Environmentally Responsible Windpower Act of 2005

Mr. President, I am here today to introduce, along with the Senator from Virginia, Mr. Warner, the Environmentally Responsible Wind Power Act of 2005.

The legislation that Senator Warner and I offer provides for local authorities to be notified and have a role in the approval of the signing of tens of thousand of massive wind turbines that will be built in America under current policies. It also ensures that the Federal Government does not subsidize the building of these windmills, which are usually taller than a football field is long, within 20 miles of a military base or a highly scenic location, such as a national park or offshore.

Senator Warner and I introduce our legislation today because next week the Senate Energy Committee is scheduled to begin markup on one of the most important pieces of legislation in this session, an energy bill. The Energy Committee's work, combined with the work of the Environment and Public Works Committee, which the distinguished occupant of the chair chairs, and the Finance Committee should this year produce a Clean Energy bill that will, over time, lower prices of natural gas and oil and reduce our dependence on overseas oil. This will be legislation for American blue-collar workers, for farmers, and for homeowners. It is urgently needed.

Natural gas prices are the highest in the industrialized world. Gasoline prices are at record levels. We cannot keep our jobs and our standard of living if we do not put in place policies that will provide our country with new steps toward conservation and an adequate supply of low-cost, reliable, clean American produced energy. Senator Warner and I both intend to be in the middle of this discussion. He is a senior member of the Environment and Public Works committee. I am chairman of the Energy Subcommittee.

I am grateful for, and I am greatly encouraged by, the leadership of the Energy Committee chairman Senator Domenici, and the ranking Democrat, Senator Bingaman, and the committee staff who have worked especially hard to create a framework for a more aggressive bipartisan piece of legislation than we were able to produce last year.

One part of our energy debate will be about wind power, which is the subject of the legislation that Senator Warner and I offer today. We are introducing this because several of our colleagues have proposed something called a renewable portfolio standard, or RPS, which would require power companies to produce 10 percent of all their electricity from renewable sources by 2025. These renewable sources are wind, hydro, solar, geothermal, and biomass. Today, these renewable sources produce about 9 percent of U.S. electricity needs.

This RPS is not to be confused with the renewable fuel standard which is a different sort of requirement, one that gasoline contain a certain percentage of ethanol. That matter is the subject for the jurisdiction of another committee. A renewable fuel standard is entirely different from a renewable portfolio standard and may well be part of the final legislation.

It is important for our colleagues to know that a renewable portfolio standard, or RPS, is all about wind. There are limited opportunities to build new dams today in order to expand hydropower, and hydro produces 7 of the 9 percent of renewable power that we have in America today. Of the remaining 2 percent of our electricity that is produced by other renewable sources, current subsidies are not enough to increase solar power by very much.

More research and development is needed to make biomass more efficient, and there is a limited amount of geothermal power that is drawing power from water that is heated underground, which leaves wind power. Experts agree that the bottom line is that a requirement that electric companies produce 10 percent of their electricity from renewable energy, if it could be achieved at all, would mean about 70 percent of the increase would come from wind. In other words, we would go from producing about 1 percent of America's electricity from wind to about 7 or 8 percent.

Testimony before our Energy Committee and most other sources suggest that to produce this much wind energy in the United States could require building more than 100,000 new massive wind turbines. We have less than 7,000 such windmills in the United States today, with the largest number in Texas and California. Testimony before our committee also indicated that even without the RPS, if Congress continues its generous subsidy for wind production for the next 10 years-- it will guarantee that we have these 100,000 windmills or more by the year 2025. According to the Treasury Department, this wind subsidy, if renewed each year for the next 5 years, would reimburse wind investors for 25 percent of the cost of wind production and cost taxpayers $3.7 billion over those 5 years.

I'm told that General Electric Wind, one of the largest manufacturers of wind turbines, has experienced a 500-percent growth in its wind business this year due to the renewal of the wind production tax credit last year.

I want to make sure my colleagues know that there are serious questions about how much relying on wind power will raise the cost of electricity, questions about whether there are better ways to spend $3.7 billion in support of clean energy, and questions about whether wind even produces the amount of energy that it is claimed to produce.

My studies suggest that at a time when America needs large amounts of low-cost reliable power, wind produces puny amounts of high-cost unreliable power. We need lower prices. Wind power production raises prices. We will have an opportunity in our debates and further hearings to examine these questions.

