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“THE NEW APOLLO ENERGY PROJECT: A BOLD NEW ENERGY POLICY FOR AMERICA” mentioning the U.S. Dept. of Energy was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H5355-H5358 on June 12, 2003.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
THE NEW APOLLO ENERGY PROJECT: A BOLD NEW ENERGY POLICY FOR AMERICA
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 7, 2003, the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Inslee) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, I have come to the House Chamber tonight to talk about a tremendous opportunity for our great country, and it is an opportunity that follows in the historical path that John Kennedy set forth back on May 9, 1961. The path that I would like to talk about tonight is a path towards a new energy future for our country, a future that is befitting of this century and our technological progress and achievements we have made and can make in the next decade or two.
What we are going to be introducing for the House consideration in the next week or two is what we call the New Apollo Energy Project, because many of my colleagues and myself believe that our country deserves a bold, vigorous, aggressive new energy policy that is befitting of the technological wherewithal and talents of our country. So we are calling it the New Apollo Energy Project.
The reason we are calling it the New Apollo Energy Project is because we think that we need to follow in the footsteps of what John F. Kennedy did in challenging America right behind us. He came to this Chamber on May 9, 1961 as a young President, way back before computers, biotechnologies, solar cells, fuel cells; and he stood behind me and looked out to America and challenged America to put a man on the Moon within the decade, which was an extraordinary challenge to America in 1961. Computers were in their infancy, our rocketry was failing repeatedly at that time. At that moment, people really scratched their heads to ask how a President could be so bold to challenge the country to reach such an ambitious goal. But Kennedy did make that challenge; and the Nation responded and, indeed, America put a man on the Moon within that decade.
I think Kennedy recognized some things about America that were perhaps unique in the world that others did not who were skeptical about that effort. He recognized the basic can-do spirit of the culture and the American economy; and he recognized that when challenged, Americans can deliver technologically much more than people would otherwise think so, and so he set forth a challenge and a promise to Americans that we could do this.
Many of us now believe that we need to do a similar thing in the field of energy, in our energy policy in this country. And we are very optimistic that if we set high bars and high goals for America, we can meet them just as we did in the original Apollo project.
So in the coming weeks, my colleagues and I will be introducing the New Apollo Energy Project, which will basically set three goals for a new energy policy of our Nation. Not one that is sort of captured by the artifacts of old industries, not one that is captured by a feeling that we just have to continue down the same old road, but one that can really lift our eyes and see a higher plane that will solve three challenges that America has now that we need a new policy to address. I will briefly mention what those three are.
Number one, we need to get our economy growing again. And to do that, America needs to seize the moment by the reins and create these new, clean energy technologies that can create high-paying jobs in America. So job creation is job number one for a new energy policy, and we are optimistic that that can be done; and I will talk about that in a moment.
Second, we set a goal in our national energy policy of reducing our contributions to global warming gases that are now polluting our atmosphere and causing a warming and climate change in our planet, and this is something we can do using new technology; and it is required if we want to avoid climactic changes to change the world as we know it.
Three, and perhaps as important, we set a goal to break addiction to Middle Eastern oil, which has enslaved us to certain policies over the last several decades that are now clearly not in our security interests.
{time} 1945
It is time for America to become more self-reliant for fuel so that we do not have to make foreign policy decisions in one shape or another that are affected by our now current addiction for over half our fuel from those sources.
So those are the three goals we have set for the New Apollo Energy Project: Job creation, reduction of global climate gas emissions, and reduction of our dependence on foreign oil, particularly Mideast oil sources. And we believe all of them are very achievable.
Let me talk about the first goal which is job creation and getting a new sort of horizon, a new scope of our economy. And that is to adopt measures that will spur the development of these new high-paying jobs in high-tech industries. Let me talk about what some of them are.
Right now we have the capacity in this country which we are not using as much as we should, for instance, to create hundreds of thousands of jobs in the wind turbine industry, a growing industry, very rapidly growing industry, but one that needs to continue to increase that rate of acceleration. And what we are now proposing as one measure out of many is to continue the tax incentive, the investment tax credit for wind turbine construction in the United States. And we believe and the economics show very clearly that when we do this, when we foster the creation of this industry, we actually create ten times as many jobs as fostering megawatt creation instead of our old industries. For every megawatt of energy, a new renewable energy program develops, we create 10 times more jobs than if we do so in the old 19th century fossil fuel-based economic systems.
So now we believe we should be building wind turbines in the United States. We should have the high-paid jobs to do that and high-sector, high-skilled manufacturing jobs. We should be having construction jobs putting them on line. We should be building transmission facilities, all of which creates jobs in our country.
