New Apollo Energy Act of 2005

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate your courtesy in giving me a few extra minutes to get here.

What I want to do this evening, and I am a little short on extra Members and we are going to see how that evolves over the next few minutes, but I want to begin the discussion on an issue that I think is really incredibly important to each and every one of us in this country. And certainly as Members of Congress representing so many people, constituents come to us, I think, every day, and they may not say, what are you doing about energy, but they certainly come to us and say, What is going on with the high price of gasoline? We go to the pump. We see the price going up, sometimes more than one time in a day, and we have seen prices well over $3 a gallon.

And what we know, of course, is that consumers are paying 100 percent more than they were paying 5 years ago. The price at the pump was about $1.44, $1.50, the average price of gasoline 5 years ago; and now we are seeing prices certainly well over $3 a gallon. And this is at the same time, of course, that we are seeing record profits from the oil industry. And certainly my constituents say to me, What is going on? What can we do about this? Why isn't something more happening? And they do understand there are some causes of this, but what I would like to discuss this evening is what is going on and what we have been doing about it and what we have not been doing about it that we should.

I think that is really what I am most concerned about as I see these issues in my district, not only for gasoline. We are not in the right season yet, but we certainly know that home heating oil and home heating fuel has gone up as well. In fact, I commissioned a study in Pennsylvania to see what the price was for home heating oil last winter, and we saw increases on the average in Pennsylvania of over $700 a year for a family. That is a lot of dollars, particularly for somebody on a fixed income, young families struggling to make ends meet, and, of course, making some of the choices are really very difficult for families. And, in fact, what we are hearing is that families are telling us that it matters, that they have seen a real effect when they see transportation and home heating costs going up an average of 75 percent increase over what they saw even in 2001.

So what are we seeing? What are we doing about this? What do we expect to do? There is certainly discussion on the floor about this issue. And I know, as Democrats, we have stood and really made quite a few suggestions, some very specific as far as what we can do immediately. The one specific one, of course, was what about price gouging? Are we seeing the price of gasoline go up because, in fact, there was some inappropriate, illegal activity? We have some preliminary information about that. Unfortunately, we do not have a Federal definition of price gouging; so it has been really difficult to be able to say specifically whether, in fact, that is really what has been going on.

And what can we do more immediately to help make sure that the oil industry is doing all that it can to get us more affordable gasoline? But there is no question that those are short-term solutions. Those are not long-term solutions. And what many of us feel is that we should be acting on long-term solutions and we should have been doing it already, and why are we not doing it today, because what we do today matters next year, the year after, and for years in the future.

So what are we doing to make sure that there is an adequate supply of energy in this Nation? Are we smart enough to be doing the kind of innovation and research that we know we need to do to be able to do this? Of course the answer, Mr. Speaker, is that we are; that the answer has to be to diversify our energy sources, to look at the different ways, the innovations, that are out there and bringing different kinds of fuel to our vehicles and to our homes. And we have seen that already. We have had numbers of our Members talk about biofuels and the opportunity for ethanol. We have just seen in my region of the country, and we have seen it elsewhere in the country, the fact that we now have mixed gasoline and ethanol. We have 5 percent ethanol coming into our tanks in the Philadelphia area. That switch was just made a couple of months ago.

But we also know that you can have a flexible fuel vehicle, you can fuel your vehicle with 85 percent ethanol. Well, that is made out of corn in this country. Does that mean we reduce our reliance on foreign oil? Absolutely. And should we be doing more of that? How do we actually begin to make the kind of investments that really would matter where we can actually say we are using the kind of research, the kind of smart scientists, the engineers, the innovation that exists in this country to bring new fuel options to our vehicles and to all of us so that we have a diversity, we have more choices as consumers?

And then, in fact, there was an article in the Inquirer just this morning that the oil executives themselves are saying this is a question of supply. It is also a question of demand. If there is less demand, that would make a difference in price as well. A report I heard said if we could just reduce demand by 3 percent in this country, we could, in fact, start to see a reduction in prices.

So we have some real opportunities here. And of course long term if we can start to look at biofuels to be able to get them going, be able to get the production up really much faster, then we really have the opportunity to bring down the cost of fuel in this country for our automobiles.

Now, of course, tied to that there is something many of us also believe, and that is that we ought to be calling on the automobile manufacturers to produce more fuel-efficient vehicles, more hybrids, more flexible fuel vehicles, and more gasoline-driven vehicles that are more fuel efficient. And they can do it. They know how to do it. We need to make them do it more quickly and to be able to create that option for us so that we as consumers, all of my constituents, all of my fellow Congressmen's constituents, all Americans, have greater flexibility and can make choices about what are the right kinds of vehicles for them to drive, what is the most fuel-efficient way for us to be handling our own transportation needs.

So I will just say that those are just some of the ideas. In fact, there are so many ideas. This is one of the things that when constituents ask, what can you do, I say we should be investing in serious ways in this country in these new technologies. And then we should be insisting that our automobile manufacturers and our purchasers, as well, start to participate in this. There are so many ideas out there.

I see a colleague of mine has joined us, and I am excited about that because he is someone who is very knowledgeable about this whole area and what we could be doing. But when we see the city of Philadelphia that I represent, that the new city buses they are buying are hybrid buses, that can make a really big difference. All of our cities should be doing that. All of our communities should be doing that. What about school buses? What can we do to make them more fuel efficient? These are things that we really need to be working on.

And I will say two of the things I have only been focusing on, access to the energy we need and to price and the concern that consumers have on that, but there are two other aspects of this that are very critical for us to understand, and that is that of course it has an environmental effect if we continue to burn fossil fuels at the rate we have been doing that, we actually continue the kind of pollution we have. We cannot just have rhetoric about reducing emissions. We need to take it really seriously if we plan to protect this Earth we live in and protect the environment and the consequences that we have seen of some of the changes in the environment, the increasing number of storms.

Hurricane Katrina is, of course, one of the examples that is in all of our minds; and we are just approaching, of course, a new hurricane season.

The third point I was going to make in addition to cost and availability of fuel and the energy we need as well as the environmental effects is, of course, the third area, which is our national security. We all understand, I hope we do increasingly understand, our reliance on foreign oil. Sixty percent of the oil that we use is imported. We need to reduce, if not eliminate, our reliance on foreign oil. It changes the relationships that we have with nations that are not always friendly to us.

So we need to have a much different relationship to foreign oil than we do,

and that is we have to end our reliance on foreign oil. But that is not going to be done unless we start to really seriously invest in alternative fuels and renewable energy sources, both for our vehicles, and, of course for our homes as well.

So I am going to ask my colleague to join us.

I did want to also say that I hope we can in our discussion also get to a little bit of a discussion about what consumers can do. What can individual Americans do that could really change the way we use energy; put more pressure on us, on Congress, to create those alternatives?

Someone asked me, well, where can you buy ethanol-mixed gasoline? Where can you buy E85 in Pennsylvania? Well, the answer is there is one station in Lancaster, and there is one station in Pittsburgh. If you live in Philadelphia, that is a very long to drive to fill up your tank and not acceptable.

So we need to be kick-starting this. We need to not just do a little bit; wouldn't that be nice, let's do that little project over there, let's see how that goes. We need to make a serious investment that changes dramatically the kind of energy options that we have for our automobiles, for our homes, for our daily lives. And only by doing that will we be able to protect the environment for the future, will we be able to end our reliance on foreign oil, will we be able to bring down the cost of energy for our cars and for our homes.

If we don't do it now, we are going to be having this same discussion, only more seriously, in the years to come.

So, as Democrats we have had a number of proposals, but one of the leaders in really putting forward a new energy policy for this country, and it is a wonderful one, it is called the New Apollo Energy Act, I guess we would like to see if it gets to be an act, and I would want to really encourage it, and I am delighted that my colleague Congressman Jay Inslee has joined us to talk a little bit about what that would do and how it would get us started in a very, very serious way in changing the way we create the energy for ourselves, for our homes and for our businesses.

I just want to ask you a little more about that. I think sometimes for those of us who are not scientists out there, there is sometimes a feeling when you hear about that, it is what can we do about that? We need to use all of this energy. We need to use these fossil fuels. How am I going to get to my job? I mean, how can we possibly do this? How am I going to worry about the coral reefs? Why should I worry about that? What can we possibly do about it?

I think what you are saying, and I think what we need to really be talking about, is believe in ourselves as a country, to believe in how smart we

are, how capable we are, how innovative we are, and then to use those assets, which are really our people and how smart we can be, to say in fact we can fix it.

Just as you point out, we did create this space program. We did send to a man to the moon. We have actually even sent some women in space now, you know? But the fact is, I was just thinking about this as well, we have taken real problems, and we have solved them. We have solved some of these environmental problems.

So I wanted to ask you about that, because I think one of the things as I read your proposal I was so taken with is that it also understands that there probably isn't one answer. We don't even know exactly what all the solution is going to be, which I think would be great for Americans, because the fact is we like choices. So it may be that a hybrid vehicle works for me, and a more fuel-efficient vehicle that is not a hybrid works for you. Maybe a flexible-fuel vehicles works for you. Maybe I need a big car, or maybe I don't need a big car, depending on where we live, what kind of job we have. But really the question I have, too, as I look at your proposal is you really look at a lot of different ways to solve this problem and really take the science and use it. So talk about that, if you would. I think that is really important to hear.

In fact, isn't that the President's solution, just more oil?

A couple things on what you say. One is that I think we also ought to make clear, and I know in your proposal and you are talking about it is that this isn't about a new big government program, this is about working with the private sector and helping innovation, on whether it is actually giving tax credits or helping to make some investment or helping to kick-start one of those ideas for a private company that wants to do this and wants to explore doing it. That is who is doing it. But what they need is for us to help make that happen so that it doesn't take them 10 years before they grow just enough to be able to prove it to someone, to be able to take a risk.

