, what is it, $23 billion of subsidy at this point that flows increasingly to a very small number of farmers, often corporate farms or large ones in a small limited area in a small, limited number of crops. We have an opportunity to unlock that, help farmers with their energy production, allow more farmers into it and find out how we unlock the power of this ingenuity.
Mr. INSLEE. We just have a few seconds. I would like to just make a closing comment.
First, I would thank my colleagues and say that I really do believe this is a historic moment for the industrial base and agricultural base of America, which is today's date, to start to move to a new base away from just a dirty fossil fuel-based system to a clean energy system. We are starting to do this starting today. We are going to join Republicans, hopefully, in finding a bipartisan way to do it.
We can tell people that the genius of Americans is in these new wind sources, wind turbines, solar cells, transit, flex-fuel vehicles, plug-
in vehicles, cellulosic ethanol, wave power, geothermal, fuel efficient appliances, energy efficient homes; this job is going to get done by a new Congress and it is a bright day for the country.
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