[Congressional Record Volume 156, Number 115 (Monday, August 2, 2010)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6561-S6563]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
ENERGY POLICY
Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I wished to talk for a moment on the
subject of energy policy.
This week is our last week prior to the August break, and it is a
very important week. We will likely see on the floor of the Senate the
Clean Energy Jobs and Oil Company Accountability Act that was brought
to the floor by the majority leader, Senator Reid.
I wish to commend him for what he has proposed. He has proposed a
piece of legislation that includes a number of very important issues,
including issues that deal with the oil spill and oil companies'
accountability for the Deepwater Horizon spill, issues that will
enhance the use of natural gas in our truck fleet in this country,
provisions for electric vehicles and infrastructure, provisions that
will provide substantial consumer savings in the HOME Star Program, and
provisions to protect the environment and create substantial new jobs.
But I wished to also say that this is but a first chapter of the book
of energy changes that are essential to this country's future. I wished
to chat about why it is important this week to start a process that I
hope will last through September, and perhaps through the lame duck
session as well. I hope there will be opportunities that will allow us
to achieve the objectives we sought beginning last year, when we spent
12 weeks in the Senate Energy Committee trying to write an energy bill
and finally reported out a bipartisan energy bill from that committee.
That committee product includes a lot of very important things. First
and foremost, people might say: Well, what is the urgency?
Why are we concerned about energy? We have people exploring the globe
trying to figure out where they can punch a hole in the planet and suck
oil and gas out. We have been pretty successful in doing that. Each day
we take about 85 million barrels of oil out of the Earth. Each day
about one-fourth needs to come to the United States because that is our
prodigious appetite for oil. Some call it an addiction. Whatever it is
found around the globe, one-fourth of all the oil that is extracted
every day has to be delivered to this little place called the United
States. Seventy percent of all the oil we use, from foreign oil to
domestically produced oil, is used in the transportation fleet.
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It is pretty clear we have a very substantial dependence on foreign
oil. Over 60 percent of the oil we use in this country comes from
outside the country. Some of it comes from areas of the world that
don't like us very much, areas that are unstable. If we go to bed
tonight and, God forbid, tomorrow morning we wake up and discover that
in one way or another concerted acts of terrorism have cut the pipeline
of oil into our economy, very quickly this American economy would be
flat on its back.
What do we do about that? We talk about it. We talk about it every
decade, about how we are going to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.
We speak really well. We do a lot better job talking than we do
enacting policy. That is for sure. We are going to make us less
dependent on foreign oil, we say. Meanwhile, for a couple of decades we
are more and more dependent on foreign oil. That potentially holds our
country's future and the economy hostage to oil coming from other
countries over which, in many cases, we have very little long-term
control.
Should we do something about that? I think we should. I believe it is
urgent. There is an assumption--not just about oil but about everything
that represents our country, its strength and the opportunities we have
always provided. There is a notion that here in America, what always
was will always be in the future. That is not necessarily the case. It
was the case when I was a child. I always knew we were the biggest, the
strongest, and the best, and we would produce opportunities that other
countries could not for the masses of people to expand job opportunity,
to expand income, to allow them to climb the economic ladder. It is the
case that we were very successful in doing that for a long time. But
polls now show that the majority of the American people believe their
children will not have it quite as well as they did. That is the first
time that we have ever seen that. Most people believe the future is
going to be less advantageous to their children than it was to them.
Part of that reason is because they look at policies and say: Are you
making the right choices for the future? Are you making hard choices?
Are you doing the right thing to make decisions that will help promote
a better economic future?
One of those decisions deals with the question of energy. The fact
is, we live on energy. It is central to our daily lives. Yet none of us
think much about it. We get up in the morning, and when we get up, we
shut off an electric alarm. We turn on a light. We start a coffee
maker. We put some toast in the toaster that is electric. We get in our
car and turn a key where we use oil.
The fact is, we use so much energy even before we get to work, never
even giving it a second thought. The dilemma is, in the mix of energy
in this country, we are far too dependent on foreign oil.
At the same intersection of concern about that dependency, that
vulnerability, now comes climate change. There is something happening
to our global climate which leads us to ask how do we use energy,
particularly fossil fuels. In the future while we put out less carbon
into the atmosphere, how do we address these two things together? Both
are very important.
I tell all of that because we wrote the Energy bill, the American
Clean Energy Leadership Act. It took us 10 or 12 weeks in the Energy
Committee, 13 months ago. We don't yet have that Energy bill on the
floor of the Senate. There are a lot of complicated reasons for that.
