Alternative Energy Sources

ALTERNATIVE ENERGY SOURCES

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Mr. INSLEE. Thank you. I am delighted that Ms. Schwartz is leading this energy discussion tonight for two reasons. One, right now outside the Capitol there is a giant lightning storm going on, so talking about energy in the spirit of Ben Franklin is the right time to do it.

But, secondly, and more importantly, many of us here on the Democratic side of the aisle believe that America is ready for a project with the same scope and ambition and vision as we had with John F. Kennedy with the original Apollo project.

I have introduced H.R. 2828, which is called the New Apollo Energy bill, that basically is working on the belief that this Nation has the same gumption, the same technological prowess, the same vision that we had in the 1960s when we decided, as challenged by John F. Kennedy from that rostrum on May 9, 1961, to say we were going to put a man on the moon in 10 years and bring them back safely.

We have now introduced this New Apollo Energy Project because we believe that the times that we now live in this decade are both as challenging and as promising as the 1960s were in space. We believe that the challenge we have to deal with energy is of the same scope as America had and Kennedy had dealing during the Cold War with the space race. We also believe that our ability to invent, to tinker, to innovate is as good or better as it was in the 1960s, and we need to have that same spirit with the New Apollo Project.

In fact, I was just reading before I came over here, one of my staff handed me the quote from Kennedy's speech, and one of the things that he said was, I think it was kind of interesting, he was talking about the need for America to be a leader in space. We believe America needs to be a leader, it is our destiny to be a leader, and what Kennedy said was, ``If this capsule history of our progress teaches us anything, it is that man, in his quest for knowledge and progress, is determined and cannot be deterred. The exploration of space will go ahead, whether we join in it or not. It is one of the great adventures of all time, and no nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind in this race for space.''

We believe, those of us who are propounding the New Apollo Energy Project believe, that we cannot be a leader of the world unless we decide that we are going to lead the world into a new energy future in this country and later in the world. And to do so, we believe that that is a challenge that is much more than nibbling on the edges.

We got to the moon because we had an aspiration of one giant leap for mankind, not just one little baby step for man. Frankly, this Congress and this administration to date, sadly to say, has been just nibbling on the edges. These tiny little inching forward as a baby would take their first little steps.

We both need and deserve more in this country, which is a very bold and visionary technological leap in energy. So we have introduced the New Apollo Energy Project, which will answer that bugle cry that this country has always answered to really leapfrog the existing technologies.

If I can just briefly describe some of the things we want to do. We want to achieve three ends in the New Apollo Energy Project. Number one, we want to lead the world economically. We want to create good, high-paying jobs in the new technologies of new energy that are right now, unfortunately, going overseas.

Unfortunately, we are losing jobs right now to some of the Japanese automakers because of auto efficiency. We are losing jobs to some the German solar energy industries. We are losing jobs to Denmark. And I think Denmark is a great country, but to lose jobs to them to create these wind turbines makes no sense. The country that put a man on the moon, to allow other countries to lead in energy makes no sense. So one of the things we need to do is to bring the job growth right here.

The second thing we have to do is truly break our addiction to Middle Eastern oil. Although we laud the President for the first time suggesting after 6 years of urging him, has now suggested that he wants to join us to help to break the addiction to Middle Eastern oil, and that is great, but, unfortunately, the week the President said that, he laid off 150 or 100 researchers in renewable energy at the Boulder Energy Laboratory. So we would like to have some reality rather than rhetoric.

Third, we have to break this tendency to put more carbon dioxide in the air, to deal with global warming. The debate about global warming is over. It was a vigorous and strenuous debate, and it is done. The science of global warming is in, and we need now to really have technologies that will reduce CO 2 emissions.

I met the President of the Marshall Islands the other day, and he told me, he was on Bainbridge Island, I live on an island, Bainbridge Island, Washington, he told me that his entire nation may be environmental refugees because their entire nation is threatened by the rising sea levels together with the collapse of coral reefs.

We had a meeting with Stanford professors last week in the basement of this building, who told us in 100 years there may not be any viable healthy coral reefs in the world because the carbon dioxide we are putting in the air out of our tailpipes and coal-powered plants goes into solution in the ocean, it makes the oceans more acidic, and when they become more acidic, coral reefs cannot survive.

So we got to get these three jobs done. We have got a New Apollo Project to do it, and I would like to discuss it in depth.

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Mr. INSLEE. Just more oil. You just drill more holes in the ground. The problem with that is, unfortunately, for reasons that are past our understanding, the dinosaurs went to die under somebody else's sand. That seems so unfair to us. We use 25 percent of the world's oil, but we only have 3 percent of the world's oil reserves. We could drill in Yosemite, we could drill outside on the south lawn of the White House. The problem is, the oil is not there.