And I think some of the proposals that as government we could just ensure that loan, so that, in fact, it helps some private bank be able to make that loan and risk it, because we don't know what is going to work. We know some things are working; we don't know which one is going to really take off. We know, again, even with the biofuels we have been talking about ethanol, but there is some suggestion we could use sugar, we could use switchgrass. There is a whole variety of other ways we can do this, the whole question about electric cars and whether that works and how we can do this. There is some other technologies out there, fuel cell technology that we could actually potentially use in cars.

So, again, what we are saying here is that we want to work with the private sector; we want to work with those scientists and innovators and entrepreneurs who will be able to take their ideas and then be able to keep tweaking them, if you will, to see what works, to see what takes off; and to work with our own automobile manufacturers to say, you want to scale it up not just another few cars, but a lot of cars, and how quickly can you do that? How can you make it? How can we keep making cars here that we want to buy, that we can afford to buy, that will use less fuel?

But it is working with the private sector with that innovation, allowing it to be quite dynamic, because we don't know which ones to choose so much. And that is even happening, as I mentioned this about the old-time fossil fuels. There are now clean-coal technologies. In Pennsylvania we are sort of interested in some of that, could that work? Could it help us get through the hump for the foreseeable future?

But I do think it is so important for us not to be so worried that we actually only think in the very narrowest ways about how we can solve the problem for next year or for the year after. This is really looking at both immediate solutions, but then long term, where are we really going with this, and why shouldn't we in America be the ones in the forefront of this? And that is what you are talking about, and I think that is very exciting.

Absolutely. And I think that that says how good this can be for business, both the cost of the new businesses that are created as a result of what we are talking about, but I really also means jobs. Coming from Pennsylvania, and I was in the State senate for 14 years before coming to Congress, and we would often have a debate when we discussed some of these changes that we wanted to in terms of auto emissions and how we would respond to this, and what if we actually put more regulation on businesses, wouldn't we lose jobs? And how will we be able to protect the environment and not lose jobs? And in Pennsylvania it was a really serious issue. And I remember having those debates on the floor of senate, and yet by not moving ahead, we, in fact, lost some of those jobs anyway and didn't create new ones.

And I think what we are talking about here is let us create those new jobs. If you have an innovative entrepreneur of a company, well, they are going to hire people who then get jobs that potentially will grow into more jobs and more jobs. And these are often skilled jobs, they are decent-paying jobs. And if as a result they end with a product, new energies, new ways for us to both fuel our vehicles and also heat our home, and at the same time reduce some of these really serious carbon emissions and be able to home-grow some of our energy, more of our energy, while we are really doing a lot, and we are at the same time reducing costs, We are reducing costs to our businesses. And now some will say to me, if we could just reduce the cost of our energy, well, then maybe I could hire that additional person that I am trying to do. You hear that all the time, just bringing down the cost of electricity or being able to bring down your home heating or heating for business, that action may produce enough residual money for someone to be able to create a new job or two or maybe many more jobs.

So I think we have to see this as just an extraordinarily potential win-win for all of us. And, again, creating that diversity of options for people and the kind of energy, maybe more choices, meaning that there will be a little more competition, means that prices might come down. That helps all of us. But I think what we have to say is this about creating new businesses, creating new jobs, and at the same time creating new sources of energy that could be both safer for the environment and also be able to be far more available without our having to have those serious kinds of negotiations that might get in the way of some of our more international relationships.

And this isn't about being an isolationist when we talk about other countries. The idea is to share some of these innovations. And we have seen that, too. Talk about the high-tech industry, well, it is actually some of our ideas that are now being produced elsewhere. But it is our ideas, and we need to work and bring all those ideas together, create those jobs, create those opportunities, and help our businesses be able to be competitive, because without reducing energy costs, they simply won't be able to.

I was going to bring up another aspect of all of this discussion. I think also that sometimes when people hear these kind of conversations, they think, well, it is not really about me. What can I do that would really affect carbon emissions in this world? You know, how can I actually help save the planet and create more energy sources?

But the fact is, and if we could just talk about this for a minute, there is a lot that people can do. And, again, I am reflecting back. I remember when we first started talking about recycling, and I remember some of my colleagues would say, well, no one is going to want to bother doing that. And now people are doing this all across the country, and it actually makes you

much more aware. It is something you can do. It saves cost at some level.

But when you think about what some individuals can do related to energy, and I thought we could talk about that. Again, if you are a business owner, there is so much you can do in your own plant potentially to be able to reduce your energy consumption so that you could reduce your costs. All of us know about if you can weatherize your home.

Well, I just went to visit a new building in my district that is actually on the campus of a university that they just built a green building. Well, I think I have seen green buildings, you know. They have sort of motion detector electric lights, or they have more efficient plumbing appliances and all that. But this building, actually the roof looked like it had grass on it. It had green plants on the roof. It was new to me. I didn't know that that existed. But they said this isn't new. This is something we are experimenting with, but, in fact, it is not just grass, it is a little more complicated than that. But it is going to reduce their need for heating and cooling that building dramatically. Dramatically. So if you could, I don't know what the number was, cut it in half, cut it 80 percent. They are trying to perfect this, of course.

My guess is that they are going to be able to come up with something as we experiment with these ideas that we can do in our homes, in our businesses, in our public spaces. And we should be leaders in that as public officials, as elected officials. This is something we should be doing because we know how important it is. And we know that we should learn from each other. We always talk about best practices. Well, we should start to scale up on this, as they say. We should start to say: If it is working in this State, why isn't it working somewhere else? And the States are innovative to change. We are interested to hear what you are talking about in terms of the State of Washington. We are proud in Pennsylvania that we have wind farms and they are working, that they are working, as I said, on clean coal, that we are creating incentives for businesses to be able to reduce their costs of energy.

Public transportation obviously is something we are not even getting into here, but some of the newer technologies on that.

But just to comment on what we can do. I know there is a Federal program, I don't think it is known well enough, called Energy Start, where you can buy more efficient appliances. Businesses can get credits, tax credits, for being more energy-efficient.

So as you pointed out, there are little starts here, but if we really want to get serious about this, we have to start talking about it, making it clear that everyone, every business, every family, and certainly our bigger businesses can really start to participate in this in a way that will start to really make the kind of difference that will see us shifting to these new energy sources and reducing our reliance on foreign oil.

Just to be a little political here for a moment, because you brought up, I think, how do we take what we are saying and make it happen. I mean, that really is sort of what we are talking about; and again, we are starting to sound sort of hopeful, optimistic, and it sounds like a lot of new terms for a lot of people, but I think we will increasingly get comfortable with some of this discussion. You know we can do that, and I think that is one of the reasons that I am on the floor tonight. It is one of the reasons that Mr. Inslee joined me.

We want to get more familiar with this terminology. What are the alternative fuels? What are the choices they have? What is the flexible fuel vehicle? What are the kinds of options that I have out there in the future? What should I be asking for? How can I save energy at home? How can I save energy for business? How can we encourage businesses to do that? And what is the role of government in all of this?

I think what is exciting here is that there are so many of these ideas out there that if, in fact, we can encourage businesses to push even harder, to move even faster, push automobile manufacturers to higher fuel efficiency, if we went to 33-miles per gallon rather than 22 or whatever we sit at right now, we would save literally 2.6 million barrels of oil per day by 2025. You say, well, that is a long time from now. If we start now, we will start to do it. We should start to do it. We really have this opportunity to do it, and in fact, we know how to make those vehicles. We can make more fuel-efficient SUVs. So if Americans want to buy the SUVs, we can make them fuel efficient.

The fact is we have brought these ideas, brought them up as amendments and bills, and we want to work together to make this happen. This should not be a fight about do we ever use oil again or do we only go to you get to live in a green building or not. It is about moving all of us forward so that we can use less energy, use it more efficiently, bring down the costs for Americans, be more self-reliant. Knowing that we can do this, our role

is to recognize the innovation out there, to create the incentive, to encourage it to move much, much faster so, in fact, we can make this happen.

Occasionally we have to set some of the rules. I mean, sometimes we cannot bring people along. You do have to set rules out there to help make it happen, and to help make it happen much, much faster; but the fact is that this is very much a part of the Democratic agenda to be able to again use our innovation and to use our smarts to make this happen.

I see the pamphlet that you have, and I will maybe yield over, but I know one of the things we are talking about that we have not brought up today is we do need to encourage our young people to be well-educated in science and engineering and technology. We know that that is so important to our future for all of us that if we do not start making sure that our young people and some of the old people who are maybe going back to school or have some new training and education that we actually encourage this so that we do have the best and the brightest who are putting their minds to this work, and that is what we are hoping to make happen as well.

I think this is something that is so exciting I think for all of us. It is something I have been excited about, too. We see the National Science Foundation being able to do some of this research, and again, some of the funding we give to scientific research is done by scientists who work for the government. So it is also given out in grants that are then either given out all over the country to innovators who are doing this kind of work, but then because we are involved in it, we have scientists sort of talking to each other, being able to give that information back on a national level, being able to share that information, being able to again act more quickly on that shared information to see what is working and what is most effective and cost effective and actually what is fuel effective.

These are, I think, really exciting, exciting options for all of us. It is something we can do, but again, I think we should be clear, we are not doing it now. That is detrimental to all of us, not just because when we go right today to fill up our tank we are paying $3 or more a gallon and because the vehicles we drive are not as fuel efficient as they could be and the homes we live in are not as efficient either as they could be. It is because we actually have not gotten serious about taking this next step and we need to. We need to again because of the high cost to our families.

If you look at families that are paying several hundred dollars more, in some cases several thousand dollars more, those are really tough decisions for a lot of our families in this country, what do we do and how do we make ends meet when we have these concerns. I hope they are hearing us. We want you to push us. You should push us. You should push this administration to do more.

Again, you pointed out the oil and gas industry could be a part of this. They should be a part of this because they also have scientists. They could be more fuel efficient. They should be.