The legislation Senator Warner and I offer today is about a different question: the siting or location of 100,000 of these massive machines. Now, the idea of windmills conjures up pleasant images in Tennessee and, I am sure, in Oklahoma, of Holland and tulips, images of rural America with windmill blades turning slowly, pumping water at the farm well.

My grandparents had such a windmill at their well pump. That was back before rural electrification. The windmills we are talking about today are not our grandmother's windmills. Each one of these windmills is typically 100 yards tall, two stories taller than the Statue of Liberty, taller than a football field is long. These windmills are wider than a 747 jumbo jet. Their rotor blades turn at 100 miles per hour. These towers and their flashing red lights can be seen from more than 25 miles away. Their noise can be heard for up to a half a mile away. It is a thumping and swishing sound. It has been described by residents who are unhappy with the noise as sounding like a brick wrapped in a towel tumbling in a clothes dryer on a perpetual basis.

These windmills produce very little power since, of course, they only operate when the wind blows enough or when it does not blow too much. So they are usually placed in large wind farms covering huge amounts of land.

This is an example of what they look like. In comparison, we often worry about offshore drilling for oil and gas. In fact, Senator Johnson and I have introduced legislation that would permit States to expand the use of offshore oil and gas. Offshore oil and gas rigs can be placed far out to sea, where nobody on shore can see them. Compare that with the power produced by today's massive wind turbines. It would take 46 square miles of these windmills spread across the landscape to equal one oil or gas rig that one could not see.

As an example, the Congress ordered electric companies to build 10 percent of their power from renewable energy which, as we have said, has to be mostly wind. If we renew the current subsidy each year, by the year 2025 my State of Tennessee would have about 1,700 of these windmills, which would cover land almost two times the size of the city of Knoxville, TN. If Virginia, Senator Warner's State, were to produce 10 percent of its power from wind by 2025 and the subsidies continue, it would probably need more than 1,700 windmills. These windmills would take up enough land to equal the land mass of three cities the size of Richmond, VA. In North Carolina, to supply 10 percent of the electricity from wind, it would take almost the land mass of the Research Triangle, the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area. According to testimony before our committee, in Tennessee and Virginia these windmills would work best and perhaps work only at all along the ridge tops.

So this is what things might be looking like. This is a picture of the Grand Canyon in the West, but we can imagine what it might look like in the East. If our present policies on wind are continued, we could expect to see hundreds

of football-field sized towers as wide as jumbo jets with flashing red lights atop the Blue Ridges of Virginia, above the Shenandoah Valley, along the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, on top of Signal Mountain, on top of Lookout Mountain and Roan Mountain in Tennessee, and down the Tennessee River gorge which the city of Chattanooga has just spent 25 years protecting, and now it calls itself the scenic city.

I hope we decide there are better ways to provide clean energy than to spend $3.7 billion of taxpayer dollars over the next 5 years on windmills. I hope we decide we need a real national energy policy instead of a national windmill policy. I hope we decide there are better and cheaper ways to discuss carbon. At least there are some important questions we need to answer.

What will this number of windmills do to our tourism industry? Will 10 million visitors who come a year to enjoy the Great Smoky Mountains really want to come to see ridge tops with flashing red lights and 100- yard tall windmills? What happens to electric rates when the Federal subsidy disappears in a few years? Who will take down these massive structures if we decide we do not like them or if they do not work? Who is making the money on all of this, and why are some European countries who pioneered wind farms now slowing down or even stopping their construction in some places?

Clearly, there are likely to be more sensible ways to provide clean energy than spending $3.7 billion of taxpayer money over the next 5 years to destroy the American landscape. For example, $3.7 billion would provide enough money to give 185,000 Americans a $2,000 subsidy to buy a hybrid or a clean diesel vehicle, which would be about double the number of hybrid cars expected to be sold in the United States during this year. Hybrid cars burn about 60 percent of the amount of gasoline that conventional cars burn. Or $3.7 billion would provide enough money for loan guarantees to help launch a dozen new clean coal gasification plants and help transform the marketplace with new technology for clean American-produced energy that would lower natural gas prices and reduce our dependence on foreign oil. For $3.7 billion, we could provide loan guarantees for at least half a dozen new technology nuclear powerplants and have a billion dollars left over for research and development on the recapture of carbon that might be produced by coal plants or to encourage conservation prices.