Now, we have the capability to do this. We are doing this in the State of Washington. Using an existing wind tax credit, we are building the largest wind turbine facility, farm essentially, in North America in the southeast corner of the State of Washington. It will create enough energy for 70,000 homes. And with the tax credit, it will do so on a market-based rate. But without the Apollo energy project or some other way, that tax credit will expire and we will lose the ability to create these jobs. And these jobs come at a very beneficial moment where the cost of wind turbine energy and a variety of other sources, I am just picking wind turbine to start this discussion, is becoming market based.
And, in fact, there is an interesting phenomenon that has occurred with many of our new technologies and that is what gives us such optimism about our new technologies. The fact of the matter is that over the last decade or so, the cost of energy produced by new technologies has come down dramatically. With every increase in the units of production of wind turbine, solar power, fuel cells, you name it, these new technologies, the cost of energy has come down dramatically.
I have a chart here that indicates how significant that reduction cost has been. For wind-powered energy, if you start in 1980, wind power was costing about 35 cents a kilowatt hour. Now, because of efficiencies caused by new production efficiencies, in 2000 that has come down to 2\1/2\, 3 cents; a reduction of a factor of 10 in the last 20 years. And it is projected that that will continue to decline in cost as we get efficiencies in production. And, of course, anyone who thinks about this knows why that happens. The more of these units you produce, we get economies of scale and the price comes down.
The same is the situation in photovoltaics and solar cells. In 1980, just 23 years ago, the price was over $1 a kilowatt hour. That has now come down to about 21, 22 cents, still above markets rates. But the interesting thing about this curve is you see this very significant reduction in cost as the rate of production has gone on up and it is predicted to continue on the downward slope. That is true for geothermal as well. It has had a reduction of more than half the cost in the last 20 years. And biomass, not quite as steep a curve, but still a reduction of cost.
What this shows us is we ought to be optimistic about, if we do engage in the production and incentivize the production of these new technologies, we will reduce cost, we will create jobs, and we will bring those jobs home.
This is a very important issue of bringing these jobs home. It is very clear for anyone who has thought about the future of the world's energy sources, is that the world is going to adopt new technologies. There is no question about that. The question is which countries are going to draw the jobs that are associated with that. And right now, unfortunately, it is not us as much as it should be.
In wind, many of these wind turbines are manufactured in Denmark. In hybrid automobile manufacturing, the cars are being manufactured in Japan. In photovoltaic manufacturing, a German company is leading the way, although much of the production is in the United States. And we are thinking about opening a Denmark-based turbine manufacturer as well. Those jobs need to be in America. Those jobs need to be American jobs. Just as we dominated the aeronautics industry for the last 50 years, as we created the first auto industry at the turn of the century, we need to create an industry that is homegrown and growing those jobs right here in America. And the New Apollo Energy Project is signed to do exactly that. And we do it by using the whole scope of tools that is available to the Federal Government to help to do that.
Number one is to use our tax policy in a way that will actually create jobs in a meaningful way. We have passed a lot of tax cuts in this Chamber recently, but virtually none of them have actually been directed to try to create new technologically driven jobs. And we need to use the Tax Code to create incentives for business people to create these new industries, to give them a little leg up to a little start, and that is why we have created investment tax credits for a whole slew of these new industries, both to the manufacturers, photovoltaics, wind turbine, fuel-efficient hybrid vehicles, retooling costs to the auto industry. It is clear that our local auto industry is going to have some retooling costs to go to either hybrid vehicles or, in the long term, fuel-cell vehicles.
We believe we ought to give our local domestic auto industry tax breaks to help those retooling costs to build this new generation of vehicles to get this job done. But it should not be just for manufacturers; we need to take care of consumers and, ultimately, buyers as well. And that is why in the New Apollo Energy Project we have created incentives to give tax breaks for people to buy fuel-
efficient vehicles. Significant incentives. And not only fueled vehicles, but also other energy producing materials including air-
conditioning units, including tax credits in a new mortgage incentivized program to help people who build energy-efficient homes. We have a lot to do to get that done.
Now, let me just also indicate there is optimism in getting this job done in real life today. I would like to show a picture of a home in Virginia, and this is a home that was built about a year and a half ago in Virginia, which is not a tropical climate. We have a picture actually in the snow. And this is a home built for $365,000 which is relatively close, maybe a little bit more than actual building costs of a typical home of Virginia in this area, but this home is special. This home, which is a very comfortable home, I have actually been in it or actually the prototype, it was built on the Mall at one time to show us what it was like, or a very similar home. This home, using existing technologies today, has zero net energy consumption, zero net energy consumption.