They did the same thing they have been doing.

It is not using our imagination and our skills to move forward. And, also, I will just second the point you made. I do feel very strongly that the public buildings, for example, and our public procurement, that is what we buy, we should be setting an example. We should be practicing what we preach. We should be doing as best we can.

Again, it is not so easy for us to change our patterns, you know, what we are used to doing. Someone said, when gasoline prices were so high, one of the suggestions we were trying to make to people is if you are going to run your errands, try to be more efficient in the way you drive and do that. You could save yourself a few gallons of gasoline every week, several a month. That could make a difference. Think about carpooling.

It is hard to change our own patterns, and I think that is true in government, too. We should be setting an example that when we actually build a new building, that it is more energy-efficient; when we change light bulbs, and I think there were just some changes made in some of the hallways and some of the office buildings, but are we encouraged to turn the lights off? We keep a lot of lights on every night. What would that save if, in fact, we had these all on timers or motion detectors?

We should be thinking about this in a way, because if each of us reduced our energy consumption by 10 percent, maybe some of us could even do better, we could have a dramatic impact on the amount of energy and fuel we would need.

So, again, this isn't picking and choosing. This isn't saying, I am going to blame individuals for not doing all they can. We are not blaming anyone. The idea is for us to really use all of our power, if I can use that word, all of our power to make it clear that we want less costly, more efficient fuel for all of our needs.

And we are going to have these needs. We are going to need this energy for our needs. They are not going to get fewer. There are more of us, more people, more densely populated, and we need to figure this out and do so in a way that doesn't just say let us just give a little more subsidy to the oil industry. If we just took the subsidies, $8 billion, $9 billion from the oil industry, maybe collected those royalties for offshore drilling from the oil industry, and said let us take that money and invest it in these new technologies and invest it in renewables, use the incentives so people will build buildings that will be more fuel-efficient and energy-efficient, what would that do for us?

In fact, what we know is that that is really significant. The amount of reduction in energy needs would be really significant and would have an impact. And at the same time, we would be learning better what, in fact, works best for us so we would be able to move ahead.

I just want to say one more thing, and then I want to reflect on some of this, too. I think we also have to say to people that we have done this. I think you are right to use the example of the man on the moon, but we have even done smaller things; for instance, when we found out that lead in paint was extremely harmful to kids in this country. We didn't always know that. There was lead in paint, and we all painted with that, used that paint, but, in fact, those paint chips actually caused brain damage for our kids. Well, we did something about it. It didn't happen immediately. People finally had to get outraged by it. Members of Congress finally had to stand up and say, you know what we are going to do, we are going to take lead out of paint.

Now, originally people said, I don't think we can do that. I don't think we have the technology to do that; how do we do that? Well, some smart people got together and figured out how to do it, and they did. We don't allow lead to be put in our paint anymore. We don't have chlorofluorocarbons anymore, because we realized it was causing a big hole in the ozone layer. It took a while for us to agree to do something about that, and some people said, oh, it is not really a problem, but it turns out it was a problem, and the fact is we could fix it, and we did.

So I just want to reflect on that because people sometimes think this is just too big. I can't do it, you can't do it, how are we going to do it? But the fact is we can if we get serious about it. If we understand the different roles of the private and public sector, we can actually do something really dramatic about creating less expensive, more home- based energy.

And I'll just also end by saying thank you very much, Mr. Inslee, for joining me and for helping, I hope, being able to talk about what is such an important issue for every American, and that is how to create less expensive, more available, more home-grown energy.

So thank you very much for joining me this evening, and I look forward to getting this done with you.

Mr. Speaker, our most important duty as Members of Congress is to ensure our Nation's security. National security is the single-most essential purpose of government. All of the other blessings of our liberty flow from it, our strength and vitality as a people depend upon it and, our economy and our way of life are reinforced by it.

A strong, bipartisan tradition has been at the core of America's national security policymaking for much of our history. A succession of American Presidents, from Woodrow Wilson to Franklin Roosevelt to Harry Truman to John F. Kennedy, guided this Nation through two world wars and some of the tensest days of the Cold War. Their leadership was based on asserting America's power in a way that advanced the ideals of our Founders and which made America a beacon to millions of people who were suffering under fascism and communism.

Most importantly, these men knew the limits of any one nation's ability, and they saw the wisdom of marshalling our strengths with that of other freedom-loving people, and they listened to the counsel of these allies abroad and Members of both parties here at home.

Harry Stimson, who served as Franklin Roosevelt's Secretary of War throughout the Second World War, was a Republican. Harry Truman cooperated with a Republican Congress to pass the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine, which were instrumental in rebuilding postwar Europe and halting Soviet expansion.

But unlike these giants of the 20th century, who put the Nation's security before chauvinism or partisanship, the current administration has too often believed that it had all the answers and did not need to pay attention to the ideas of others.

This refusal to listen to other voices and excessively partisan and ideological approach has resulted in an America that is more isolated than it should be and less safe than it needs to be. Around the world, among nations that should be our strong allies, we are often seen less as a force for good in the world, and this has jeopardized the cooperation that we need in the war on terror.

In Iraq, a stubborn refusal to commit enough troops to save the lives and pacify the country in the months after the invasion has led to a protracted fight against Baathists and Islamic insurgents and increasing sectarian violence that has claimed more than 2,300 American lives and wounded thousands more.

At home we have wasted valuable time in making real strides to safeguard the Nation from terrorist attack. Most significantly, we have failed to reckon with the Achilles heel of our national security, our reliance on foreign oil to supply our energy needs.

Clearly, Americans want and deserve change. Last month, Members of our party from both the House and the Senate unveiled a comprehensive blueprint to better protect America and to restore our Nation's position of international leadership. Our plan, the Democratic plan, is called Real Security. It was devised with the assistance of a broad range of experts, former military officers, retired diplomats, law enforcement personnel, homeland security experts and others, who helped identify key areas where current policies have failed and where new ones were needed.

In a series of six Special Orders, my colleagues and I will share with the American people our vision for a more secure America. Two weeks ago, we discussed the plan as a whole and laid out the five pillars that make up that plan. I would like to go over some of these in summary before we turn to the pillar that we will discuss tonight.

These five pillars of security are the creation of a 21st century military, the successful prosecution of the war on terror, a more successful strategy to provide real homeland security, a way forward in Iraq, and the securing of energy independence for the United States of America.

One of the pillars of our Real Security plan focuses on the war on terror. It devises a strategy to destroy al Qaeda and finish the job in Afghanistan. It would have us double our special forces and improve our intelligence-gathering processes. It would eliminate terrorist breeding grounds. It would use preventive diplomacy and bring new international leadership, recognizing that we are strongest when we cause the world to join us in a cause.

Secure loose nuclear materials by 2010, this is one of the greatest vulnerabilities we have. You might recall in the debate between Senator Kerry and President Bush both acknowledged that the number one threat facing the country was that of nuclear terrorism. In fact, when we had testimony in the Nonproliferation Subcommittee, I asked Jim Woolsey, former director of the CIA, what was the most likely suspect if a nuclear weapon went off tomorrow in New York, Los Angeles or Washington? He thought about it for a moment and then he said, ``al Qaeda.''

I said, ``I think that is exactly right. But if al Qaeda is the number one threat, then the most likely delivery vehicle is not a missile, it is a crate, and why are we not doing more to secure those materials that al Qaeda has said they want?''

Osama bin Laden, who has called it a religious duty of Muslims to obtain the bomb and use it against the United States, who wants an American Hiroshima, at the pace it is going it is going to take years, if not decades, to secure the nuclear material in the former Soviet Union, and this makes our Nation at risk of calamity.

If you think the debates we have now over civil liberties and national security are difficult, imagine the world after a nuclear detonation here in this country or against our troops in the theater. All of that debate would be moot. This Nation would be a very different Nation. It would be one we would not recognize. It would certainly not be one we would want to live in.

All efforts must be made to deal with this threat, and too little has been done. Precious little has been done, and time is not on our side.

We must redouble our efforts to stop nuclear weapons development in Iran and North Korea. Too often the administration's policy in this area has been on-again off-again, as if we can only focus on Iran right now and we can take our focus off North Korea, where 6 months ago we could focus on North Korea to the exclusion of Iran, or we couldn't focus on either while we were focusing on Iraq.

The reality is we must continually focus on all of the above, and we must marshal the international community to stop this weapons program in Iran and in North Korea. Only through sustained and vigorous and dedicated efforts to pressure Russia, to pressure China and to bring that world community together do we have a chance to stop that nuclear weapons development in Iran and North Korea.

Let me turn to one of the other pillars of our Real Security plan dealing with homeland security. In the weeks to come, we will be going through the details of this pillar, which involves implementation of the 9/11 Commission recommendations. We support the immediate implementation of those recommendations.

The 9/11 Commission, probably no other commission in the last half century has done a more valuable job, a more bipartisan job of analyzing the vulnerabilities of the United States and making good, strong and sound recommendations about what we can do to address them, many of which affect this body. In fact, it is an irony not lost to anyone here, or shouldn't be: those recommendations of the 9/11 Commission that affect how we organize our business in the Congress are the last to have been implemented. Most of them have not been implemented.

But a great many of their recommendations are being ignored at our peril, and, indeed, what I was talking

about a moment earlier, in terms of dealing with the loose nuclear materials in the former Soviet Union, this was something that the 9/11 Commission paid great attention to and is one of the great deficiencies in our response to their recommendations. We should put those recommendations into effect now. Under the Real Security plan, that is exactly what we will do.

Another pillar: part of this pillar of homeland security is screening all containers and cargo. Again, if the threat to this country comes in the near term, in the near term, in a crate and not on a missile, then why aren't we investing more in that portal technology to keep nuclear material out of this country, to keep a nuclear weapon out of this country, to keep a radiological weapon out of this country?