But first let me describe what was in that bill.
No. 1, we do, in fact, reduce our dependence on foreign energy and
increase domestic production. This bill would do the things that give
us the opportunity to maximize the production of renewable energy,
where the wind blows and the Sun shines. There is no reason for us not
to collect energy in one place and ship it to where it is needed in the
load centers. We do that in this bill.
We establish a first ever national renewable electricity standard,
what is called an RES. It says: Here is where we are headed. We want X
percent of our electricity to be produced from renewable sources. That
is the way we get to a desired destination, by deciding where we are
headed. If we don't care where we are going, we will never be lost. But
we will never get to where we want to head if we believe the country
needs to achieve a certain direction.
That is very important. If we are going to have our country less
dependent on foreign oil, we have to produce more at home. I believe in
responsibly producing more oil and gas at home, but I also believe in
producing more electricity from renewable sources.
It also creates a transmission superhighway. We built an interstate
highway over which we can drive. One of the interstate highways goes
through my State. It connects New York to Seattle. It is a wonderful
thing. It is also the case that we have not built a strong, interstate
transmission system, an interstate highway of transmission lines to
allow us to collect the energy where the wind blows. My State is the
windiest State in the Nation. My State is called the Saudi Arabia of
wind, but we don't need more electricity in our State. We produce far
more than we need or can use.
So the question is, How do we produce it where the wind blows and put
it on a wire and move it to a load center where they can transmit the
electricity? We do that by creating a transmission superhighway which
we don't have. We need to build it. That itself will allow us to
maximize the production of renewable energy and make us less dependent
on foreign oil.
The bill electrifies and diversifies our vehicle fleet. The fact is,
we will make ourselves less dependent on foreign oil by moving toward
an electric vehicle fleet. That makes a lot of sense as well and is a
responsible step to take. The Senate Energy Committee just passed
legislation I wrote, along with my colleagues Senators Alexander and
Merkley, called the Promoting Electric Vehicles Act.
What we are trying to do is move the country in this direction by
providing the right policies and incentives. It makes a lot of sense.
If we build an electric system for peak load when people are air-
conditioning and heating their homes during the day, and then at night
that load requirement goes way down. But we still have the capability
to produce all this energy, and we are just not using it. If we are
able to plug in our cars in the garage at night to use energy that we
have already developed an infrastructure to create, we make maximum use
and opportunity of energy resources that currently exist.
That is what we do with respect to the electrification and
diversification of the vehicle fleet. Energy efficiency is the lowest
hanging opportunity in the country. We can achieve that through
appliance standards, new technology, and building retrofits. We expand
clean energy technology. All this means substantial job creation
opportunities, and we train the energy workforce of tomorrow.
It is the case that the bills we will consider on the Senate floor, a
piece of legislation that Senator Reid has decided to bring to the
floor includes some pieces of what I have just described and apparently
another competing piece of legislation and perhaps cloture votes on
these issues--they are steps in the right direction but very short, in
my judgment, of what we could and should do before the end of this
session to say to the American people: We understand your concern about
the future of this country. We understand about the vulnerability you
know exists when we send $1 billion a day, every day, 7 days a week to
other people around the world to pay for their oil.
We understand that makes our country vulnerable, and we will do
something about it. We are not going to take baby steps. We are going
to take big steps in the right direction to fix the vulnerability that
exists.
We have had some in this Chamber who have held up the Energy bill
from the Senate Energy Committee because they said we shouldn't do this
unless we also take up a climate bill. I believe we should put a cap on
greenhouse gas emissions. Something is happening to our climate. We
would be fools not to take a series of no-regrets steps so that 50 or
100 years from now, when we look in the rearview mirror, we decide to
take commonsense steps. We would be fools not to have done some
important things in the meantime that would help address these issues
just in case.
I believe the consensus of scientists is that there is something
happening to
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the climate. But those who have insisted that this Congress in this
year address climate change have said: If you are not going to address
climate change, you can't do the bill from the Energy Committee.
If we brought a bill to the floor of the Senate that established all
kinds of benchmarks on CO2 emissions, how would we then
limit CO2? We would go back and do these very things I have
just described. We would maximize the production of wind and solar
energy, the biofuels, a whole series of things that represent what we
have done in the Energy Committee. It has never made much sense to me
that we would hold up or block the opportunity to do this bill. If we
brought this bill to the Senate floor in September or in a lameduck
session, it would be wide open for amendments to offer a climate title.