Just by way of comparison, a nuclear powerplant such as the Tennessee Valley Authority's Sequoayah nuclear plant would produce about the same amount of energy as the windmills, which a renewable portfolio standard and the tax subsidy would build in Tennessee. The electricity would be available even when the wind was not blowing. So while we are debating the wisdom of wind policies over the next several weeks, these massive turbines are being built across America, 6,700 of them so far, 29 of them in Tennessee.

The Tennessee Valley Authority recently announced it had signed a 20- year contract with a group of investors from Chicago to build 18 huge windmills atop a 3,300-foot ridge on Buffalo Mountain in east Tennessee. So the purpose of our legislation being offered today is to give citizens the opportunity to have some say in where these massive structures are located in their communities and to make sure that the Congress does not subsidize the destruction of the American landscape near our national parks or other highly scenic areas or build such tall structures dangerously close to our military bases.

First, the bill ensures that local authorities are notified and have a role in the approval of new windmills to be built in their areas of jurisdiction. This means that at the same time a proposed windmill is filed with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, FERC would notify the local authority with zoning jurisdiction. Under this bill, within 120 days, local authorities may support or oppose the project. If they support it, the windmill may qualify for FERC marketbased rates--that means allowed to charge wholesale prices--and may be exempt from a series of regulations that restrict the operations of public utilities. If local authorities oppose the windmill, it may still go forward but subject to regulations--we call them PUCHA--and unable to charge wholesale rates or issue a qualified rate schedule. If no action is taken by the local authority, the FERC process would proceed as though the authority were in support.

I believe it is crucial that local authorities have a chance to consider the impact of such massive new structures before dozens or hundreds of them begin to be built in their communities. In many other instances involving the location of facilities generating power, State and local governments have developed laws giving citizens an opportunity to comment or even stop the location of facilities they do not want. Our legislation gives communities that do not have such laws the chance to do just that, and then this legislation sunsets or expires in 7 years.

The second thing our legislation would do is provide protection to highly scenic areas and at military bases. I do not think we want to see hundreds of windmills in the Grand Canyon or just outside the Grand Canyon or in the foothills of the Great Smokies or when we go to see the Grand Tetons. There are plenty of places we do not want to see that. This makes sure it does not happen. It does so by eliminating tax subsidies for any windmills within 20 miles of a world heritage area, which includes many national parks, and within 20 miles of military bases or offshore.

Under the bill, placement of a windmill within 20 miles of such a site shall also require the completion of an environmental impact statement. Further, any windmill that is to be constructed within 20 miles of a neighboring State's border may be vetoed by that neighboring State. In other words, if the neighboring State can see it and does not want it, they can veto it.

I used the same kind of analogy when I introduced legislation to allow offshore drilling since offshore drilling can be put so far off sight that one does not need to see it. If Virginia wants to do it and North Carolina can see it and they do not like it, they can veto it. I believe the same thing should apply to these massive windmills.

I believe that during our debates, we will find that there are better ways to produce a low-cost reliable supply of American energy than by spending $3.7 billion over the next 5 years, requiring power companies to produce energy from giant windmills that raise electric rates, only work when the wind blows, and destroy the American landscape.

The legislation that Senator Johnson and I have introduced, the Natural Gas Price Reduction Act of 2005, includes support for aggressive conservation, new clean coal gas plants, new supplies of domestic natural gas, and, for the time being, easier import of liquefied natural gas. We did this because natural gas is at $7 a unit around the world, and that needs to change. In the USA, it is the highest priced gas anywhere in the industrial world. The chemical plants in Oklahoma, Colorado and Tennessee will find it likely that they will be moving their jobs to other parts of the world where the price of natural gas is not so high.

(Mr. ALLARD assumed the Chair.)

I believe there is an important place in our energy bill for renewable fuels such as ethanol, and I believe there is an important place for renewable energy sources. For example, the legislation Senator Johnson and I introduced a few weeks ago would increase from 10 percent to 30 percent the tax credit for commercial investments in solar technology that generates electricity, heats or cools a structure, uses fiber optics, and illuminates a building or provides solar process heat. It provides a similar 30-percent tax credit for a solar system that heats a home. But it is important to keep in mind that, aside from wind, renewable energy can only provide about 3 percent of America's total energy needs over the next 20 years. I am excluding from that, also, hydro.