Why is it in terms of cargo coming in through our airports that when you go to the airport to get on a flight and you have to take your shoes off and your belt off and you have to be wanded down, that at the same time in the cargo hold of that plane, where half of the cargo on most passenger jets is commercial, it is not your luggage, it is commercial cargo, 98 percent of that cargo or thereabouts is never screened for explosives? So you have to take off your shoes, yes; but you could ship a bomb the size of a small piano in a crate, and it may never be inspected for explosives.

That doesn't make sense. That is a real deficiency that has to be addressed. We cannot afford to wait until there is a calamity. Terrorists don't need to fly planes into our buildings to destroy the economy of this country. It would be enough to destroy that plane in mid-flight. We simply cannot afford to take these risks, and we must screen all containers and cargo.

The job at our ports is an even more difficult challenge, but it is one that can be met. It can be met through a homeland security plan that is tough, that is smart, and where the priorities match the nature of the risk. That is exactly what we have to do in homeland security. We have to prioritize, what are the greatest risks facing the country, and that is where we need to devote our greatest resources.

We need to safeguard our nuclear and chemical plants, which still have not been adequately safeguarded.

We can't outsource our security of our ports or airports or mass transit to other interests. We have to train and equip first responders. I had a group of first responders from my district in to visit with me today from the cities of Burbank and Glendale and other parts of Los Angeles to talk about their lack of interoperable communications equipment. They can't talk to each other across the cities. They are starting to be able to. They are patching this system together.

But here we are, years after 9/11. Can it be that our emergency responders still can't talk with each other, don't have that capability? That is simply inexcusable. We saw on 9/11 the communication problems we had. The fact that we have not dealt with that problem still years later is beyond comprehension.

Finally, we have to invest in public health to safeguard Americans. You might recall it was just a few weeks ago the burning issue in the Nation was the avian flu. It still ought to be a burning issue in the Nation. Yet we saw when this was at the top of the news how unprepared we are.

We are still unprepared. That hasn't changed. The issue may have fallen out of the top of national news. It hasn't fallen out of the tomorrow of the national dangers facing this country. Those are not even man-made disasters.

Terrorists purposely attempting to spread a biological pathogen, perhaps at multiple locations in the United States at the same time, imagine the havoc that would ensue. Are we prepared? We are not nearly as prepared as we must be.

Let me turn to another pillar of the Real Security plan, that dealing with Iraq. The Real Security plan proposes that 2006 be a year of transition to full Iraqi sovereignty, that we have a responsible redeployment of U.S. forces, that we work harder to promote Iraqi political compromise to unite the country.

We saw this week that we had a change in the position of prime minister, and that is hopeful and we all hope that leads to the formation of a unity government. But those hopes have too often been disappointed. We must ensure that within the next 30 days that government is stood up, and it is a government that is representative of Sunnis, Kurds and Shiites that the Iraqi people will defend.

Ultimately, if the Iraqis choose civil war, if they choose to murder each other in large numbers, there is not much that we can do to stop it. But if they decide to be one country, if they decide as one country to take on the foreign jihadists and the terrorists, that is a fight they can win and a fight we can help them win. But if they are determined to squander this opportunity, if they don't form this unity government, then they have to understand that the patience of the American people is running out.

We must encourage our allies and others to play a more constructive role in Iraq, and we must hold the Bush administration accountable. We had a hearing in the International Relations Committee on Iraq this week. It was one of the first hearings we have had in years on Iraq.

I asked the panel, which included top level DOD, Department of Defense, and top level Department of State officials, I asked them, given the history of I think fairly well-recognized mistakes in the prosecution of the war, of course, the failure to find WMD, the standing down of the Iraqi Army, the failure to bring enough troops in to maintain order that allowed the insurgency to get out of hand, who has been held accountable? Who has been held accountable for these errors?

And I ask my colleague, Mr. Inslee from Washington State, do you know what the answer to me was?

I thank the gentleman. This was precisely the nature of the testimony in the committee. When I asked that question of the witnesses, who has been held accountable, it was really quite remarkable what happened. There was an incredible silence as the witnesses looked at me and then looked at each other, and then looked at me, and then looked at each other. And it seemed like an eternity before anyone could respond.

And I said, your silence speaks volumes. To me, and I expressed this to the committee, the only one who has been held accountable was General Shinseki, and he was accountable for speaking the truth.

Now you mentioned the Truman Commission, and I was thinking about just the same thing when I was mentioning just a few moments ago that as part of our homeland security pillar we intend to implement the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission.

And probably not since that Truman Commission have we had a group of former Members and elected officials, experts on national security, come together and had such a credible work product that was so deserving of our respect, attention, and implementation as the 9/11 Commission, not since the Truman Commission. Would you agree?

If I can interrupt the gentleman, this has, I think, precisely been the problem. It has been a shared responsibility. There has been the failure of the executive to act promptly on the 9/11 Commission recommendations that have put us at risk, and most probably, I agree with you 100 percent, most prominently that risk is something coming in through our ports or on the back of a truck across the border that has nuclear material in it. That is, I think, the chief threat that we face.

But it is a shared responsibility, because we here in Congress have done nothing about that. Because there has not been oversight of the executive; the majority has been allergic to doing oversight. I am on the investigations and oversight subcommittee of the International Relations Committee.

We have had 6, 8, 10 hearings. The majority of them I believe have been on what, are they on overseeing problems within our own government? No. They have been on the United Nations. When you do not want to oversee what you are doing, what do you do, you oversee the United Nations.

Now, admittedly the U.N. has got plenty of problems and is in desperate need of reform, but that cannot be the sole area of our oversight. We have had hearings in the subcommittee on Iraq, as our chairman recently pointed out. You know what it was on? How bad a man Saddam Hussein was. As I said at the outset of the hearing, I think we can stipulate that Saddam Hussein was a horrible man, was a tyrant, was a dictator, was guilty of crimes against humanity. That is not in dispute.

But what we ought to be overseeing is whether we are implementing the

9/11 Commission recommendations that make us safe; we ought to be investigating the Inspector General's analysis that $9 billion in reconstruction funds in Iraq is unaccounted for. We ought to be looking into, this is something that has really troubled me, I raised it with the Secretary of Defense during our briefings, how is it that we continue to have problems with equipment and material to protect our troops.

How is that possible? I mentioned to the chairman of Armed Services that if this was a problem of production, my constituents would line up around the block to work on up-armoring vehicles, provide state-of-the- art body armor.

There was no lack of will. But none of the country, other than those people in uniform and their families, have been asked to sacrifice at all. And we are desperate I think around the country to make a sacrifice to be part of the greater good and the greater effort protecting the country. We have not been asked to do it. The Congress has not asked. The President has not asked. We have not done the oversight to even ask the hard questions.

And so we are a Nation at risk. A Nation that is not as well prepared as it should be, and as it really must be.

I have to take my hat off to my colleague from Washington, because no one has led more consistently and more strongly on this issue than you have.

Before our caucus had a strategy jointly that we have put forward before the President came forward, Jay Inslee was there, and you have been just the most powerful advocate for years for an Apollo-like project to bring about energy independence.

Let me touch on the first point you made, and then I want to go a little bit more into energy independence and talk about some of the other pillars, and then get to the pillar we are going to focus on this evening.

You mentioned that the priority has to be placed on securing this nuclear material in the former Soviet Union. I agree with you exactly. When you look at what is preventing al Qaeda from detonating a nuclear weapon on our soil, you might look at the difficulty of getting the material in the country.

Well, that is not very difficult. Unfortunately, as we have discussed, we don't have the portal technology engaged to the degree that we need it, and how would you get a nuclear weapon in the country? Well, I like to quote the chancellor of UCLA, Chancellor Carnesale, who says, well, you could smuggle it in a bail of marijuana. That is one way you could get it in. That is sort of the magnitude of the problem of keeping it out. That is a tough strategy at the border.

Well, then, you might ask, what about the technology? Maybe it is tough to actually build the mechanics of the bomb. But that is not hard either. That is a 50-year-old technology. Cal Tech is in my district. I bet I could pick any two Cal Tech students and they could design a crude nuclear weapon for me using information on the Internet.

What is the obstacle? Is it the will of al Qaeda? It is not the will, as Osama bin Laden has talked very plainly about the imperative to bring about an American Hiroshima. I think those writings and those speeches he has given are basically his own Mein Kampf, and we ignore that at our own peril.

So if it is not lack of will or the lack of technological prowess or the lack of ability to get it into the country, the question is why hasn't al Qaeda brought this off? The answer is, it is hard to get the material. It is still hard to get the material. That is the only

real prevention we have. You know something? It is just not hard enough. It is just not hard enough.

As you point out, some of this material is secured with a chain link fence and a night watchman and a bike lock. Some of it is more secure. But much of it is in the form of highly enriched uranium at research reactors. Some are defunct or stockpiled. It is all too accessible. We cannot wait for a disaster.

Turning to your second point, one of the pillars of the real security plan is the energy independence by 2020, which would eliminate our reliance on Middle East oil and all of the distortions that accompany our foreign policy as a result of that dependence. It would increase production of alternative fuels in America, promote hybrid and flex- fuel vehicle technology and manufacturing. It would enhance energy efficiency and conservation incentives.

I believe exactly what you do. We are the American people. We are the best entrepreneurs and inventors anywhere in the world. This isn't like where we were in terms of putting a man on the Moon. It is not like we were when we had to embark on the Manhattan Project. We are so much farther along on this goal technologically. A lot of these technologies are already in existence.

It is a question of making sure that they are made better and that they are made much more use of, would be a large part of the solution. It is not that we can imagine these technologies; they are out there, many of them. It is just the lack of will and the lack of leadership, and it is having a crippling effect on our economy now with gas prices at the pump, on our foreign policy, and I just want to thank you again for your tremendous leadership on this issue.

Well, you pose an interesting question. How can the administration's policy, which is dubbed a ``reduce our dependence on foreign oil,'' be a policy which, if you actually play it out over the years, will increase our importation of foreign oil? I can only say, because this is Washington.

