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.
“PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEES IN OREGON” mentioning the U.S. Dept. of Energy was published in the Senate section on pages S3906-S3908 on May 11, 2000.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEES IN OREGON
Mr. SMITH of Oregon. Mr. President, I have come to talk to citizens of my State who have a rare privilege in the next few days: The two leading candidates for the highest office in our land will be in the State of Oregon. Vice President Gore will be there tomorrow, and Governor Bush will be there on Tuesday. I will have occasion to be with Governor Bush, and my friend and colleague, Ron Wyden, will have occasion to be with Vice President Gore tomorrow.
Oregonians need to ask a lot of questions to find out where these men are on issues that affect their lives. I came to speak in terms similar to those of Senator Gorton, who wants Washingtonians to ask what I want Oregonians to ask; that is, Mr. Vice President, where are you on the issue of hydroelectric power on the four Snake River dams in the State of Washington? I am not sure I know of an issue of greater importance to our State's environment and our State's economy. As a background to this question, Mr. Gore, where are you on the question of breaching these dams?
I would like to talk a little bit about our energy policy in this country. So I say to any Oregonians that may be watching, I want to share a memo which I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows:
Energy Secretary Richardson Announces Six Short-Term Actions To Help
Prevent Power Outages
stresses need for institutional change to protect reliability in the long term
Energy Secretary Bill Richardson today announced a series of short-term actions that the Department of Energy will take to help ensure the reliability of the nation's power supply in the coming months. Several regions across the country have experienced reliability problems in recent summers and there are concerns about the reliability of the nation's grid this summer.
These short-term actions by the Department of Energy, while not a cure-all, are designed to help keep the lights on this summer,'' said Secretary Richardson. ``To protect reliability in the long term, we need new policies and passage of federal electricity legislation to keep pace with rapidly changing market developments.
The Department of Energy will: work with other agencies to identify opportunities to reduce electric consumption at federal water projects during times of peak demand; urge the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and state utility commissions to solicit and approve tariffs that will help reduce electricity demands during peak time periods. For instance, large industrial consumers could find it to their advantage to sell their power entitlement back to their utility if it would be profitable; explore opportunities for the use of existing backup generators during power supply emergencies to reduce the strain on electric systems and help avoid blackouts; conduct an emergency exercise with state and local governments to help prepare for potential summer power supply emergencies; work closely with the utility industry to gain up-to-date relevant information about potential grid-related problems as quickly as possible; and prepare public service announcements to provide tips to help consumers reduce electricity use and lower their bills.
Secretary Richardson began a series of regional summits this week between federal, state and local government officials, regulators, utilities and consumers to discuss ways to enhance the reliability of our electric system. The first meetings are taking place on April 24 in Hartford, Newark and New Orleans. On April 28, he will co-host a summit in Sacramento.
After last summer's outages Secretary Richardson formed a Power Outage Study Team to review the events of last year and provide recommendations for making the nation's grid more reliable. The team's final report, issued last month, is available online at http://www.policy.energy.gov.
Mr. SMITH of Oregon. This is a news release from Department of Energy Secretary Richardson announcing six short-term actions to help prevent power outages.
This will blow your mind.
We are expecting power outages all over the United States this summer. The long-term forecast for the Pacific Northwest is for energy shortages, as well. If you look at the six proposals for what this Government is going to do, there isn't one proposal about producing energy. The first one is: Look for opportunities to reduce electric consumption at Federal water projects.
Let me tell the farmers what that means, they are turning off the switch and they are turning off the water. That is what that means.
Second, solicit and approve tariffs that will help reduce electricity demands during peak times. Do you know what that means, Mr. President? That means the rates are going up. It is like a tax increase. So the cost of your energy is going up. We are not going to produce any more, Heaven forbid, we are just going to make it more expensive.
The next actions prescribed: The Energy Department will conduct an emergency exercise with State and local governments to help prepare for potential summer power supply emergencies. So we essentially will do a fire drill to see what happens when a whole city shuts down because electricity isn't produced when hitting a switch. Somebody has to turn something before we can have lights.
The next one prescribed: the Government is going to gain up-to-date relevant information about potential grid-related problems as quickly as possible.
Great. We don't already have that information?
Finally, we are going to prepare public service announcements to provide tips for how you can conserve electricity.
Nothing in the news release about producing.
When Mr. Gore and Mr. Bush are in the State of Oregon, I want Oregonians to ask about our power. I want them to ask how are our lights going to go on at night? How are we going to stay warm in the winter? How are our factories going to continue to operate? How will we have jobs?
This is not a hypothetical situation I am posing. These are real potential threats.
In spite of all of that, the Vice President is talking about shutting down any offshore drilling. Fine, but realize that has a cost to the environment.
Talk about not renewing nuclear licenses for energy plants--but that has an environmental cost as well. I see Senator Byrd on the floor all the time, decrying how the coal fields of West Virginia are being shut down because this Administration does not want to produce any more coal. I hear the people in the northeastern United States screaming about skyrocketing fuel prices in the winter, yet we are becoming more dependent upon foreign oil. Now I hear this Administration, in my neck of the woods, the Pacific Northwest, saying they are going to tear out our hydroelectric power.
