Alternative Energy

Floor Speech

Alternative Energy

I appreciate, Mr. Blumenauer, coming forth to talk about this issue because we're about to really make a pretty big decision here, whether we're going to just continue doing nothing about our energy problems, this sort of inaction model. Some of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle basically are saying everything is hunky-dory and we should do nothing about the energy challenges we have. Or should we take a real step forward to try to move to transform our economy, to build millions of green collar jobs, to wean ourselves off of Middle Eastern oil and at the same time reduce the amount of global warming that is occurring?

We think we need to move. We think we need action. We don't think the current state of the economy is good enough for America. We think America is better than this for ways I'd like to talk about a little bit. And I don't think it's good enough to adopt this sort of approach some of my colleagues earlier were talking about to just say it's okay to be addicted to Middle Eastern oil, it's okay to allow the jobs of building electric cars to go to China.

It's not okay to let the jobs building wind turbines to go to Denmark. It's not okay to let the job of building solar cells go to China. We don't think that's okay. We want an American response to build those products here, to build those green collar jobs here.

Now, I meet with a lot of groups about energy. I was very heartened last weekend. I went to the Boston area to go to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the MIT Conference on Energy, and there's a group up at MIT of students, mostly post-graduate science and engineering students, and they have an energy club, and and once a year they have a meeting about energy. So I went up there to address their group. There were about 150, 200 students, and about 300 entrepreneurs and business people. And I was so excited to listen to what they saw as a vision for this country.

And for those who think we can just stay in the status quo, I wish they could meet these MIT students. These folks were telling me about the jobs we can create in the solar industry with concentrated solar energy power, like the Ausra Company that just built the first manufacturing plant for concentrated solar cell energy in Nevada. Just 2 months ago they opened up this plant. And these MIT students are chomping at the bit to start working in that technology. We were talking about the AltaRock Company, a company that's now exploring engineered geothermal up in the State of Washington. These MIT students just can't wait to start going out and start businesses around technology like that. We talked about the Sapphire Energy Company, a company that now is building production facilities to use algae to make biofuels. We talked about the A123 Company in Boston, which makes lithium-ion batteries so we can power our plug-in electric hybrid cars.

And what these MIT students told me is, Mr. Congressman, you build a structure to drive investment into these new technologies, and we will build the companies of the future and the jobs of the future to deliver a clean energy transformed economy for the United States.

And for anybody who is a pessimist about our ability to wean ourselves off of fossil fuel and wean ourselves off of Saudi Arabian oil, you ought to go out and meet these MIT students.

But the businessmen there told us something, and this is the important point, I think. What the business people, these were venture capitalists, these were CEOs of major corporations, what they told us is that future will not come to pass, the green-collar jobs we are talking about, unless we adopt some rules of the road for a market-based economy that will not give such an advantage to fossil fuels but, in fact, will level the playing field.

And what they told me is that basically there is a couple of things we can do. One thing we can do is to essentially level the playing field between these new technologies and some of the older companies that have been subsidized for so long, like the oil and gas industry.

Now, basically, we can do that through a system that will drive investment towards these new jobs of the future. And, by the way, those new jobs of the future may include what we call sequestered coal. Some of my colleagues were here earlier talking a lot about coal. The folks up at MIT were telling me that we may be able to find a technology to sequester carbon dioxide when you gasify coal. It may be a possibility.

So we need some research dollars to make that come to pass. Well, we have a way of doing that, and President Obama has proposed a way of generating funds that can be used to essentially develop that technology, and he has proposed what's called a cap-and-trade or a cap-and-invest system which is, basically, it's pretty simple. We would establish a cap, a limit on the amount of pollution that polluting industries are allowed to put into the air.

We have done this to great success in acid rain, sulfur dioxide, which is the pollution that causes acid rain. Congress several years ago passed a cap, a limit on the amount of that acid rain pollution that we put into the atmosphere.