In the United States of America, the wholesale destruction of the American landscape is not an incidental concern. The great American outdoors is an essential part of the American character. Italy has its art, Egypt has its pyramids, England has its history, and we have the great American outdoors. In fact, the song ``America the Beautiful'' was written in Colorado, the State of the Presiding Officer. We care about that.

In my home County of Blount County, TN, my father and lots of other people worked at the Alcoa plant for many years to save money and buy a home. Where did they want to buy a home? They wanted to buy a home on streets that were named Mountain View, or Scenic Drive, because they loved to look at the Great Smoky Mountains.

While we debate the merits of so much subsidy and reliance on wind power, we should at the same time protect our national parks, our shorelines, and our other highly scenic areas. And we should give American citizens the opportunity to protect their communities and landscapes before it is too late.

I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I am here today to introduce, along with the Senator from Virginia, Mr. Warner, the Environmentally Responsible Wind Power Act of 2005.

The legislation that Senator Warner and I offer provides for local authorities to be notified and have a role in the approval of the signing of tens of thousand of massive wind turbines that will be built in America under current policies. It also ensures that the Federal Government does not subsidize the building of these windmills, which are usually taller than a football field is long, within 20 miles of a military base or a highly scenic location, such as a national park or offshore.

Senator Warner and I introduce our legislation today because next week the Senate Energy Committee is scheduled to begin markup on one of the most important pieces of legislation in this session, an energy bill. The Energy Committee's work, combined with the work of the Environment and Public Works Committee, which the distinguished occupant of the chair chairs, and the Finance Committee should this year produce a Clean Energy bill that will, over time, lower prices of natural gas and oil and reduce our dependence on overseas oil. This will be legislation for American blue-collar workers, for farmers, and for homeowners. It is urgently needed.

Natural gas prices are the highest in the industrialized world. Gasoline prices are at record levels. We cannot keep our jobs and our standard of living if we do not put in place policies that will provide our country with new steps toward conservation and an adequate supply of low-cost, reliable, clean American produced energy. Senator Warner and I both intend to be in the middle of this discussion. He is a senior member of the Environment and Public Works committee. I am chairman of the Energy Subcommittee.

I am grateful for, and I am greatly encouraged by, the leadership of the Energy Committee chairman Senator Domenici, and the ranking Democrat, Senator Bingaman, and the committee staff who have worked especially hard to create a framework for a more aggressive bipartisan piece of legislation than we were able to produce last year.

One part of our energy debate will be about wind power, which is the subject of the legislation that Senator Warner and I offer today. We are introducing this because several of our colleagues have proposed something called a renewable portfolio standard, or RPS, which would require power companies to produce 10 percent of all their electricity from renewable sources by 2025. These renewable sources are wind, hydro, solar, geothermal, and biomass. Today, these renewable sources produce about 9 percent of U.S. electricity needs.

This RPS is not to be confused with the renewable fuel standard which is a different sort of requirement, one that gasoline contain a certain percentage of ethanol. That matter is the subject for the jurisdiction of another committee. A renewable fuel standard is entirely different from a renewable portfolio standard and may well be part of the final legislation.

It is important for our colleagues to know that a renewable portfolio standard, or RPS, is all about wind. There are limited opportunities to build new dams today in order to expand hydropower, and hydro produces 7 of the 9 percent of renewable power that we have in America today. Of the remaining 2 percent of our electricity that is produced by other renewable sources, current subsidies are not enough to increase solar power by very much.

More research and development is needed to make biomass more efficient, and there is a limited amount of geothermal power that is drawing power from water that is heated underground, which leaves wind power. Experts agree that the bottom line is that a requirement that electric companies produce 10 percent of their electricity from renewable energy, if it could be achieved at all, would mean about 70 percent of the increase would come from wind. In other words, we would go from producing about 1 percent of America's electricity from wind to about 7 or 8 percent.