It is not unreasonable, my fellow Americans, to ask how are the lights going to go on? Our own Energy Department is admitting we have a problem on the horizon. I think the whole country was just reminded that gasoline does not come from a filling station. It is $2 a gallon and climbing in some cases, falling in others, I hope.
We need an energy policy.
I support conservation initiatives. Raise CAFE standards? I am for that. I am looking for ways to conserve. But Americans are demanding energy and this Administration's policy is to shut down domestic energy production and leave America more dependent on foreign oil. This does not add up.
I hope Oregonians understand that it is very important to ask the Vice President of the United States what his policy on energy is. Mr. Bush has already answered it. He said if he is elected President, the dams will stay and you will keep your jobs and the lights will go on at night. I like that answer. It is clear.
He also made the point that we can have our energy and we can have our fish as well. Let me tell you a real dirty little secret. As we speak, all that can be heard here in Washington is the gloom and doom about the fish going away. Do you know that in the Columbia/Snake Rivers right now, those rivers are teeming with salmon coming back to spawn?
Let me give some numbers. As of today, at the furthest dam they want to take out, called the Lower Granite, 18,000 chinook have passed through this season. Some say, ``Oh, but they must be hatchery fish.'' To those I say no, they are not. A few of the fish are from hatchery stock, but many of them are wild. Do you know how many fish passed through this same dam last year? It was 240. This year it was 18,000. These numbers have many in the environmental community looking pretty ashen-faced.
The first dam on the Columbia River that the fish pass through is called the Bonneville Dam, a dam Franklin Roosevelt dedicated, I believe in 1936. As of today, 160,000 spring chinook have passed over that dam this season. These are big returns. There are lots of fish returning. In fact, there are so many coming back that the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife is clubbing nearly every fish they can find that is a hatchery fish. They are killing them so they will not spawn because they say that hatchery stock affects the ethnic purity of the wild stocks.
The real secret about hatchery fish is that their eggs come from wild fish. But, nevertheless, we have so many fish now, apparently, that we have the luxury of clubbing them to death before they can spawn. By the way, the hatchery fish in the Atlantic salmon recovery program are treated the same as wild fish. But in spite of all this, we're told in the Pacific Northwest that we have to take out our dams. We have to take them out in order to have a normative river.
What do we hear from the administration? We hear on the one hand that Fish and Wildlife has concluded the dams have to come out. The National Marine Fisheries Service says we need to study dam breaching for at least 10 years because we do not have a good answer yet. And, by the way, the studies they have been producing are all predicated on data from 1980 to the current date. However, if you look at data dating back to 1960, which is available, you do not come up with extinction modeling. But federal agencies just picked the years that had the worst ocean conditions to argue that the salmon are going to become extinct unless we tear out our dams. I want the fish but I don't want the people to be suckers. I think we are being set up to be that.
I would like to know, also from Mr. Gore, why it is that the Corps of Engineers was about to issue their recommendation, which was don't take the dams out, and they were ordered by the White House not to make that recommendation? Why were they ordered to make no recommendation? What that adds up to, I believe, is that this is not about science--this is about political science. Political science is not the basis upon which this decision should be made, particularly when our rivers are full of fish as we speak.
What are the consequences if they pull the dams out? I have named a few already, but I do know it adds 13 cents a bushel to every farmer's wheat. I know it means $11 million a year lost in revenue to the barging industry. When you take this wheat from the barges and put it on a truck, do you know how many trucks it takes to replace those barges per day? It takes 2,000 semi trucks a day. You say you care about the environment? Are you going to burn that kind of fuel, burn up those kinds of miles, cause that kind of congestion in the city of Portland and the city of Seattle? Not on my watch you will not.
What else does tearing out the dams mean? It means a loss of about
$130 million in property values to farmers. What does that mean to property taxes? School support? Roads? All those things are in jeopardy if you take those dams down. Dam breaching takes 37,000 acres of wheat out of production. What happens to those families? Their land goes back to sagebrush.
It takes at least 5,370 direct jobs in Portland. I actually think it is higher than that when you look at the ripple effect. When you take out these dams, you lose longshoremen in Portland and the many other service-related jobs that depend on them. Not only that, but to take these dams out, it would cost $809 million. Some have said that it could cost that much for each dam--I don't know whether we can get through this body an appropriation to destroy Federal assets that will be in the billions of dollars. What are you going to replace the energy with? What are you going to burn? This is crazy.
What else do you lose? You lose 3,033 megawatts of clean hydroelectric power. That is the amount it takes to run the city of Seattle every day. We are going to take that out in the face of projected energy shortages? Not on my watch.
So I say with the Senator from Washington: No, not on our watch.
I say to my fellow citizens in Oregon, this is the most important question you can ask Al Gore. Governor Bush has answered it. Please, Mr. Vice President, tell us what is your position on tearing out hydroelectric power in the Pacific Northwest? One of your agencies says do it. Another says we don't know enough yet. A third says don't do it. And Gore is refusing to answer the question.
We can have our fish and we can have our power. There are many things we can do, short of destroying our energy infrastructure and our clean, hydroelectric power. There are many things we can do to save fish short of the destruction of this kind of energy. To replace our clean energy with any other type, you are going to burn something and Oregonians will live in a dirtier place. I do not want them to.
I ask the Vice President, respectfully, to answer the question. What is your policy on dam breaching?
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