Now, President Obama has proposed doing the same for the pollutant that causes global warming, principally carbon dioxide. And then we would simply have the polluting industries buy, at auction, the permits to do that, and use the market system to establish a price for that.

Now, here's the important part about this approach. Number 1, it does, it takes action. It recognizes that the status quo is not good enough. And we are here tonight to say that America needs a better energy policy than the one we have right now. So, number one, it takes action.

Number two, when you do this, what the business people have told me all across this country, when you do this, it starts to drive investment into these new technologies that can create the green-collar jobs that we need so much in wind power, in solar power, in enhanced geothermal power, in electric cars and potentially in sequestered coal to use coal in that way. But to do that you have to put a price on carbon dioxide, and you have to limit the amount of this pollution that's going into the atmosphere. So we are here to say that we are capable of building a new transformed economy.

I want to make one other comment if I can, people have said that when you make an investment like this it costs some money. Well, any investment costs some money, when you buy a house, it costs some money. When you build an electric car, it costs you some GPO's PDF
money. But the people who want us to just stay in the status quo don't understand that the door of inaction is going to cost us a heck of a lot more money.

Go ask the people up in Alaska whose homes tonight are washing into the Arctic Ocean because the permafrost is melting, these are Americans. There is a town in America that is going to have to be moved at the cost of about $30 million because it's basically melting into the Arctic Ocean because the tundra is melting underneath them. That's costing Americans a lot of money tonight. We need to figure that into the proposition.

Go ask the farmers in California, who are losing their farms tonight because we have this horrendous drought, an unprecedented drought in the western United States, who are losing their farms and their livelihoods. Ask them if there is a cost associated with global warming.

Ask the folks who are losing salmon, the salmon fishermen on the west coast--I am from Washington, Mr. Blumenauer is from Oregon--ask them the cost of inaction of losing their livelihood because we lost salmon runs because there wasn't enough water in the rivers last year to have a salmon harvest.

Americans are getting costs tonight that we cannot ignore, and we know those costs are going to be greater than any investments that we make. By the way, those investments that we make under our plan, here is what is going to happen, and this is President Obama's plan. Polluting industries are going to do what they should do, which is to have to pay some cost to put pollution into the atmosphere.

You know, when you and I go to the dump, we pay $25 to dump our junk in the garbage dump. We can't just dump it for free. And under our plan polluting industries will pay some cost associated with putting pollution into the atmosphere, as determined by the market. They will bid against each other, and the highest bidder will get the permit.

So they will get to finally recognize the atmosphere as not a personal dumping ground for a coal-fired plant but, in fact, something we share that has a market value. So they will put money into the pot to buy those permits.

That money will then go back to the American people in a variety of ways. First it will go back to the American people in making an investment for America in common to build these new industries to do the research and development it takes so these jobs will be here, not China. It will go back to the American people as an investment to build research facilities to build lithium ion batteries here in this country rather than China and Korea, that's number 1.

Number two, it will go back to the American people in a substantial tax cut, probably the largest tax cut America has seen for the middle class, to make permanent some of these tax cuts. It's going to go right back to the American people.

Third, it will go back in a way, and there are several ways we can do this, to help some of the communities that might be disadvantaged, potentially, by job loss and energy-intensive industries around steel mills and the like. The point is it will go back to the American people, and it go in a way that will reduce the cost for Americans, not increase it.

Now, if you think I am just making this stuff up, people can go check an authoritative view, an assessment of the cost of this, and it basically concluded as this has net positive costs. I mean, it doesn't have costs relative to what's going to happen to our economy if we do not act, and that's from an assessment done on the GNP that predicted we would have a 5 percent reduction.

Lloyd Stern, a very well respected economist from England, he and his team did this assessment. They concluded we will have net negative costs relative to this inaction.

So we are here to say we have a vision based on confidence that Americans still have the right stuff, that people who put a man on the Moon still have the right stuff. And if we go out and make these investments, we are going to put Americans to work building these green-collar jobs right in this country. If we don't, we are going to lose jobs.

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