Testimony before our Energy Committee and most other sources suggest that to produce this much wind energy in the United States could require building more than 100,000 new massive wind turbines. We have less than 7,000 such windmills in the United States today, with the largest number in Texas and California. Testimony before our committee also indicated that even without the RPS, if Congress continues its generous subsidy for wind production for the next 10 years-- it will guarantee that we have these 100,000 windmills or more by the year 2025. According to the Treasury Department, this wind subsidy, if renewed each year for the next 5 years, would reimburse wind investors for 25 percent of the cost of wind production and cost taxpayers $3.7 billion over those 5 years.

I'm told that General Electric Wind, one of the largest manufacturers of wind turbines, has experienced a 500-percent growth in its wind business this year due to the renewal of the wind production tax credit last year.

I want to make sure my colleagues know that there are serious questions about how much relying on wind power will raise the cost of electricity, questions about whether there are better ways to spend $3.7 billion in support of clean energy, and questions about whether wind even produces the amount of energy that it is claimed to produce.

My studies suggest that at a time when America needs large amounts of low-cost reliable power, wind produces puny amounts of high-cost unreliable power. We need lower prices. Wind power production raises prices. We will have an opportunity in our debates and further hearings to examine these questions.

The legislation Senator Warner and I offer today is about a different question: the siting or location of 100,000 of these massive machines. Now, the idea of windmills conjures up pleasant images in Tennessee and, I am sure, in Oklahoma, of Holland and tulips, images of rural America with windmill blades turning slowly, pumping water at the farm well.

My grandparents had such a windmill at their well pump. That was back before rural electrification. The windmills we are talking about today are not our grandmother's windmills. Each one of these windmills is typically 100 yards tall, two stories taller than the Statue of Liberty, taller than a football field is long. These windmills are wider than a 747 jumbo jet. Their rotor blades turn at 100 miles per hour. These towers and their flashing red lights can be seen from more than 25 miles away. Their noise can be heard for up to a half a mile away. It is a thumping and swishing sound. It has been described by residents who are unhappy with the noise as sounding like a brick wrapped in a towel tumbling in a clothes dryer on a perpetual basis.

These windmills produce very little power since, of course, they only operate when the wind blows enough or when it does not blow too much. So they are usually placed in large wind farms covering huge amounts of land.

This is an example of what they look like. In comparison, we often worry about offshore drilling for oil and gas. In fact, Senator Johnson and I have introduced legislation that would permit States to expand the use of offshore oil and gas. Offshore oil and gas rigs can be placed far out to sea, where nobody on shore can see them. Compare that with the power produced by today's massive wind turbines. It would take 46 square miles of these windmills spread across the landscape to equal one oil or gas rig that one could not see.

As an example, the Congress ordered electric companies to build 10 percent of their power from renewable energy which, as we have said, has to be mostly wind. If we renew the current subsidy each year, by the year 2025 my State of Tennessee would have about 1,700 of these windmills, which would cover land almost two times the size of the city of Knoxville, TN. If Virginia, Senator Warner's State, were to produce 10 percent of its power from wind by 2025 and the subsidies continue, it would probably need more than 1,700 windmills. These windmills would take up enough land to equal the land mass of three cities the size of Richmond, VA. In North Carolina, to supply 10 percent of the electricity from wind, it would take almost the land mass of the Research Triangle, the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area. According to testimony before our committee, in Tennessee and Virginia these windmills would work best and perhaps work only at all along the ridge tops.

So this is what things might be looking like. This is a picture of the Grand Canyon in the West, but we can imagine what it might look like in the East. If our present policies on wind are continued, we could expect to see hundreds

of football-field sized towers as wide as jumbo jets with flashing red lights atop the Blue Ridges of Virginia, above the Shenandoah Valley, along the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, on top of Signal Mountain, on top of Lookout Mountain and Roan Mountain in Tennessee, and down the Tennessee River gorge which the city of Chattanooga has just spent 25 years protecting, and now it calls itself the scenic city.

I hope we decide there are better ways to provide clean energy than to spend $3.7 billion of taxpayer dollars over the next 5 years on windmills. I hope we decide we need a real national energy policy instead of a national windmill policy. I hope we decide there are better and cheaper ways to discuss carbon. At least there are some important questions we need to answer.