I have said I will support limiting carbon. I will also support a
mechanism to price carbon. I have also said--clearly, many times--that
doesn't include cap and trade because I have no interest in the trade
piece by creating a $1 trillion carbon securities market on Wall
Street. The reason for my concern about that is, I have watched in the
last several years what has happened with respect to various kinds of
speculative excesses in other markets. I am not someone who wants to
sign up the cost of our energy future to carbon securities traders.
There is an opportunity between now and the end of this year. I hope
we don't miss it. It is easy for us to minimize our actions. It is easy
to take small steps. It is much harder to take bold steps in the right
direction. But I am mindful, as is everyone involved in the political
system, that the American people are plenty upset about a lot of
things. We have just been through the deepest recession since the
1930s, and we are not out of it yet. There is some improvement, to be
sure, but we are not out of this. There are a whole lot of folks out of
work, feeling hopeless and helpless. Some have looked for jobs for a
year, 2, 2\1/2\ years, and can't find them. They are concerned about
pension benefits, concerned about Social Security, about whether
grandpa and grandma will have decent health care, and concerned about
quality schools among other national issues.
They are concerned about whether they live in safe neighborhoods.
They are concerned about whether they can find a job or whether they
have a job and job security. They are concerned about a lot of things.
This is one of them, however, the issue of energy. They worry that if
we are not smart and if we don't take action that is bold and decisive
in the right direction, we will miss the opportunity to address some
very important issues in the future.
The most important issue to me with respect to energy is our
unbelievable dependence and vulnerability of having to get so much of
our energy outside of our country, especially from areas that are in
troubled parts of the world. We can do a lot better.
We hear a lot of people talking about wanting to hear ``made in
America'' again. I want to hear that about a lot of products. I want to
see a vibrant manufacturing industry and sector built once again. But
``made in America'' can also mean produced in America. We can use our
resources--yes, even our fossil energy--if we use them differently.
One final point is the question about the use of hydraulic fracturing
for oil and natural gas production. I know this is very technical. In
my State, we produce a lot of oil at the moment, and it increases all
the time. It is the largest reservoir or largest reserve of technically
recoverable oil ever assessed in the history of the lower 48 States. It
is called the Bakken shale. That oil shale formation is 10,000 feet
underground.
In recent years, we been able to access it with great success. We go
down 2 miles, 10,000 feet, with a drill, and then we make a big curve
with the same drill and go out 2 miles. So we can go 4 miles, including
a curve in the middle, with one drilling rig. Then with a water
solution, we initiate hydraulic fracturing to crack open the shale rock
to release the oil. I understand that is 2 miles below the surface. It
is 100 feet thick. They drill for the middle third of a 100-foot seam 2
miles below the surface. That is how sophisticated it is.
The oil can only be extracted from that deposit by using hydraulic
fracturing techniques. The U.S. has been using hydraulic fracturing for
50 years. Some people have raised concerns about what that does to the
water table when producing oil or natural gas. There is like chance of
doing anything to the water table 10,000 feet below. Hydraulic
fracturing has been used for a long time in a way that has not affected
the water table. I am very concerned about carefully vetting issues
from who have concerns about hydraulic fracturing. I don't want to shut
down a substantial portion of that which can be produced in America to
support our country's need for homegrown energy in the future. I will
have more to say about that at some point when the bill comes to the
floor, but I did want to mention that issue because I think it, too, is
very important as we discuss energy issues.
All of us want the same thing for our country. We want stability,
economic opportunity, and environmental protection. We want to give our
kids hope that the future for them is going to be better than the
future for their parents. We all want those things. But the only way we
will achieve those things is if we at last, at long, long last make
some big and bold decisions on a wide range of issues. Yes, fiscal
policy on energy policy and on a wide range of other issues, we need to
make some big and bold decisions, some of which may not be popular in
the short term but are essential for this county's well-being in the
long term.
We need to do that now, not later, not next year. We need to take
those steps this year. That is why I wanted to talk about the
opportunities that still can be achieved well beyond the size of the
legislation we are going to consider this week on the oil spill and
energy. There is an expanded capability on energy legislation that took
us 12 weeks to write. It was passed on a bipartisan basis and
represents a menu of things we could and should do in order to address
both our vulnerability and dependence on foreign energy as well as to
begin to address the issue of climate change.
Mr. President, I yield the floor.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Delaware.
Mr. KAUFMAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak in
morning business.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so
ordered.
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