We use one-quarter of the world's oil, but we only have 3 percent of the reserves. So we can accelerate some exploration, but, unfortunately, the oil, frankly, is not there. So for one reason, it is just not there. But the pessimists believe that we cannot invent our way out of this pickle.

The optimists believe that we can do the same thing in energy as we did in space. Just to harken back in history, when Kennedy said we were going to the moon on May 9, 1961, put that in historical perspective. Our rockets were blowing up on the launch pad. We had launched a softball in suborbital flight. Computers were as big as a room. He didn't know how we were going to get to the moon, but he did know a fundamental lesson of American psychology, which is we are the best inventors in human history, literally. Our culture, our society in America is the best inventive society in human history. So he recognized our ability to innovate.

Now, the New Apollo Energy Project that we have propounded delves on that. Let me just give you an example of just a couple things in my neighborhood.

It was in my paper this morning, in the Seattle Times, about a young man who has built a hybrid vehicle that uses an enhanced battery. It is a plug-in hybrid that has a little larger battery that he adds to the trunk. That car now gets 100 miles per gallon, 100 miles per gallon, and it is driving the streets of Seattle, Washington, today. The reason it does, you plug it in, it gets a little larger boost, it uses electricity now much greater than the gasoline. Now, it does use additional electricity, but it is getting 100 miles per gallon driving on the streets today. This technology exists.

Because of his efforts and some of these other groups that are pushing this, they are now pushing the auto industries to move faster to get to this plug-in hybrid technology. It is there.

We have the largest wind farm in North America being built today, 350-foot-tall towers in southeast Washington, that is generating over $1.5 million over a several-year period for one farmer of a stream of revenue. This is great for farmers as well. It is going to produce enough electricity for 400,000 people.

We have the largest biodiesel plant in North America now is under design in southwestern Washington which will produce environmentally sound fuel for our cars and biodiesel. And biodiesel is great because it reduces the CO2 emissions, because the CO2 goes into the plant, we make oil out of it, and we don't put any net increase in carbon dioxide.

I just mentioned these three technologies out of hundreds that are now coming on.

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Mr. INSLEE. And I want to dovetail on this point about this is good old American capitalism as work. We believe in the power of capitalism. You look at the space race, and it was not just governmental activity, it was a public-private partnership with private contractors operating in a profit margin or incentives that did help get us to the moon. And we believe the same type of activity can be part of the solution for energy.

And I have to tell you, one of the huge transitions going on in the U.S. economy right now is happening without necessarily government help, which is a huge influx of investment capital. We just had a startup company involving biofuels that was announced last week at one of the largest infusions of capital for some period of time this decade, and we are seeing that.

And we are also seeing an infusion of intellectual capital. I come from a part of the world that is very active in the Internet and software technologies. The Microsoft campus is in my district. And we are seeing a lot of intellectual capital now from software and Internet move over to the energy side. We have seen investments from some of the Microsoft family into biofuels.

I met an interesting fellow a few months ago who was involved in the commercialization of the MRI machine, the magnetic resonance imaging machine, and he made a bundle of cash on that commercialized product that now they put us in the tubes and diagnose our old knees when you get to be 55 and play basketball like I do. So this guy now is involved in perfecting a solar cell panel that is nonsilicone-based; it is based on an organic molecule that you essentially just spray on, and you can reduce the construction cost because silicone-based solar panels are fairly expensive to make. This could be just a spray-on application and potentially reduces the cost 20 to 30 percent.

So here is a fellow that has done well in one electronic business now making the transition to energy, and we are seeing a lot of that. But what we can do is we can help those businesses get a jump start, and one of the important things we can do on that is to offer loan guarantees to guarantee the loan of some of these new plants. We are now trying to hustle along a loan guarantee for a first cellulosic ethanol plant in the world, actually in the State of Idaho, and we are trying to get that loan guarantee perfected so that company can get up and running.

Those are the kinds of things that are an appropriate public-private partnership, along with the tax incentives. I sponsored a bill with Senator BARACK OBAMA called Health Care for Hybrids, and what it would do is to help the auto industry with some of their legacy health care costs in exchange for producing more fuel-efficient cars. So here is a two-for.

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Mr. INSLEE. It has been very sad to see technology originally developed in the United States, particularly solar cell technology, now being perfected and commercialized in Germany and other countries. To see that hemorrhaging of jobs is really a pathetic statement of our inaction to have a national energy policy. And we effectively don't have a national energy policy right now, except to just sort of allow the status quo to stumble along.

There is one thing that is very clear about energy: Somebody is going to create millions of jobs and millions of dollars, and we want that to be Americans. In the 1960s, they had the missile gap. Remember, during the Nixon-Kennedy debate there was a debate about the missile gap. In a way, we have an energy technology gap right now that, frankly, other countries are getting a leg up on us. And the reason is, is that those countries have developed energy policies that have decided to leapfrog technologies and develop technologies there. We can't allow that gap to continue to widen. And that is why this New Apollo Energy Project, H.R. 2828, if you want to take a look at it, is going to answer this challenge.