This is the same place where 3 weeks ago the majority announced its deficit reduction package, which was, I don't know, $30- or $40 billion in spending cuts, and about $70- or $80 billion in tax cuts, which more than offset the spending cuts. So the net effect was increasing the national debt, and that was a deficit reduction plan? I guess if that is a deficit reduction plan, then the administration's energy plan is subject to the same logic.

I think this is part and parcel of the broader problem, where there is a lack of accountability, there is a lack of responsibility. The reality is that our friends in the majority have been in the majority now for years. They control this body, they control the Senate, they control the White House, they have got a pretty favorable Supreme Court, and there has been not only inaction on energy independence, but actually we have lost ground and are moving in the wrong direction.

There is really only one party to blame and one party responsible for that failure.

And for several years the blame was all placed on the Clinton administration. Everything that was going on years after the Clinton administration was the fault of the Clinton administration. But at some point you have to take responsibility when you are in the leadership. When you are in the majority, you have to take responsibility.

Let us take the pillar that we wanted to highlight tonight, and that is the 21st century military, the part of our Real Security plan that would strengthen our military and that would rebuild a state-of-the-art military; that would ensure that we have the world's best equipment and training; that will provide accurate intelligence and a strategy for success; that would bring about a new GI Bill of Rights for the 21st century, and that will strengthen the National Guard.

Let me talk briefly about a couple of those items, and then I would love to hear your thoughts as well. In poll after poll, the American people have demonstrated they have more faith in the military than in any other public institution in this country. I have been to Iraq three times, I have been to Afghanistan twice, I have met with our troops there and have spent a lot of time with military personnel here and around the world and other places, and that confidence in the troops is well placed. America does have the finest military in the world.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, our soldiers, our sailors, our airmen and marines have done everything we have asked of them and more. But since 9/11, our Nation's Armed Forces have become overextended. We have had recruiting goals that have not been met, forcing the armed services to enlist less qualified men and women.

Because of the poor planning by the administration, many units are on their second and third tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Army and Marine Corps personnel still don't have adequate body armor and sufficiently armored vehicles to the degree they should.

We are committed to ensuring that the United States military remains second to none and, more importantly, committed to building the Armed Forces to confront the threats of the 21st century. The Real Security plan, which I went over, has these elements that will rebuild the state-of-the-art military by making the needed investments in equipment and manpower so we can project power to protect America wherever and whenever necessary.

Second, we will guarantee our troops have the protective gear, equipment, and training they need and are never sent to war without accurate intelligence and a strategy for success.

Third, we will enact a GI Bill of Rights for the 21st century that guarantees our troops, active, reserve, retired, and our veterans and their families receive the pay and health care, the mental health services and other benefits they have earned and deserve.

Finally, we will strengthen the National Guard in partnership with the Nation's Governors to ensure it is fully manned, equipped and, available to meet missions at home and abroad.

Building this 21st-century military begins with the acknowledgment that we are in a new era with a new set of challenges and threats distinct from those we faced in the Cold War. Our colleagues on the other side of the aisle delight in accusing our party of having a pre- 9/11 mindset. But their stewardship of the Nation's defenses makes it clear that it is the majority that has been living in the past.

We need a military that is highly mobile, self-sustaining, and capable of operating in small units. On the one hand, our ability to use air power has extended our global reach and allows us to engage enemies without large numbers of ground troops being employed, as was the case in Kosovo and Afghanistan. On the other hand, the war on terror, ongoing operations in Iraq and the increasing need for American forces to play a stabilizing role as peacekeepers and peace enforcers demands the sustained commitment of American forces.

Our friends in the majority used to deride these types of operations as nation-building. But in a post-9/11 world, we cannot allow states to fail and become havens for Islamists and other radicals to plot attacks against us. Clearly, we need to increase the size of the active-duty Army and Marine Corps.

These are just some of the steps we will take. There are others I want to highlight, but I will be happy to yields to my colleague from Washington.

Just to interrupt for a second. I visited our troops in that very same hospital, as well as here in Bethesda at Walter Reed. That is exactly what they told me also. They just want to get back to their unit. These young people, and they are so young, that is the most striking thing when you meet them in the field. They are so committed, it just can't help but take your breath away.

If I can add one thing, before you do, and that is one of the things that really concerns me, and here again is the failure of us in this body to do the oversight we should, to have the majority support that oversight, and that is have we moved as quickly as we can, as quickly as this great Nation can to provide the technology to defend against these improvised explosive devices that have taken so many Americans lives? I think the answer is, no, we have not done all we can. We have not moved as fast as we could.

I know certainly in Congress, when these questions have come up, we haven't gotten the answers, I think, to go home to our constituents and say every rock is being turned over, every effort is being made, every resource is being expended to make sure we are protected against the IEDs. I think there is more we could be doing.

And the L.A. Times had an analysis recently of a promising new technology and the frustration of those that have been working on this program about how difficult it is to get that technology actually out into the field. That is inexcusable. If there is promising technology, it needs to be fast-tracked, and it needs to be put to immediate use.

The fact that we would lose a single life because of the failure of the richest Nation on Earth to provide the body armor, the up-armored vehicles, or the technology to defeat the IEDs is just inexcusable.

And this is precisely the problem. When we discuss where we are in the rest of the world, what our standing is in the world, and some of our colleagues on the other side of the aisle will pejoratively say, well, we don't care about the court of public opinion, we are not in this to be popular. Well, it is true we are not in this to be popular. But when we alienate the rest of the world, it has a real cost to us in terms of our own security.

We are dependent, like it or not, on information about al Qaeda's operations from other nations. If we can't get their cooperation, that affects our security. If we communicate to the rest of the world that we don't care about their priorities, when we go to them about ours, when we go to them about North Korea or Iran or Iraq, how can we expect a warm and ready and welcoming response? We can't. And that puts us more at risk.

So this has had real consequences. When I consider where we were in the world's estimation and the kind of cooperation we could get pre-9/ 11, and I look now, when it should be that much greater given what took place on 9/11, but it is that much more problematic because these world leaders, even if they wanted to help us, and many of them do, because they recognize the threat to themselves from terrorism as well, but if our Nation is that unpopular, or our chief executive is that unpopular and politically they can't afford to do it, that is a real problem.

When people are running for office in foreign capitals of our allies on a platform of who will be most opposed to the United States policy, that is a problem for our security. It is not about popularity; it is about security. And this is why we need a change. We need a change that will, as you say, bring the world together in a great cause. Because in the end, this fight we have with terrorism unites us. It is an attack on civilization.

And was it Ben Franklin who said, ``We have to hang together or we shall all hang separately''?

I thank the gentleman from Washington for his great work.

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 CO2 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.

I think you have put your finger on a very important principle as we go forward on energy debate. The debate in energy between those of us who believe in the New Apollo Project and those of us who do not is really a debate between the optimists and the pessimists.

The pessimists believe that we are tied to these really now ancient technologies. Fossil fuels is really an ancient technology. It is from the 1800s. It is old. We have been doing it for a long, long time.

Now, pessimists believe that we are stuck burning fossil fuels, and that is about as good as it gets.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I do, actually. There is only one person that the Bush administration has fired involving Iraq policy. There is one single person. And that person was General Shinseki, who was right about Iraq.

He had the huge error in this administration of being truthful, forthright and accurate when he said we needed 400,000 to 500,000 troops to provide security in Iraq so it would not degrade into anarchy as it has done.

And as a result of that, the President, in the way they do this with the military, effectively fired him. He is the only person who the Bush administration has removed from office in Iraq, not the people really responsible for the problem at Abu Ghraib, not the Secretary of Defense, not Paul Wolfowitz who came to us and told us the incredible falsehood that this whole operation was going to be paid for, because Iraq was going to pump more oil, and it would not cost a penny to the American taxpayers. And you know how many billions of dollars now the taxpayers have suffered.

None of those people who have gotten almost every single thing wrong in Iraq that you can imagine. If you were going to design a train of errors, misjudgment, inefficiency, incompetence, acceptance of outright fraud in the contracting procedure, it would be hard to design a more inept train of abuses than this one, yet this President has sat there and done nothing.

Now, I have to admit he has not said they have done a heck of a job. He has not used that language. But he has failed to hold anybody accountable. And one of the things that I am very pleased that you have been a leader on, is holding the administration accountable for this, is accountable for U.S. tax dollars.

You know, there was a Democrat, Harry Truman, during World War II, who convened the Truman Commission in the U.S. Senate, and he insisted that during war time, even during war time, it is important to not allow the abuse of U.S. taxpayer dollars. And he ferreted out some of the fraud and abuse in military contracting that was going on in World War II even when our whole Nation was in jeopardy, in an existentialistic sense was in jeopardy, but he still said we need to be careful with these dollars.

We have had umpteen billions of dollars disappear into the sands of Iraq with nothing to show for it, no meaningful reconstruction, but tens of billions of dollars gone. We have seen multiple GAO reports, Inspector General reports.

We have seen multiple contractors, many of whom have been very closely

aligned with this administration; there is no secret about that. What we are saying as Democrats is real simple. The U.S. Congress needs to do its job to ferret out these abuses, find the people responsible, relieve them from duty, and hold these contractors responsible to the American taxpayers. That is not too much to ask.

This Congress has been a lap dog. It has been a see-no-evil, hear-no- evil group, while one of the greatest abuses of the American taxpayer ever happened in the sands of Iraq, despite the tragic loss, which of course is a thousand times worse of our men and women in Iraq.

So the Democratic Real Plan for Security is that it is the job of Congress to hold the administration accountable to the American people, and the American taxpayer, and we will do that job at the right moment. So I am glad that you have brought this issue up.

I certainly will. I will point out that Democrats do not claim to be the sole source of genius and wisdom in America. Republicans have great ideas too, and they did in the 9/11 Commission, chaired by ex-Senator Kean of New Jersey, a Republican. He was one of the co-chairs of the commission.

