Global Warming

Floor Speech

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, the statement my colleague has made is truthful and important, but there is absolutely more to this story even than that. At another time I will discuss at greater length the oceans dimension to what is happening to our planet as a result of the carbon pollution we are emitting at literally unprecedented levels in human history. But for now let me say it is very severe, very dire, and to everyone who is listening and paying attention, the ocean is emitting warning signs that we disregard at our peril.

In addition to the threat of environmental harm, connected to the problem of carbon pollution is a huge opportunity and that is the opportunity of clean energy. Clean energy will drive the decades to come. Clean energy jobs can and should be powering our economic recovery.

We are in a race right now. We are in a race for dominance and for preeminence in the clean energy economy that is emerging. All around the world, other countries see it. They are competing in that race. They are putting everything they have into winning that race. But because we have a political system that is still listening to the dirty, polluting energy industry and using the politics of Washington to interfere, we are constantly having to fight to stay even. One of the things we are fighting right now to preserve is the section 1603 Treasury grant program, which will expire at the end of this year if we do nothing. This program has been vital for our renewable energy industry. It has leveraged nearly $23 billion in private sector investment, supported 22,000 projects which collectively power more than 1 million homes. This is big. This is no longer some tiny little cottage industry. The National Renewable Energy Lab estimates the 1603 program has supported up to 290,000 U.S. jobs.

If we look more largely at the renewable energy sector, renewable energy is more labor intensive, creates more jobs than fossil fuel energy per dollar invested, creates more jobs than fossil fuel energy per megawatt generated, and the clean economy as a whole, including renewable energy and energy efficiency and environmental management, employs 2.7 million workers in this country. It is more than the fossil fuel industry, but the fossil fuel industry owns this town and they keep stepping on this larger, growing, clean energy industry.

We are seeing it, unfortunately, out there in real life. Americans invented the first solar cell in 1995. America had 40 percent of the global manufacturing volume. We are now down to 7 percent of the global manufacturing volume of solar cells.

China is investing $20 billion more in clean energy every year to accelerate ahead of us. European countries have feed-in tariffs so investors can know what their clean energy product will sell for and that is attracting capital and growth there, and we simply are not keeping up. We are now, in the United States of America, the home to only 1 of the top 10 wind turbine manufacturers. This is an unhealthy place to be and we need to get back into this fight. The mature industries that America leads have demonstrated the important role of government intervention at their early days.

Our commercial aviation industry has been the envy of the world through its entire history. The United States of America subsidized airmail to help support this fledgling industry. They purchased planes for military purposes to help support it and supported it with aeronautics R&D.

The same thing should be happening in clean energy, and we need to work very hard to make sure this 1603 Treasury grant does not die on the cutting room floor as we come to the end of this year. If it does, jobs will go with it. There will be an immediate response. Projects will be terminated, people will be laid off, divisions of companies and smaller companies will close, and it is an unnecessary, self-inflicted injury we should avoid.

Let me bring it home. In Rhode Island this project has facilitated solar panel installation on three new bank branches. The TD Bank has opened in Barrington, East Providence, and Johnston, RI. Those projects created jobs, put people to work, and lowered the costs of their electrical energy. Step by step it gets us off foreign oil and these foreign entanglements to defend our supply.

The city of East Providence, RI, is in the middle of planning a 3-megawatt solar project on an old landfill, land that had gone out of use effectively but now will be generating power for that city. Construction has also begun on three wind turbines at the Fields Point wastewater treatment facility in Providence. The turbines will meet more than half of our big water utility's energy needs.

A company called Hodges Badge--if your child has ever won an award in a track meet, in a horse show, or in a school production, they probably got a ribbon for it, and that ribbon was probably made by Hodges Badge. It is a great Rhode Island company. It has 95 employees. They have gone completely clean energy, and they are doing that to protect those 95 jobs. They are doing it to lower their energy costs, and they are doing it to do the right thing.

I salute Senator Sanders for his eloquence on the real problem of climate change and the campaign of lies and propaganda that has interfered with our ability to deal with what is a real and emerging problem, and also to point out that the second step in this is that there are jobs and there is economic success behind the clean energy industry that will lead us out of the predicament we are creating for ourselves because people here are in the thrall of the polluting industries.

I thank Senator Sanders very much.

I yield the floor.

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I thank Senator Sanders. Senator Cardin has arrived so I will hand off to him in a moment. But to the Senator's point about the imbalance between support for the fossil fuel energy industry and the renewable energy industry; the first being one that hurts our national security, pollutes our air and costs a fortune and is phasing out and the second being one that is growing, that is clean, and that is the way of the future.

According to the Environmental Law Institute, the U.S. invested almost six times more in subsidies for fossil fuel from 2002 to 2008 than we did in renewable energy. So by a factor of six times, we have our thumb on the scales supporting the old dirty industry against the new, rather than supporting the new the way our international competitors are doing.

I ask unanimous consent that a response from Secretary Chu to a letter Senator Sanders and I and other Senators wrote to him about the status of and success of our clean energy investments be printed in the Record.

There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the Record,

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I thank Senator Sanders. I wish to go back to this question of the jobs and the economic value we get from clean energy. The Department of Energy reports that the clean energy sector alone directly employs nearly 1.6 million people in the United States. So nearly 1.6 million families are depending on the paychecks they get from the clean energy sector.

Within that, it is growing. The United States has created over 100,000 solar-focused jobs--100,000 solar-focused jobs--and at least 75,000 jobs related to wind energy installation in 2010. In Rhode Island, we are seeing that coming on. The newspaper today, the Providence Journal, reported on a permit application for the cable that will connect an offshore wind facility that is going in off Block Island back to the grid onshore to bring the power from that installation back and into the New England energy grid.

But when it gets going, think of the jobs that are going to be involved in that. Senator Reed and I worked very hard to shore up--get money to shore up the waterside, the side of the pier at Quonset so it would be capable of dealing with very heavy-duty installation barges and things such as that.

So the Quonset Point facility is now ready for this construction. We have the trains and new highways that bring in the pieces of those big turbines. The turbines are so big you cannot build them in China, in Europe. We have to assemble them onshore and put them right on the barge. So the assembly of them will take place in Rhode Island, right at Quonset, and that will mean a lot of jobs.

Then we have to barge them out and we have the barge operators and the barge captains and the tugs. Then we sink the base, and we have to have divers and builders and people who are experts in that kind of marine construction.

Then we put them up. We have to operate them. We have to maintain them. What they do is they contribute clean energy to the grid. They are a constant supply because of the wind over the Atlantic being such a powerful resource, and it is kind of a win-win situation. So we see the need to get behind this in an immediate way in Rhode Island.

It would be one of the great tragedies if we let the Chinese and the Belgians and the French and the Dutch and whoever else get ahead of us in this competition. We do not need to. It is wrong. We are taking ourselves out of a race we should be winning when we do that. I commend Senator Sanders for his effort to bring us together to continue to make this point. There are jobs here. There is an energy industry that is going to lead the economy of the next decades of this world, and we want America to be at the front of it and not to have sand thrown in our gears by the dirty, polluting energy industry that is on its way out as its last contribution to the damage it is now doing to our economy and to our environment.

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