When Kennedy set us forth in the original space race, it really was not for economic reasons, it was largely not for a job creation program. But if you look at what it did create, can you imagine had he not challenged America to start the original Apollo Project? We would not have a computer industry in this country, we would not have an Internet-based industry, we would not have a satellite-based industry. We would likely probably not have a nanotechnology-based industry. That has been the mainspring of economic development and job creation in this country.

So I think the important thing to realize about energy is we are not just acting to $3 a gallon gas, we are not acting just to save the planet we live on from the ravages of global warming. We are doing it from a positive economic growth-oriented proposal. And I think you can honestly say that this is probably the best thing the U.S. Congress could do to really grow the U.S. economy right now, because it is the one thing that the world obviously needs. Our market is not just in America. When we develop a clean-coal technology, we want to sell that technology to the Chinese and to India. And assuming we can do that, there is enormous growth potential.

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Mr. INSLEE. I would like to compliment you for bringing up the idea of efficiency and not wasting energy. Because one of the things when we talk about energy, it is very easy to just launch into how we are going to generate more energy in an environmentally clean way. Obviously, or maybe not so obviously, the best energy you can create is the energy you do not waste. That is, clean energy is saving dirty energy and not wasting it, and those of us who have studied this believe that 30 or 40 percent of this solution ultimately is using energy in a much more efficient way, as much as inventing new ways to generate it.

That starts at home, with weatherizing your home, as you have indicated, a pretty simple thing, and there are some simple, inexpensive things you can do. There are more expensive things one can do with insulation, green building; and the green building, we just had two young men design the greenest building. They won a national award. We are kind of proud of that. It uses passive solar heating.

They can use solar cell technology now. If you want to build a new home, you can buy shingles that have the solar cells incorporated right in the shingle. There is a home about 20 miles from where we are standing in Virginia that is a net zero user of electricity, and they use massive solar heating. It is a two story, looks like a nice little home you find in any suburban place around Virginia. They use an in-ground heat pump, integrated solar panels on the roof, solar sort of passive heating through the use of the windows and tiles that collect the heat. When they generate more electricity than they use, they feed it back into the grid. That home was built for no more money than an average home. They are using zero electricity off the grid on a net basis. So a family that is committed to this can do it today using even existing technology.

But you said something I thought was very interesting, too, and that is about businesses. We are fortunate to have some visionary business leaders who are already accomplishing what we need to do.

British Petroleum, under the leadership of Sir John Brown, they decided they were going to change their energy use, and this is an oil company. This is an oil company that decided to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions to actually meet the treaty goals of the Kyoto global warming treaty. They were not pessimists. They were not nay-sayers. They just decided to do it; and within 3 years, they met their Kyoto targets of a reduction in their CO2, and, importantly to their shareholders, saved something like $300 million in the process because when you do not waste energy you save yourself money.

General Electric, under the leadership of their CEO, has decided to make an enormous investment not only in the use in their CO2 emissions but in developing these new high-tech, energy-efficient appliances that all of us are going to use.

So we have some business leadership; and regrettably what we do not have, we do not have leadership here in Congress, at least in the majority, who have not joined us optimists in breaking this addiction to oil and gas. The sad fact is that oil and gas still dominate the situation here in the House of Representatives; and until something changes, we are going to follow the leadership of the business community and people around this country who want to respond to this energy crisis individually that we are seeing.

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Mr. INSLEE. As Ms. Schwartz indicated, I just happen to have an Innovation Agenda, which is the Democratic suggestion on how we can seize the power of innovation for the country and how the Innovation Agenda is just part of a larger package that one can read if anyone is interested.

We think energy is a very important part, but it is one part of our Innovation Agenda; and page 3 of that basically is our effort to develop a new generation of innovators, and that is what we need to do. That is why we are committed to placing a highly qualified teacher in every math and science classroom, why we are committed to educate 100,000 new scientists, engineers, and mathematicians in the next 4 years, why we want to make college tuition tax deductible for the students studying math, science and engineering so we can have those minds available.

But if you look at page 8 on our Innovation Agenda, you will see our dedication to energy independence in 10 years. I will just mention two of the bullet points in the Democrats' larger agenda. We would commit to substantially reducing the use of petroleum-based fuels by rapidly expanding production and distribution of synthetic and bio-based fuels, such as ethanol derived from cellulosic sources, and by deploying new engine technologies for fuel-flexible, hybrid, plug-in hybrid and biodiesel vehicles. Now, those are different kinds of vehicles.