A group of Republicans and a group of Democrats got together and did an evaluation on what this country really needs to do. And they have since then, they have made their recommendations, have issued this score card to evaluate the administration's performance to see whether those bipartisan recommendations have been implemented.

And if it was your son or daughter's score card, the kid would not be going to any movies or watching any television, because it was full of Ds and Fs. The most amazing part that is important, I represent the area in Seattle, we have a huge port. And when I tell people that despite this bipartisan Republican and Democrat recommendation to do screening of all of our containers coming in, of radiological materials, either a dirty bomb, the makings of a dirty bomb, or worst case scenario, a fission bomb coming in through our containers, and we know the proliferation that has gone on in the last few years, when you report to people that despite that foreknowledge, the administration can only tell us a tiny little percentage of those are screened for radiological material, that is a sorry state of affairs. And there is no excuse for that failure. We have had a bipartisan consensus, at least on the commission, to get that job done. And the job simply has not been done.

And the administration has had its eye off the ball of this major league threat. This is the big threat, by the way, at least in my estimation, and I think of the 9/11 Commission, of a dirty bomb or some day a fission product coming into this country. That is the real threat.

By the way, it is probably 1,000 times more likely to be delivered in a container coming through Los Angeles or Seattle or Boston or Gulfport, than coming in from 10 miles up in space in an ICBM that none of these countries have, at least at the moment. That is where the real threat is.

But, instead, the administration has been off spending billions of dollars on the Star Wars Project, and refuses to do more than 3 or 4 percent of the containers, which is a known threat, which is a known vector of radiological material; and they refuse to act.

That is unconscionable. We Democrats intend to implement a bipartisan approach to this, which is what was in this 9/11 Commission. And people can look it up. It is on the Internet. You can look at the report card. You know, I thought, I was hopeful after that report card came out that the President would get his Cabinet together and hold that report card and say, what is going on here? This is absurd. I am President of the United States, the most powerful Nation in the world, and we are getting Fs on securing our ports, when we have got the technology to do this.

I thought that he would do that. Instead, you know what he did? He walked around handing out Medals of Freedom to Paul Wolfowitz who got every decision you could possibly imagine wrong on Iraq. He told his homeland security people they are doing a great job, when 95 percent of the cargo is not screened coming into our ports. That is not a heck of a job. And he has failed to respond to that report from this again bipartisan commission in any way that I can fashion.

That is one of the reasons Congress needs to act. There is a reason the framers set up a couple branches of government, so that when one branch was not doing the job, which right now is the executive, Congress can act.

Well, I would agree with you. You have to ask, why has this happened? And I think it comes from an attitude of unbridled rose- colored glasses and feel-good politics. The administration wanted to have a war we could all just kind of feel good about, not have any personal sacrifice associated with it, not have any concern on our tax policy about that whatsoever.

It was feel-good politics, and the attitude is that we try to all feel good over here, and the only people who would be suffering are the men and women in Iraq. That is a wholly irresponsible way to fight a war, and that is what has gone on.

I wonder if I can address a little different issue of our Real Security plan, and that is what I like about the aggressiveness of the Democratic Real Security plan, because as you know, you have been a leader on this, we Democrats feel we need to be aggressive in disarming our enemy.

The most effective effort is offensive. And we want to be offensive, not meaning disliked, but offensive in being aggressive and assertive to disarm our enemies. And I want to mention two ways, one short and one not so short.

The short way we want to disarm our enemies, we want to make sure that they cannot get access to fissionable materials, which frankly are as loose and insecure tonight as we speak; it is roaming around places around middle Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, which is still secured with maybe a bicycle lock. I pay more attention to my Chinelli bicycle than some of these old failed States in the middle part of Europe to fissionable material.

And we need to secure that. And as numerous reports have indicated, the executive branch of this government has failed to secure the number one threat to this country, which is that fissionable material. And we will get that job done. We will make the investment it takes to do that, because that has got to be an extremely high priority for this country.

So one way you disarm your opponent is you take away their fissionable material that is laying around all over the world right now. And we will get that job done.

But the second thing is even bigger. We need to disarm our enemy from their financial resources to attack us, and that means that we have got to be energy independent and stop sending our dollars to the Middle East. We have got to start sending them to Middle Western farmers rather than Middle Eastern sheiks, in this regard.

Because of that $3-plus, one of my staffers paid $3.35 this morning, that $3.35 gallon, a good part of that goes to the CEO of Exxon, who just walked away with $400 million in a bonus package, and the rest, a lot, goes to the Middle East to arm our enemies.

And we know that many of those regimes have been playing footsie with al Qaeda and various other groups. We know that our money we are spending is going to arm our enemies, and so we believe what we need in this country is an energy independence program that is not just rhetorical, but is real. And I was pleased to have the President give us some rhetoric during his State of the Union speech.

He said, we have an addiction to oil. Well, welcome to the land of recognition, Mr. President. We have been waiting 6 years, but, nevertheless, it is good to hear the rhetoric. But the problem is we are not seeing the reality.

The week he talked about breaking our addiction to oil, he fired 100 scientists at our renewable lab in Boulder, Colorado. When the press suggested that seemed somewhat inconsistent, those pink slips were pulled back, and those scientists were back on the job.

But we think we need something as bold as John F. Kennedy about in the 1960s, we need an Apollo project, we are going to go the moon, we will invest in the capital and wisdom and technical brilliance in this country. We are going to take a big step forward, one big step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

We need now a giant leap in energy policy in this country to depend on the technical prowess of this country, because Kennedy knew, and he stood right behind you right there. We are in an historic place here. He stood there March 9, 1961, and he said, we are going to go to the Moon. That was an amazing point. Our rockets were blowing up on the launch pad. We had launched a little softball into orbit. We hadn't even invented Tang yet.

A lot of people thought that was an absurdly ambitious goal, but he understood a central tenet of the American character is that when challenged, we respond, number one. Number two, we are the greatest tinkers since, you know, whoever in Space 2001 invented the bone as a weapon. We are the people that can invent our way out of this.

We need to make the investments to do that. If you look at what the President has done in his budget, it is a pathetically insufficient commitment to this goal. We got so far two words from the President. We got energy independence.

We got two words, but we have no funds to do the job from him, no bold strategic challenge, no commitment to science, no commitment in our academic institutions. You look at the money, he came out, and I was listening carefully to the State of the Union address. He had this bold rhetoric and he said, therefore, I am committing a few million dollars to this project. He has committed to this budget for biofuels less than we spend in Iraq in about 18 hours. That is what we have committed to this project.

We have men over there fighting a war now for 3-plus years at about $80 billion a year, and he is committing less than 18 hours of what we are spending in Iraq to try to disarm our enemies. That is not a wise strategy. We need a significant energy plan to solve this problem.

We have it in the new Apollo energy project, H.R. 2828, that I have introduced and others. That is a bold step, leap for mankind that we will get this job done. So I am happy that the Democrats have embraced real policies and not just rhetoric.

Well, I appreciate your words, but in a sense it is easy in contrast to brand X. If you look at the energy bill that the Republican-controlled Congress that was promoted by this President, it is hardly a secret that this President had substantial history in the oil and gas industry, and it would not be surprising if that affected decisions, just like the secret meetings that the Vice President had when he designed the energy independence. In the secret meetings the President has always refused to tell us about, I doubt that they were hatching a plot to create biofuels and energy independence from the oil and gas industry. I suspect that was not a discussion, had we been a fly on the wall to listen to what they were talking about. Maybe they were talking about a way to increase the profits of the oil and gas industries that led to $3 a gallon of gas and the largest profits of any corporation in the solar system history in this quarter in the oil and gas industry. Maybe that is what happened. Can't be sure.

But in any event, the policy that this Republican-controlled Congress came out with that was promoted by the President of the United States, according to the Department of Energy, this is the Bush's own governmental agencies, will increase our imports of oil from the Middle East. I want to say that again because I think it is very, very important.

The President, in his State of the Union Address, said, I want to break our addiction to Middle Eastern oil. That is the White House, the President of the United States. The Department of Energy, which works for him presumably, their analysis of his policies have concluded that the imports from imported oil from the United States will increase after full implementation by a significant amount. I don't have the number off the top of my head, but I was shocked at how much they would increase when I looked at this report, under their policies.

Why is that? First off, to me it takes a little chutzpah to talk about it up there and out there in the real world have a policy that will increase your imports. But why is it such a grand failure? Well, it is because they refused to do the things that we know that works.

You know, we know it works. Brazil is now energy independent. Last week, actually, they achieved total domestic energy independence. The way they did it principally was to develop a biofuels industry. They didn't mess around. The President of Brazil didn't just give some nice speech and say, I believe we are going to break our addiction to oil. He actually did some policies.

What they did is they made sure that consumers in Brazil when they bought a car would have a car that would burn either gasoline or ethanol. They freed Brazilian consumers to make sure that you get to decide what you burn, not the oil companies and not the automobile manufacturers. They insisted that every consumer when you buy a car, you get a flex-fuel vehicle that can burn either gas or ethanol.

When they did that, that immediately created an enormous demand for an ethanol industry. Without subsidies for the Brazilian government, boom, 40 percent, 6 years later, 40 percent of all the transportation in Brazil is run on ethanol, which does not feed the Middle East and the sheiks, has zero emissions of global warming gases, because it is circular, it has no net increase of global warming gases.

Brazil achieved that not because they are smarter than we are, not because they have better natural resources than we do. We have got the Midwest, we have got Microsoft, we have got Intel, we have got Google. You know, they have got some smart people, too. But what they had was leadership that had actual policies rather than just rhetoric. That is what we need.

The second thing I just want to point out, we have had experience in achieving this in the United States. It was during the late 1970s. We improved the efficiency of our cars by over 60 percent in 5 years. We were on a path of doubling the efficiency of our cars while increasing safety, I might add, while increasing safety for 5 years in this country. Then those policies were stopped under a Republican President.

