Energy Conservation

ENERGY CONSERVATION -- (Senate - November 18, 2005)

Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, for the last several weeks, those of us who serve on the Subcommittee on Health and Human Services have been trying to find adequate resources amongst other resources to fund LIHEAP, the money necessary to help low-income families provide for their comfort this winter. I thought it would be an appropriate time to talk about that for a little bit because I think Americans need to understand they are not without power to do a few simple things over the course of the next several months of this winter to help themselves as it relates to the heating of their own homes.

Americans spend more than $160 billion--that is right, $160 billion--a year on heat, cooling, lights, and living in their homes. That is an awful lot of money. If most Americans are like I am, I would like to know how I can bring that number down a little bit, how I might be able to tighten my belt a little or my family's budget a little bit during this time of extremely high-priced energy.

We hear about record natural gas prices and 30- and 40- and 50-percent increases in heating bills this winter for those who heat with natural gas. We know those who heat with home heating oil in the Northeast are going to pay substantially more. In the West and in the pipelines of the West on which my home is connected, where there is more gas, we are still going to be paying 25 or 30 percent more.

What might we do about it? Let me suggest a couple of things.

Do you know that if you lower your home heating thermostat by 2 degrees--by 2 degrees--for every degree you lower it, you save 1 percent on your heating bill. We were told by experts recently who were testifying before the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, if every American did that this winter, by spring, we could potentially have a surplus in natural gas in the lower 48, and that in itself would drive prices down. Americans have power to help themselves if they simply would turn their thermostats down by 2 degrees.

I am not going to do a ``Jimmy Carter'' on you by saying put on a sweater, but if you did turn your home heating thermostat down by 2 degrees and if you did put on a sweater and if you are a couple living by yourself in a large home and you turn off the radiators in some of your bedrooms that you are not using and close the doors, there could literally be a dramatic savings across this country.

If you want to change your gas price experience at the pump, instead of driving 70 and 75 or 80 miles per hour on the freeway, why don't you go back to 60 or 65? And if you turned it down and slowed it down, oil consumption could drop in a day--a day--in this country by 1 million barrels of consumption. That is the power of the American consumer if the American consumer wants to do something about it instead of pointing fingers and blaming--and there is plenty of that going around, and we deserve to take some of it. The consumer is not without power.

Let me suggest this in my time remaining. Senator Bingaman and I would like to help in that effort. So we are going to provide conservation packages, packets of information to our colleagues' offices that they can send out in their letters to their constituents advising and assisting in this kind of conservation effort. We hope you do it. If every Senator and all Senate staffs turn off their computers when they go home at night--shut them down, hit the off switch, turn out the lights in your office. If that were done across America today, heating bills and energy bills would drop precipitously.

But we are in this mode of everything on, all the lights on, the thermostat turned up because we are still living in the memory of surplus and inexpensive energy. That memory is gone. The reality is that the world has changed significantly, and while we scramble to catch up and provide increased availability of supply in the market--and that is what we are doing and that is what the national energy policy passed in August is attempting to do--while that is happening, you know what we can do: We can help ourselves.

So once again I say to America, turn your thermostat down a few degrees, put on a sweater, shut portions of your house down and take literally tens, if not hundreds, of dollars off your heating bill in the course of a winter. If we do it collectively across America, by spring, natural gas prices could be down dramatically, and we would not see the kind of job loss that is occurring today in the chemical industry as large manufacturing plants are shut down simply because they cannot afford the price of natural gas, and they are moving elsewhere in the world to produce their product.

We are building pipelines, we are drilling for more natural gas out West and in the overthrust belts than we ever have before, and there are trillions of cubic feet available out there if we can get to it. We are making every effort to, and this administration is doing just that. In the interim, in the reality of a cold winter, America, you can help yourself. America, you can drive a little slower, you can turn your thermostats down, and if we were all to do that collectively, it would have a dramatic impact on the marketplace and on consumption.

Does it have to be mandated by law? Need there be a law to tell you that you can save a little money by those actions? I would hope not. I would hope that the wisdom of the pocketbook would suggest that we be prudent as to a procedure to follow.

Senator Bingaman and I are going to supply packets to the offices of our colleagues. We hope our colleagues will pass those on. We hope our colleagues might take the time to do a public service announcement over the course of the next month, talking to their folks at home about the opportunity and what is available. I think it is appropriate, and I think it is the right thing to do.

Senator Bingaman and I have coalesced with industry to see if they cannot collectively begin to produce a greater message of clarity about the opportunity in the marketplace to conserve and to save and, in so doing, to lower the overall cost of energy and its impact upon the American economy.

Want to give yourself a Christmas gift? Put on a sweater and turn the thermostat down 2 degrees.

I yield the floor.

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