Coming back to what Ms. Schwartz said, we want to give consumers choices of what kind of vehicles to buy and to use. This is not a command-and-control suggestion we are making. We think we want to develop an economy so that you can decide what kind of vehicle you want to use. That might be a flex-fuel vehicle. That is a vehicle that can burn gasoline or biofuels, and Brazil has done this through great genius. Now, when you pull up to a pump in Brazil, if you have a flex-fuel vehicle, you can burn either gasoline or biofuels or ethanol, which makes you in the driver's seat literally, not the oil and gas companies. So you can compare prices and decide what to burn.

Now, the reason they have done that is Brazil basically told the auto industry to start producing these vehicles, give consumers choice, and that is what we stand for is giving consumers choice so that we are not victims of the oil and gas oligopolies in our country. We talked about fuel-flexible, hybrids, plug-in hybrids, and biodiesel.

The second bullet point in our plan will create a DARPA-like initiative within the Department of Energy to provide seed money for fundamental research needed to develop high-risk, high-reward technologies and build markets for the next generation of revolutionary energy.

We do realize that there is some basic research that the government is good at that is very high-risk. It might be hard to get a bank loan on some of these cutting-edge technologies, but we have had very great success in the Defense Department with a group called DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research labs. They have done great work in the Department of Defense. We need to use that same strategy in energy, and that is why Democrats are proposing to have a similar energy advanced research program in the Department of Energy. We are very optimistic about that.

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Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, if the gentlewoman would yield for a moment, this is a point that is absolutely galling to me, and folks need to understand this. This Congress is pathetic, with a capital P, when it comes to energy policy. We are doing nothing significant to really reduce our dependency on oil and gas. This place is awash in oil. It is a slave to oil. It has not broken its addiction even to the political ties that bind it to the oil and gas industry. As a result, it has done nothing significant to move forward on energy.

When we have all these new technologies coming on, solar cell technology which costs 80 percent less than it did 10 years ago, those prices are coming down spectacularly, wind energy that is coming down, has come down 20 percent so that it is competitive right now today in the State of Washington with other sources, has come down 20 percent. Instead of making investment in those technologies, you know what this Congress did? It stood up and gave another multimillion dollar tax break to the oil and gas industry of your tax money, and that is boneheaded.

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Mr. INSLEE. They did the same thing they have been doing since the 1800s. The way I described this is this Congress last year passed a great energy policy for 1890. It was visionary for 1890. It is Neanderthal in the year 2006.

When you look at when this country has made great advances, we have done it in two major challenges that our country had in the last several decades, the Manhattan Project which developed nuclear power, and it was a major investment by the United States of America because of a major challenge. The second was the original project in the space race, and we responded and were successful. The third now needs to be an energy revolution in this country.

But the fact of the matter is under this Congress and in this management of Congress, we are investing less than 15 percent of the equivalent of what we would have done in either one of those projects; and as a result, we are getting teeny, tiny little baby steps that we are encouraging when we should have these great leaps for mankind.

You know, if this Congress was running the space race, the quote would have been, ``Another little step up the cabin of a DC-3,'' because that is about all we would have invented. Kennedy got us to the moon; this energy policy won't get us to Cleveland.

We believe we need a very significant ramp-up both in Federal research and development, basic R&D, tax credits to manufacturers, to help them manufacture fuel-efficient vehicles; tax credits to consumers to allow you to decide how to buy both a fuel-efficient car and build a fuel-efficient home; and use of the procurement policy.

We haven't talked about this tonight at all, but one of the great tools we have in our toolbox in energy policy is the Federal Government procurement power. The Federal Government is kind of the 800-pound gorilla when it comes to buying things in this economy. The Federal Government needs to start buying fuel-efficient cars, fuel-efficient air-conditioning units, and building green buildings. There is much more that we can do.

We are taking little baby steps there. The Pentagon is looking at a fuel-efficient battery. One of the competitors trying to develop this is in my district. It is called Neopower. They are building a fuel-celled battery that will actually power computers and radio devices using fuel cells. So as we ramp that up, hopefully we will have much more efficient batteries that can last much longer and not burn gasoline-generated electricity. But we are just starting.

I don't know how to categorize it other than to say that we need a revolution, and what we are getting is not even an evolution. It is almost a devolution, going back the wrong way.

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Mr. INSLEE. I just want to point out the history of our own country is that we will succeed on this because we have succeeded.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, because of what Congress did, and President Carter, we increased our fuel efficiency at least 50 percent. And if we had simply continued on that path, we would be free of Persian Gulf oil today. We could have solved this problem if we had simply continued with that success.

But I want to close by thanking you for your leadership on this and by saying that the Democrats are optimistic on energy, Democrats believe in innovation, and Democrats believe in paying for it and not having a deficit. And we are going to do that by closing some of these giveaways to the oil and gas industry.

Thank you for your leadership.

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