The fact of the matter is that had we continued on that path, if we had simply continued to improve the efficiency of our cars, as we did for those 5-year periods, today you and I would not be having this discussion because we would have been free of Middle Eastern oil today. That is the opportunity cost that we experience when we got off this bandwagon at doing smart things in energy.

I just point this out; you know, we have a history of success in this. We just need the policies to get it done.

We have seen some pretty amazing rhetorical epiphanies here in this Chamber. For the last year Democrats on three separate occasions have attempted to pass a bill to make sure that the Federal Trade Commission has the explicit authority to investigate and punish price gouging by the oil and gas industry. We wanted to make it real clear that we wanted that investigation, and even when there is a lack of complicity, where there is price manipulation, that should be shut down. I think Americans are with us 100 percent on that. Three times we tried to pass that. The Republicans blocked us every single time.

Now, last week I heard the Speaker of the House say, we demanded an investigation of price gouging in the oil and gas industry. Welcome, I guess; better late than never. But we will see if we really get that law passed here. It will be interesting. We heard the press conference. If we had the vote, we could have done that today. It will be interesting to see.

I just want to preface my comments about the strategies and tactics, about the people we have in Iraq and Afghanistan. I think any discussion needs to center on them, at the point of the spear, at our request.

When I think about these issues, I think about the soldiers I met in Landshtul, Germany, just before Thanksgiving, where most of our badly wounded go after they leave Iraq. We have an amazing medical system, which I am happy about, taking care of our men and women. By the time they get to Germany, a lot of them are conscious, and so I had a chance to meet these folks. I met a couple of young men from Bremerton, Washington, just south of my district, both of whom had very severe injuries. Their legs were up and pins were sticking out and tubes coming every which way. One guy had both arms shattered, up and attached to pieces of metal. They were very seriously injured guys. I just wanted to say thank you to them and asked if there was any way we could help them.

I asked both, What do you have in mind? And both of them said, in fact all of them I talked to, said one thing: I want to get back to my unit as soon as possible.

Whatever you think of the Iraq operation, whatever you think of the strategy, I think anybody who met these people would be incredibly proud and reach one bipartisan conclusion, that they deserve the best that America can provide.

And you have to ask the question: Have they gotten the best that America could provide? And the answer is a resounding no, they have not. They have not gotten the personal body armor, they have not gotten the armored Humvees, they have not gotten basic equipment, on occasion, that we have talked about. The National Guard in particular has been shorted some important equipment. They simply have not gotten the best that America can provide.

And when you ask the administration, Donald Rumsfeld, why we sent these people in, not in cardboard, but essentially thin-skinned Humvees with no protection, his answer was, and I am paraphrasing, well, we didn't know anybody was going to be shooting at us in the rear. We have the armor up in front. But, geez, the guys in the rear? Who could have imagined that an Iraqi would be unhappy that a Western occupation army of 150,000 people roaming through might be unhappy about that, and might be shooting at our people, and might be doing improvised explosive devices? That was beyond our comprehension.

Just like it was beyond their comprehension that the levees could be topped during Katrina. Those two failures of obvious common sense I think have to go down in the top 10 of ineffective, incompetent, uncaring, rank mistakes, and that is too easy a word to use, in American history. Levees won't be topped and people won't be shooting at us back in the streets of Baghdad for the years we were going to be there. That was the working assumption of Donald Rumsfeld and the President of the United States when they sent our troops into harm's way.

I can't think of a possible excuse for that bone-headed assumption. As a result, our people aren't coming home, a lot of them. And the anger I feel is matched by a lot of my constituents who feel this way, whether they are for or against the Iraq war. They deserve better than they are getting.

And the Democrats are going to insist that when our people go into action they are going to be fully equipped, and we will not go in there

with sort of a hallucination that it is going to be like the film clip of the Champs Elysees in 1944. They should have anticipated that. So I wanted to get that off my chest.

But I want to say one thing about intelligence, if I can.

Well, I agree. And I want to, if I can, talk about intelligence for a moment because I think that in the nature of the warfare we are involved in with terrorism, intelligence, if not everything, is most of our ability to stop a terrorist attack.

What I want to point out is that we have an enormous shortfall of HUMINT, or human intelligence. We have an enormous shortfall of human agents around the world. And Democrats have committed to ramping up that capability in this country because we recognize that in the new threat environment we have, the new threat is much more likely to come from an al Qaeda ring personally delivered by a taxi cab and bus than it is by an ICBM from some particular other place on the planet.

You wonder why this administration is not ramping up the human intelligence around the globe. There are a couple of reasons. One, is they would rather put the money in the Star Wars projects by the tens of billions of dollars. That is number one. And number two, frankly, because this President worked so ineffectively with the rest of the world leading up to Iraq that we have had some difficulty in having as many alliances around the world as we need in this war on terrorism.

We are certainly experiencing that in Iran right now, when we are trying to rally the world on a sanction policy against Iran, and we are not getting as much cooperation as we should. And, frankly, one of the reasons is that the rest of the world is not particularly pleased that the President refused to work with the rest of the world in Iraq.

So what I would say about the Democratic approach to intelligence is there are two things we believe are the most effective in intelligence work, or at least two things we are vastly short in: electronic surveillance, very important, and we can talk more about that in a minute; but we have to boost the human intelligence, the number of effective agencies that have penetrated these cells around the world and can work with other governments in that regard.

Two, we have to rally the world to a global alliance that is against us. And when we have a chief executive officer that tells the rest of the world to go fish on Iraq and global warming and on the land mine treaty, and you name it, it doesn't make you a very effective rallier of troops. And that is a problem.

I don't think it was Yogi Berra.

Mr. Speaker, the Preamble to our Constitution lays out the basic functions of government and notably featured is the need to provide for the common defense.

National security is the single most important purpose of government; all of the other blessings of liberty flow from it. Throughout much of this country's history, Senator Arthur Vandenberg's famous maxim that ``Partisanship must end at the water's edge'' has guided the formulation and execution of America's national security policy.

Unfortunately, over the past several years that bipartisan tradition has been undermined by the Republican Party which has sought to convince Americans that only one party could be entrusted to preserve our Nation's military strength and its position as the world's preeminent power.

This unwillingness to listen to other voices has reached its zenith under the current administration, which took office with one overriding principle, that was to guide American national security policy. Yet when the previous administration, that of President Clinton, was for it, they were against it. The result is an America that is less safe than it should be and less safe than it needs to be.

Our military has been stretched to the absolute limits in Iraq, leaving us precious little ability to respond to other contingencies around the globe. Overseas, we are less often seen as a force for good in the world, and surveys of public opinion consistently show that we as a Nation are viewed negatively, even by our friends in Europe.

At home, we have frittered away the 4\1/2\ years since September 11 instead of making real strides in safeguarding the Nation from terrorist attack.

In Iraq, a stubborn refusal to commit enough troops to save the lives and pacify the country in the months after the invasion has led to a protracted fight against the Baathists and Islamist insurgents that has claimed now more than 2,300 American lives.

And finally, we have failed to reckon with the Achilles heel of our national security, our reliance on foreign oil to supply our energy needs.

Clearly, Americans want and deserve change. Last week, Members of our party from both the House and the Senate unveiled a comprehensive blueprint to protect the American people and to restore our Nation's position of international leadership.

Our plan, Real Security, was devised with the assistance of a broad range of experts, former military officers, retired diplomats, law enforcement personnel, homeland security experts and others, who helped identify key areas where current policies have failed and where new ones were needed.

During the next several weeks, Democratic Members of the House will be doing a series of 1-hours where we will discuss the particulars of the Real Security plan. Tonight, we will give an overview of that plan, and in the following weeks we will flesh out each of the five pillars of the Democratic Real Security plan for the country.

It is a tough and smart strategy to rebuild our military, equip and train our first responders and others on the front lines and here at home, provide needed benefits to our troops and veterans, fully man and equip our National Guard, promote alternative fuels and reduce our dependence on foreign oil, restore Americans' confidence in their government's ability to respond in the face of a terrorist attack or natural disaster.

To protect the American people, we will immediately implement the recommendations of the independent bipartisan 9/11 Commission and finally protect our ports and airports, our borders, mass transit systems, our chemical and nuclear power plants, and our food and water supplies from terrorist attack.

After September 11, all Americans trusted the President to take the steps necessary to keep our country safe. Since then, inadequate planning, sometimes incompetent policies, have failed to make Americans as safe as we should be. The tragedy of Hurricane Katrina showed that the Federal Government was still not prepared to respond.

Under the administration's leadership, the war in Iraq began with intelligence that was at best wrong and at worst manipulated. 140,000 of our finest young people were sent into Iraq without an adequate plan for success.

Our ports and other critical infrastructure remain vulnerable, while both soldiers in the field and first responders at home lack the basic equipment and resources they were promised.

Both in the Persian Gulf and on our own gulf coast, lucrative, no-bid contracts have gone to companies like Halliburton, Kellogg, Brown&Root and others with friends in high places.

Despite record high fuel prices, our country remains heavily dependent on foreign oil because of an energy policy that benefits the big oil interests.

The Real Security plan rests on five pillars that my colleagues and I will introduce to you tonight. They are the creation of a 21st-century military, a smart strategy to win the war on terror, a plan to secure the homeland, a plan to move forward in Iraq, and a proposal for achieving energy independence for America by 2020.

Under Real Security, a Democratic Congress will rebuild a state-of- the-art military by making needed investments in equipment and manpower so that we can project power to protect America wherever and whenever necessary.

We have all heard the stories of parents using their own money to purchase body armor for their own children serving in Iraq. I personally asked Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld about the shortage of body armor, about the lack of adequately armored vehicles, and the holdups in development of equipment to counter roadside bombs that have killed and maimed so many of our troops. Despite his assurances, there are still problems and young Americans are still paying the price.