It does so by using photovoltaic cells incorporated in the roof in the actual shingles to produce electricity. It has a very high degree of insulation value. It uses an in-ground heat pump, and it has a net energy consumption of zero because it can produce, and we one get a net metering bill which allows homeowners who generate electricity to feed their excess electricity back into the grid and to get a credit for doing that. This is a model for the future that is here today. And we need to utilize our Tax Code in a way that helps homeowners who want to recreate homes like this across America, which can happen today in a variety of climates, in almost every climate, to help reduce energy costs. To do that we need to pass a bill that is similar like that.
So what we are saying is this is not pie-in-the-sky, Buck Rogers, over the horizon, next decade. Some of these technologies may take a decade to, in fact, become cost effective; but some are on the market today with a very modest boost, and America ought to be doing it.
Now, I would like to turn to the second goal of the New Apollo Energy Project and that is the goal to reduce America's contribution to global warming gases. We unfortunately, with every other industrialized country, are contributing an enormous load of pollutants to the atmosphere; and what we are creating, all of us, we are putting out of the tailpipes of our cars and out of our smokestacks of our industry and a whole host of any fossil fuel-based system, we are putting millions of tons of carbon dioxide and methane into the air. And these are invisible gases. They really do not bother our eyesight but they will bother our climate in the long term.
To the extent that now science is irrefutable that the concentration of these gases are going to significantly increase during our lifetime, and I have a chart to indicate that, to indicate how significant this problem is, I have a chart of the levels of concentrations of carbon dioxide. And carbon dioxide is a global warming gas basically. The levels of carbon dioxide you will see are relatively consistent for 1,000 years, starting at 800,000. Then we get to the Industrial Age of 1800. We started burning coal and other fossil fuels. And when we do that, we create carbon dioxide and it goes out to the atmosphere. We dump it for free. We treat the atmosphere sort of as a big garbage dump. When that happens, those rates of concentration of carbon dioxide started to go up dramatically, and now in the early 2000s start to rise in almost a vertical fashion.
So for thousands of years we had levels in the 240 parts per million range, which are now going to be skyrocketing in the next century, are anticipated to double at least in the next century. This is doubling of an unprecedented occurrence in the history of the world. And the reason that is significant is that carbon dioxide acts, in a manner of speaking, like a pane of glass or a blanket, depending on how you look at it.
The way carbon dioxide works is that carbon dioxide allows the rays of the sun to come in. Because the rays of the sun come in, there is ultraviolet light. But when the energy bounces back, it bounces back at the infrared spectrum. It is a different spectrum of light. And carbon dioxide traps infrared light. So as a pane of glass works, it traps, if you will, the infrared radiation from going back into space and it warms the planet. And it is a really good thing we have some carbon dioxide in our atmosphere because we would have a very cold planet if we did not have it.
But the problem is if we are going to double the rate of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, it is going to, as you can imagine, trap enormous amounts of energy. And we are already seeing the ramifications of that. The 5 hottest years in recorded history have been in the last 10 years; 1999, I believe, probably was the hottest year in record in the last 10,000 years. And we saw extraordinary damage associated with the change in our climate already.
We have seen significant changes right here in America. We have seen the glaciers in Glacier National Park disappear. It is predicted in the next 75 years, if we keep going at the rate we are going, there will not be any glaciers in Glacier National Park.
In the Arctic, dead Intuit Indians are popping out of the ground because the tundra is melting and the caskets are popping out of the ground.
{time} 2000
In the Arctic ice sheet, it could be reduced by 40 percent in the next couple of decades and in depth reduced 40 percent, almost in half; and it is reduced at least 10 percent already.
We are seeing huge increases in very severe hurricane thunderstorm activity so that the insurance losses in the domestic industry have gone up something like 40 or 50 percent in the last several years.
So we are seeing now just a little taste of very significant changes in our climate that are going to continue to go up if we do not do something about it.
What we have proposed, we have introduced in the new Apollo Energy project, we can do this better than this. We have achieved really dramatic results, improving our environment in the last 2 decades because the Federal Government's got busy and it has done some things to clean our air. We have got a lot cleaner air than we did 25 years ago. In sulfur dioxide and various particulate matter, we have made some real strides because the Federal Government has acted, but in this situation Congress has sort of adopted the pose of an ostrich. We have put our heads in the sand, our tails in the air, rather than the American eagle; and it is time for us to pull our heads out of the sand and do something about the climate, and there are some things happening here in Congress.
We have this proposal we have suggested in the House. In the other Chamber there will be an energy debate in the next week or two. There will be a very important vote on trying to create a cap to try to limit the amount of CO2 that goes into the global atmosphere, and that is something that is in America's long-term interest. We hope that the other Chamber will show some action in that regard.
What we have done is we have used the tools in the Federal tool box to try to reduce the rate of global gas emissions in a way that will preserve the way we live because Americans still want to continue to enjoy easy, accessible transportation, safe transportation. We want to have enjoyable homes. We do not want to change dramatically our lifestyle, and we can do that if we will make some smart investments in new technology.
