Volume 146, No. 154 covering the 2nd Session of the 106th Congress (1999 - 2000) was published by the Congressional Record.
The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“AMERICAN ENERGY CRISIS” mentioning the Environmental Protection Agency was published in the Senate section on pages S11773-S11774 on Dec. 14, 2000.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
AMERICAN ENERGY CRISIS
Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I have come to the floor today to talk about a crisis that the leadership in America does not want to tell the American people about, and certainly the leadership does not want to try to solve this basic problem which is the most serious problem confronting us now.
I thought it would be fair and right, since this is what I believe and this is what I understand and before we have a new President, for at least one Senator--and I hope there will be others--to remind the American people that we are in the midst of an American energy crisis. Unless and until it becomes critical to millions of Americans in their daily lives, it is very hard for Americans to think we have a crisis, but there is a growing, creeping crisis of paralysis that will occur in America because we do not have enough energy that is approved by the Environmental Protection Agency and that we can add to our inventories and resources.
The crisis is coming close. Californians may be asking some questions. They ought to be. The media of the United States is not asking them yet. The great State of California, if you put that State alongside countries, is either the third or fourth largest economic unit in the world. In other words, in terms of gross domestic product, California is either third or fourth in the world.
There are brownouts happening in California, USA, which means there is not enough distributable electricity in the power lines, in the grid of California, to permit people to continue operating day by day as if there is sufficient energy for anything and everything they choose to do.
I hope some people start asking: Who did this to us? Why are we in this condition? I predict this will creep across America, and I only hope we do not blame the next President for what has occurred before his watch. We do not have anyone in a leadership position at the executive branch of America, from the President on down, who is telling the American people that we have a big, big energy problem and that there are solutions, but it will mean we have to make some tough decisions.
I want to talk a moment about what energy means.
The reason the United States is powerful, the reason we can have a strong military, the reason we have the best material things in our daily lives--more houses, more cars, more refrigerators--and people can continue to aspire to be materially sound in America with our economy growing robustly, adding people to the payrolls and giving them more money per unit of time, giving them a better standard of living and a life to lead, is because we have energy. Without energy, we cannot grow, and I do not mean grow from the standpoint of adding a subdivision; I mean grow from the standpoint of putting to work for us in our daily lives the kinds of things that use energy and give us productivity, jobs, and economic growth. Without an energy supply, that cannot happen.
I want to talk a moment about our goals for the world.
We have used some really nice words--``globalization,'' for one. The way I see it, America would like poor countries to get rich. We would like poor people in the world to have more, not fewer, material things. Believe me, these poor nations are beginning to look at the world and ask: How about us? Can't we grow? Can't we have prosperity?
Let me give an answer as I see it. If the world is expected to grow and prosper using current American restraints on energy sources, it is impossible for us to grow and the poor to grow because they need huge quantities of energy to grow. Do we want to be part of that? If we do, how can we hide our heads and not encourage that all sources of energy be looked at from the standpoint of the benefits versus the costs--the cost to a country, to the environment.
Because of the inability to make hard decisions, we are just about to make our country a natural gas environment. We have almost abandoned coal. We have almost abandoned cleaning up coal so we can use it.
People are wondering what is happening to natural gas prices. When we say to the American people that all you can use in new powerplants is natural gas, all you can use for anything now because of environmental concerns is natural gas, and then we say we cannot produce it on American lands, on American property, on American public domain--I am looking across the aisle at a Senator who is always talking about coal, coal mining. Let me tell him, there is currently a study that says the United States of America has 200 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. We use 20 a year. That is almost 10 years of total supply. We have it locked up in American public domain, in American real estate that we own as a people, because we are frightened to make decisions about letting people explore for it or drill for it. In fact, we have case after case where almost nonsensical restraints lock it up so we cannot use it.
I submit that the challenge for the new President is to be courageous and for his Secretary of Energy to be courageous. First, we had better define the problem for the American people. A Senator this morning came to the floor and spoke about our growth. I say to my friend from Colorado, we seem to be having a downward trend in our gross domestic product, and everybody wants to tell Alan Greenspan how to do his business. That is OK. That is what Senators do. Everyone claims Alan Greenspan in the last decade did the best job of steering us in the direction of sustained growth, high employment without inflation. I say to my friends, there can be no sustained growth at 2.7 per year or 3.3 per year, which gives us a lot of power in our economy, if we do not have energy to use. We cannot do that with brownouts across America.
That, in and of itself, and the increased price will cause America's economy to sputter and slow down, and somebody will be blamed. I submit, do not blame the new President and do not blame the new Secretary. They may have to tell us the truth. They may have to tell us we cannot as a nation get by hiding our heads from new energy sources, such as advanced new technology in the nuclear area.
I think we are going to have to start talking about it realistically with the American people.
Do you know in South Africa they are about to build a module--that means a small powerplant--with brand new nuclear technology that, number one, means the powerplant can never melt; it is passive; it will turn itself off at a certain temperature.
Do you know that powerplant they are trying to build will not use light water? Their gas-cooled design may be much simpler, much safer, and produce less waste (but some) than light water systems.