Under Real Security, Democrats will guarantee all of our troops have the protective gear, equipment, and training they need and are never sent to war without accurate intelligence and a strategy for success.

I have been to Iraq now three times; and I visited our wounded troops here at home, there, and in Germany. I have spoken at the funerals of my constituents who have been killed in Iraq, and I have sat with their families as they have mourned. These experiences have reinforced my sense of commitment to ensuring the well-being of America's soldiers and their families and our veterans.

Democrats will enact a GI bill of Rights for the 21st century that guarantees our troops, active, reserve and retired, our veterans and their families, receive the pay, health care, mental health services, and other benefits they have earned and deserve.

Our active military are stretched to the breaking point, but our Guard and

Reserves have also been ground down by multiple deployments and falling enlistment and reenlistment. This has, in turn, added to the stress on the active Army and Marines.

As part of our Real Security plan, Democrats will strengthen the National Guard in partnership with our Nation's Governors to ensure it is fully manned, properly equipped, and available to meet missions at home and abroad.

The next pillar of Real Security is a broad strategy to win the war on terror. Four and a half years after 9/11 Osama bin Laden is still at large, and al Qaeda has morphed into a worldwide amalgam of discrete cells that are more difficult to track down.

When Democrats are in charge, we will make the elimination of Osama bin Laden our first priority. We will destroy al Qaeda and other terrorist networks, and we will finish the job in Afghanistan and end the threat posed by the Taliban. We propose to double the size of our special forces, increase our human intelligence capabilities, and ensure that our intelligence is free from political pressure.

Despite their vow to drain the swamp, the administration has done little to eliminate terrorist breeding grounds by combating the economic, social, and political conditions that allow extremism to thrive. Democrats will fight terrorism with all means at our disposal by leading international efforts to uphold and defend human rights and renew the long-standing alliances that have advanced our national security objectives.

Under Real Security, we will confront the specter of nuclear terrorism by greatly accelerating the pace at which we are securing nuclear material that could be used to make a nuclear weapon or a dirty bomb. Our goal is to secure loose nuclear material by 2010. We will also redouble our efforts to stop nuclear weapons development in Iran and North Korea. While Democrats understand that no option can be taken off the table, we are committed to a muscular diplomacy as the best option for curbing Pyongyang and Teheran's nuclear ambitions.

The third pillar of Real Security is homeland security. In the wake of 9/11, there have been numerous commissions and investigations at the Federal, State and local level, as well as a multitude of private studies. All of them have pointed to the broad systemic and other flaws in our homeland security program. Almost 2 years ago, the independent bipartisan 9/11 Commission published its report, but most of its recommendations have yet to be implemented.

As part of Real Security, Democrats will immediately implement the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, including securing national borders, ports, airports, and mass transit systems. We will implement the screening of 100 percent of containers and cargo bound for the U.S. in ships or airplanes at the point of origin, and we will take steps to better safeguard America's nuclear and chemical plants and our food and water supplies.

Democrats will prevent the outsourcing of critical components of our national security infrastructure, such as ports, airports, and mass transit to foreign interests that could put America at risk. Under Real Security, Democrats would provide firefighters, emergency medical workers, police officers, and other workers on the front lines with the training, staffing, equipment and cutting-edge technology they need.

While the immediate threats to our national security come from terrorists, we face other dangers as well. Democrats are committed to a security strategy that will protect America from biological terrorism and pandemics, including the avian flu, by investing in the public health infrastructure and training public health workers.

The fourth pillar, and the one that will have the most immediate effect on our security, is to chart a new course in Iraq that will ensure that 2006 is a year of significant transition to full Iraqi sovereignty, with the Iraqis assuming primary responsibility for securing and governing their country with a responsible redeployment of U.S. forces. Democrats will insist that Iraqis make the political compromises necessary to unite their country and defeat the insurgency, promote regional diplomacy, and strongly encourage our allies in other nations to play a constructive role.

As a part of Real Security, Democrats intend to hold the administration accountable for its manipulated prewar intelligence, poor planning, and contracting abuses that have placed our troops at greater risk and wasted billions of taxpayer dollars.

Our security will remain threatened as long as we remain dependent on Middle East oil. The fifth pillar, and the one with the most far- reaching ramifications for our country and the world, is to achieve energy independence for America by 2020.

Under Real Security, Democrats will increase production of alternate fuels from America's heartland; biofuels, geothermal, clean coal, fuel cells, solar and wind, promote hybrid and flex-fuel technology and manufacturing, enhance energy efficiency and conservation incentives. All this we will do, and more, to meet the real national security needs of the country.

And now, I would like to turn to some of my colleagues who have been leaders on national security issues. I would like to begin by introducing my colleague from California (Susan Davis) to hear her thoughts on one of the five pillars.

I thank the gentlewoman from California for all her work in this area, and I know that you represent a very large constituency of servicemembers in your district, probably one of the largest in the country. Undoubtedly, you have had the opportunity to visit with a lot of the families of those serving in Iraq and Afghanistan and know firsthand some of the demands being placed on our active duty but also on our guard and reserve.

Many of them pulled out of their jobs, earning a lot less on active duty than they were in their civilian occupations. This must be a tremendous hardship for families.

I imagine that you have had the experience that I have with some of my constituents in talking to their families, those that are serving in Iraq and the concerns that they have, and in talking with the soldiers when they return about whether they had the up- armored vehicles that they needed, and finding out from them firsthand that, notwithstanding protestations to the contrary by the Pentagon, that in fact they often didn't have up-armored vehicles. I still have people coming back telling me of the inadequacy of materiel they have to work with and to keep them safe.

But I thank you so much for all your leadership on this issue. You do a tremendous job on behalf of your constituents in the San Diego area and in the armed services area for all the rest of our country. Thank you.

I would like to turn now, Mr. Speaker, to one of my close friends and colleagues here, David Scott of Georgia. We cofounded, along with Steve Israel, the Democratic Study Group on National Security. He has been a strong voice and a great leader on national security issues. We are very grateful for your joining us this evening.

The gentleman from Georgia.

Mr. Scott, we are proud and grateful to have you here. You mentioned the proud history of the Democratic Party and national security under the leadership of Presidents like Roosevelt and Truman and Kennedy and others.

Today we saw in the press reports that the President authorized Mr. Libby, the chief of staff of the Vice President, to disclose classified information, national security information, for a political purpose. Can you imagine Roosevelt or Kennedy or Truman doing that? Can you imagine, for political reasons, any of them disclosing classified intelligence information for a political reason?

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman.

It gives me great pleasure to yield to Mr. Bennie Thompson, our ranking member on the Homeland Security Committee, someone who has brought great intelligence, foresight, and determination to protecting America, to ensuring we have port security and airport securing, and that we plug many of the gaping holes here in the homeland. I yield to the ranking member of the Committee on Homeland Security.

I thank the gentleman, and I particularly appreciate your talking about the common sense changes that have to be made to protect this country. Does it make sense, I ask our ranking member, to have a policy where you have to take off your shoes at the airport to get through the metal detector, but 50 percent of the cargo on the plane you are flying on is commercial and 98 percent of that is never checked for an explosive? You can ship a bomb the size of a piano that will never get opened in a crate under that same plane, but you have to take your shoes off. Does that make sense?

And that last point, I think, is the key one. The President, I am sure you recall, during the first debate with Senator Kerry, was asked what is the top national security threat facing the country? And he said, nuclear terrorism. Senator Kerry agreed. I think they were both right.

But if that is true, and the most likely suspect for nuclear terrorism is al Qaeda, then the most likely delivery device is not a missile but a crate. And that crate is going to come into one of our ports. And why we haven't mobilized the resources to implement that portal technology, why we are spending as much as we are on a more distant threat in terms of national missile defense, rather than the more proximate threat of a smuggled in dirty bomb or crude nuclear weapon is not in our Nation's national security interest.

I thank the gentleman very much for all his leadership in improving our Homeland Security.

I would now like to turn to my colleague, Dennis Moore from Kansas, who does a tremendous job. He is one of the true leaders on a variety of issues, including energy self-sufficiency and energy independence. It is one of the pillars of our national security plan. Dennis Moore.

Mr. Moore, we thank you for you tremendous leadership on this issue and for joining us this evening.

Now it gives me great pleasure to yield time to the gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. Wasserman Schultz), who I would say is a rising star in the Congress, but she was a rising star. She is now a full star in the firmament. The rise has already been complete. But we are so grateful for your leadership, and I yield to the gentlewoman from Florida.

I thank the gentlewoman and I am tremendously grateful for your leadership and participation tonight.

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague from Maryland, Chris Van Hollen, for his patience this evening. It has been a long evening already, and I have been keeping him and my other colleagues from the beginning of the recess. He has done a tremendous job in his tenure here in the Congress. He has already established himself as a superb leader on national security and other issues, education. Without any further ado I turn over my time to Mr. Van Hollen for such time as he may consume.

I thank the gentleman for his leadership and his eloquence and the tremendous job that he also does as we serve together on the Judiciary Committee.

I am now pleased to yield to Jay Inslee from the great State of Washington, who has been a pioneer in the area of energy independence.

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleagues this evening for all their comments and their leadership. Over the next several weeks, we will be unveiling in greater detail each of the pillars of security: how we intend, as Democrats, to rebuild the 21st-century military; how we intend to take the war on terror to Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda; how we intend to beef up our homeland security and repair a lot of the broken pieces of our homeland security policy that make us continue to be vulnerable; how we will make Iraq in 2006 a year of transition to full Iraqi sovereignty; and how, as Mr. Inslee points out, we can achieve energy independence, something vital to the present and this Nation's future.

I want to thank my colleagues for their leadership, David Scott for all his great work, Chris Van Hollen, Jay Inslee, all of the other speakers tonight. We look forward to continuing this dialogue with the American people.