What will this number of windmills do to our tourism industry? Will 10 million visitors who come a year to enjoy the Great Smoky Mountains really want to come to see ridge tops with flashing red lights and 100- yard tall windmills? What happens to electric rates when the Federal subsidy disappears in a few years? Who will take down these massive structures if we decide we do not like them or if they do not work? Who is making the money on all of this, and why are some European countries who pioneered wind farms now slowing down or even stopping their construction in some places?

Clearly, there are likely to be more sensible ways to provide clean energy than spending $3.7 billion of taxpayer money over the next 5 years to destroy the American landscape. For example, $3.7 billion would provide enough money to give 185,000 Americans a $2,000 subsidy to buy a hybrid or a clean diesel vehicle, which would be about double the number of hybrid cars expected to be sold in the United States during this year. Hybrid cars burn about 60 percent of the amount of gasoline that conventional cars burn. Or $3.7 billion would provide enough money for loan guarantees to help launch a dozen new clean coal gasification plants and help transform the marketplace with new technology for clean American-produced energy that would lower natural gas prices and reduce our dependence on foreign oil. For $3.7 billion, we could provide loan guarantees for at least half a dozen new technology nuclear powerplants and have a billion dollars left over for research and development on the recapture of carbon that might be produced by coal plants or to encourage conservation prices.

Just by way of comparison, a nuclear powerplant such as the Tennessee Valley Authority's Sequoayah nuclear plant would produce about the same amount of energy as the windmills, which a renewable portfolio standard and the tax subsidy would build in Tennessee. The electricity would be available even when the wind was not blowing. So while we are debating the wisdom of wind policies over the next several weeks, these massive turbines are being built across America, 6,700 of them so far, 29 of them in Tennessee.

The Tennessee Valley Authority recently announced it had signed a 20- year contract with a group of investors from Chicago to build 18 huge windmills atop a 3,300-foot ridge on Buffalo Mountain in east Tennessee. So the purpose of our legislation being offered today is to give citizens the opportunity to have some say in where these massive structures are located in their communities and to make sure that the Congress does not subsidize the destruction of the American landscape near our national parks or other highly scenic areas or build such tall structures dangerously close to our military bases.

First, the bill ensures that local authorities are notified and have a role in the approval of new windmills to be built in their areas of jurisdiction. This means that at the same time a proposed windmill is filed with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, FERC would notify the local authority with zoning jurisdiction. Under this bill, within 120 days, local authorities may support or oppose the project. If they support it, the windmill may qualify for FERC marketbased rates--that means allowed to charge wholesale prices--and may be exempt from a series of regulations that restrict the operations of public utilities. If local authorities oppose the windmill, it may still go forward but subject to regulations--we call them PUCHA--and unable to charge wholesale rates or issue a qualified rate schedule. If no action is taken by the local authority, the FERC process would proceed as though the authority were in support.

I believe it is crucial that local authorities have a chance to consider the impact of such massive new structures before dozens or hundreds of them begin to be built in their communities. In many other instances involving the location of facilities generating power, State and local governments have developed laws giving citizens an opportunity to comment or even stop the location of facilities they do not want. Our legislation gives communities that do not have such laws the chance to do just that, and then this legislation sunsets or expires in 7 years.

The second thing our legislation would do is provide protection to highly scenic areas and at military bases. I do not think we want to see hundreds of windmills in the Grand Canyon or just outside the Grand Canyon or in the foothills of the Great Smokies or when we go to see the Grand Tetons. There are plenty of places we do not want to see that. This makes sure it does not happen. It does so by eliminating tax subsidies for any windmills within 20 miles of a world heritage area, which includes many national parks, and within 20 miles of military bases or offshore.

Under the bill, placement of a windmill within 20 miles of such a site shall also require the completion of an environmental impact statement. Further, any windmill that is to be constructed within 20 miles of a neighboring State's border may be vetoed by that neighboring State. In other words, if the neighboring State can see it and does not want it, they can veto it.

I used the same kind of analogy when I introduced legislation to allow offshore drilling since offshore drilling can be put so far off sight that one does not need to see it. If Virginia wants to do it and North Carolina can see it and they do not like it, they can veto it. I believe the same thing should apply to these massive windmills.

I believe that during our debates, we will find that there are better ways to produce a low-cost reliable supply of American energy than by spending $3.7 billion over the next 5 years, requiring power companies to produce energy from giant windmills that raise electric rates, only work when the wind blows, and destroy the American landscape.