So what we have done is to try to create incentives to use new technology to reduce global emissions in a variety of ways. One, we suggested that we, in fact, improve the efficiency, for instance, of our air conditioners which have enormous improvements we can make of the efficiency of air conditioners to reduce the demand of electricity and reduce the fossil fuel we burn to create electricity.
We think people who buy autos that are efficient ought to get a tax break to try to reduce the amount of CO2 emissions we put into the air. We think that we ought to use the regulatory basis to improve the efficiency of our automobiles through the government acting as well as we have to improve the CAFE standards which we stopped in the early 1980s.
It is interesting, we improved the mileage of our cars dramatically in the 1970s, but we stopped in 1983; and we actually have gone backwards in the mileage of our cars. I mean, think about that. At the very time we have created the world's best computers, the world's most vibrant biotech industry, we have gone backwards in what our auto industry has given us for mileage of our cars. That is an abysmal record, and we ought to improve this and get back on this track of improving the fuel efficiency of our vehicles; and that is very possible. That is part of our new Apollo Energy Project.
Now I want to say, too, it is very important to realize there are no silver bullets to any of the challenges we have here tonight, and we recognize that. There is no one technology that is going to solve all of our energy challenges. We believe we have to have a very broad-based approach to do the research and development work that it is going to take to meet our challenges, and that means that we just do not look at wind or solar or geothermal. We think about things outside of the box, if you will, one of those being, for instance, clean coal technology.
There may be a way for us to burn coal and trap, or as the scientists use it, a $24 word, sequester the carbon dioxide as it comes out of the smokestack. If we can sequester the carbon dioxide from coal, we can continue to use coal without, in fact, increasing our CO2 emission, and we have an enormous supply of coal in this country.
There are other environmental challenges we have to address with this mining; but this is something we need to explore, and we need to have sort of an all-comers approach when we are doing research and development to look at all the potential energy efficiencies and new technologies that we can use in this regard. So we have taken an all-
comers approach.
The third goal that we have is to break our addiction from Middle Eastern oil, and I do not think anyone has to be a foreign policy genius to understand that we have to act. Not just Republicans or Democrats, multiple administrations have skewed our foreign policy by necessity because of our addiction to oil. We certainly have not been as aggressive in insisting on Saudi Arabia's ending the terrorist threat to this country as we should have been, and one of the reasons is because of our addiction to Saudi oil. It has made us lethargic in multiple administrations in dealing with this terrorist threat which now we are starting to actually make some improvements on. I heard today that Saudi Arabia is going to start to take some steps finally, way too late, to cut off financing for terrorism; but we need to get rid of this anchor on our foreign policy.
We need to make foreign policy decisions based on the security of Americans, rather than the security of the oil industry. To do that we have got to reduce our dependence on Middle Eastern oil; and what we have suggested is to set a goal, set a goal of saving or eliminating 600,000 barrels of oil a day, oil we otherwise would buy from the Mideast, by the year 2010; and that is an achievable goal using these new technologies. We set the goal of eliminating 2.4 million barrels of oil a day by the year 2015; and assessments by the Department of Energy have indicated that if we use our smarts and use these new technologies, we can, in fact, break that addiction to Middle Eastern oil if, in fact, we will use our heads.
Certainly, jobs are a good reason to do this. Our environment is a good reason to do this, but our personal security is an excellent reason to do this; and we ought to do that for all three reasons. Therefore, we set those effective goals that we would like to achieve.
Now we realize that we do not have all the answers starting out in this effort. So we have also essentially given future administrations flexibility to act; and in our bill, we have basically said that if these goals are not being met in a timely fashion, if we are not reducing our CO2 emissions down to 1990 levels, as is our goal, if we are not reducing our oil by 600,000 barrels a day, as is our goal, if we are not on a path to create those millions of jobs that we want to create, we would give the administration further flexibility to, in fact, act in ways that it sees fit and certain efficiency measures to improve our productive capability to continue on the path of jobs and improve our efficiency because it is going to be a flexible standard in that regard.
In conclusion this evening, Mr. Speaker, we are very optimistic about our country's energy future. We are only optimistic if the U.S. Congress starts to act in a progressive way that really is in keeping with the can-do spirit of America. There are some naysayers who would say that we are just not smart enough, bright enough, creative enough, we are just going to have to sort of stick with the technologies that were invented in 1899, which much of our industrial energy policy we are still using; but we are the folks who believe that America is brilliant because we keep changing. America is successful because we are not sort of shackled by the ideas of the past or the technologies of the past. So we believe that we ought to adopt this new approach.
I will be working with my colleagues to pass the new Apollo Energy Project. I do not know if it will be this year; but we believe it is going to happen, and it must happen because this is the destiny of the United States of America, the greatest country on Earth.
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