We here in America are working on nuclear research and the like related to that kind of addition, but we are doing it in such a quiet way because we are fearful that some will rise up and get angry about it. Angry they may get, but the truth is, if the American people understand that we can move in that direction--carefully, slowly--
adding some diversity to our energy supply, we can also do a better job in cleaning up our coal and using some of it for electricity.
We can, indeed, open up our public lands to exploration instead of hiding them, as if drilling a well that produces huge amounts of natural gas for Americans--and for whatever we need to grow and prosper--as if that is something terrible rather than something very good. It is something where we ought to hold our heads up and say: We own it. It is American. If we produce it, it is ours. We do not have to be dependent.
And, yes, there is no question that we ought to look at the refining capacity of America. We have not built a new refinery in 16 years, I say to the occupant of the chair.
What is that all about? It is because we have put environmental rules ahead of America's energy needs. We refuse to look at real cost benefits and reasonable mainstream protection rather than extraordinary protection that in many instances is meaningless but costly and many times stops the production of things such as refineries, pipelines, and the like.
I have much more that I will talk about from time to time on the floor of the Senate, but I come today to say, I hope we do not have to turn off our Christmas trees in New Mexico during this Christmas season, nor in the Senator's State of Colorado. I hope we can turn them back on in California.
Frankly, the only reason they cannot--and the only reason California suffers--is because nobody will make tough decisions. We are sitting back suggesting that things are really going well; that we will fix the American energy supply with windmills. I can deliver a specific talk on why that will not work for all our energy, but we ought to continue it. But it will never give us the kind of energy supply we need as we look to the future.
Do you know that the underdeveloped countries of the world, which intend to grow--and we say to them: Grow, prosper--by 2020 will use as much energy as the United States of America? Where are they going to get it? What are they going to use? What are we going to suggest they do?
Are we going to sit back and say America can grow but they can't? Are we going to say they can use some new kind of energy source but we won't?
So our leadership in the world, moving towards democratization and growth and prosperity for the poorest of nations, will come to a grinding halt if, in fact, we cannot have energy supply in the world.
Why should we have an agreement to preserve ambient air qualities and in that report not mention nuclear power? Why should leaders do that? I have had experts, physicists, who know what they are talking about, saying that alone is enough to put that document over here on a table and declare that it is not real.
If you want clean air in the future, you cannot say we will do it by using only natural gas, that we will not build any more coal burning powerplants, even though we could develop the technology to do that, that we will not consider nuclear power, even though we have a nuclear Navy that since 1954 has gone all through the waters of the seas and oceans of the world with it, with one or two powerplants right inside the hull of the boat, with never an accident. Never has anything happened, and we are so frightened we will not even talk about it.
I think we will talk about it. I think we will talk about opening up American public domain for production. I think we will have a real debate about ANWR, rather than an emotional debate, a real one about what we ought to do to relate our energy needs to that area of the world, not just putting our hands up and saying it cannot be touched, that you can do nothing.
So there is much to be talked about and much leadership needed. But the point is, energy problems in America, without major changes, will get more pronounced. We will have more crises; the prices will go higher, not lower across the board in America for gasoline and natural gas.
I am hopeful the new President will put somebody in the Department of Energy who will help America address this issue with its eyes open, ready to make some really tough decisions.
But the biggest thing I seek is to set the record straight. When that occurs, as the energy crisis creeps across America, I hope we will remember that the seeds have been sown before the swearing in of this President. They are there; the lack of doing the right thing in America is already in place.
This President and his Cabinet and his Secretary and his Environmental Protection Agency head are going to have to help solve a crisis they did not create. We ought to know that, and we ought to set the record straight that that is the case.
I want to close by saying there is plenty of blame to go around. But we will not solve this problem without some leadership that is willing to tell us the truth and suggest that there is really no need for the State of California to be running out of electricity. It is because we have been shortsighted, misled--and they have been in their State because there is the potential for plenty of energy to go around out there. We just have to decide that America needs energy for its future, and that we cannot grow more dependent, that we ought to grow less dependent.
So rather than proceed with details about each of the sources of energy which I had chosen to talk about today, I will do that on another day. Suffice it to say, we will not continue to grow--the Federal Reserve Board notwithstanding--if we cannot solve the problem of how much energy we need and make sure we have it.
Some people thought that because of Silicon Valley, because it is so clean and because it is built around new technology and computerization, we would not need new energy sources. But it turns out that if you want that kind of growth and that kind of productivity increase, and if you want the future of our country to be built upon the technology that evolved with the Silicon Valley in California and other mini ``silicon valleys,'' you need a lot of energy to create the new productivity that that brings to America.
I want to also add that new technology, led by computerization, is part of the reason we have had the sustained growth; they added a dimension of productivity we did not even measure for many years. They added growth to technology by way of productivity increases: The more computers you had, the more you got out of your personnel per unit of work. You got more because of high technology. That has added immensely to our productivity and has permitted us to grow without inflation. That is peaking out.
Surely, if we do not add more energy to the mix of the base, we will have to start trading off one source of growth in America for another. I do not believe that is going to work, and somebody will be blamed, especially since it does not have to happen.
Mr. President, I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Minnesota.
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