The legislation that Senator Johnson and I have introduced, the Natural Gas Price Reduction Act of 2005, includes support for aggressive conservation, new clean coal gas plants, new supplies of domestic natural gas, and, for the time being, easier import of liquefied natural gas. We did this because natural gas is at $7 a unit around the world, and that needs to change. In the USA, it is the highest priced gas anywhere in the industrial world. The chemical plants in Oklahoma, Colorado and Tennessee will find it likely that they will be moving their jobs to other parts of the world where the price of natural gas is not so high.

(Mr. ALLARD assumed the Chair.)

I believe there is an important place in our energy bill for renewable fuels such as ethanol, and I believe there is an important place for renewable energy sources. For example, the legislation Senator Johnson and I introduced a few weeks ago would increase from 10 percent to 30 percent the tax credit for commercial investments in solar technology that generates electricity, heats or cools a structure, uses fiber optics, and illuminates a building or provides solar process heat. It provides a similar 30-percent tax credit for a solar system that heats a home. But it is important to keep in mind that, aside from wind, renewable energy can only provide about 3 percent of America's total energy needs over the next 20 years. I am excluding from that, also, hydro.

In the United States of America, the wholesale destruction of the American landscape is not an incidental concern. The great American outdoors is an essential part of the American character. Italy has its art, Egypt has its pyramids, England has its history, and we have the great American outdoors. In fact, the song ``America the Beautiful'' was written in Colorado, the State of the Presiding Officer. We care about that.

In my home County of Blount County, TN, my father and lots of other people worked at the Alcoa plant for many years to save money and buy a home. Where did they want to buy a home? They wanted to buy a home on streets that were named Mountain View, or Scenic Drive, because they loved to look at the Great Smoky Mountains.

While we debate the merits of so much subsidy and reliance on wind power, we should at the same time protect our national parks, our shorelines, and our other highly scenic areas. And we should give American citizens the opportunity to protect their communities and landscapes before it is too late.

I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, during World War I and II, Native Americans heard the call of their Country and enlisted in the United States Armed Services in unprecedented numbers. Many of these brave men performed the role of code talkers, using a code language derived from a variety of American Indian languages to ensure secure and rapid communication of information on the battlefield. Through three wars and five decades, enemy forces were never able to break the United States code language thanks to the service and ingenuity of Native American Code Talkers. These patriots provided an invaluable service to the United States and our allies and deserve recognition for their bravery.

Until 1968, information related to the code talker's activities during both World Wars remained classified by the Department of Defense. The postponement in learning about the essential role of Native American Code Talkers has resulted in delayed recognition of these war heroes. The first step in recognizing these men came in 2000 when President Bush signed into law legislation authorizing Congress to award gold medals to the twenty-nine Navajo Code Talkers as well as a silver medal to each man who later qualified as a Navajo Code Talker. While this legislation was a step in the right direction, it failed to recognize a number of Native Americans who also served as code talkers but were not members of the Navajo Nation.

During the first World War, Choctaw code talkers served with distinction in France. By transmitting in their native tongue a variety of open voice messages relating to unit movements, United States forces completely surprised the enemy during battle. Following the success of the Choctaw code talkers, soldiers from the Navajo, Sioux, Comanche and Meskwaki tribes, along with members of 14 other tribes, served as code talkers in some of the most dangerous operations in both theaters of World War II.

Today I introduce the Code Talkers Recognition Act to honor those who were overlooked when medals were awarded to the Navajo Code Talkers in 2001. This bill authorizes the presentation of commemorative medals on behalf of Congress to Native Americans who served as Code Talkers during any foreign conflict in which the United States was involved during the 20th Century. I ask my colleagues to help honor the heroic contributions of these gentlemen by cosponsoring this bill.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I be allowed to speak in morning business for up to 15 minutes.

I thank the Senator from Oklahoma for assuming the Chair, and I congratulate him for the progress on the highway bill. He has been working on the bill ever since I have been in the Senate. It looks like it is ready to be passed.

THE PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Tennessee is recognized.

I thank the Chair.

(The remarks of Mr. Alexander pertaining to the introduction of S. 1034 are printed in today's Record under ``Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions.'')

Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Armed Services be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Friday, May 13, 2005 at 9:30

a.m. in closed session to mark up the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2006.