Mr. President, I am delighted to follow on the floor the chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, who is now hastening for the exit before I can say nice things about him. I want to…
Mr. President, I am delighted to follow on the floor the chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, who is now hastening for the exit before I can say nice things about him. I want to say he represents Wyoming. We have a place called Wyoming in Delaware just south of Dover--Camden Wyoming--and I go there every week, just as he goes home to Wyoming every week.
His colleague from Wyoming is Mike Enzi, whom our new Presiding Officer, a former Governor, is well familiar with. Mike Enzi had something called the 80-20 rule, and the 80-20 rule goes something like this. I used to ask him: How do you get so much done with Ted Kennedy on the HELP Committee, that you now serve on, Mr. President, and he said: Ted and I agree on 80 percent of the stuff. We disagree on 20 percent of the stuff. He said: Ted and I focus on the 80 percent where we agree and we set aside the other 20 percent to another day.
So I want to just talk about the 80 percent Chairman Barrasso and I agree on and then maybe the 20 percent we can agree to disagree until another day. I appreciate your staying here, but you don't have to. I know you have better things to do than to listen to me.
Something that is being lost in this conversation is, at least to this point in time, there is a reason we have a policy that encourages people to buy electric-powered vehicles. There is a reason we have a tax policy and other policies to encourage people to buy fuel-celled powered vehicles that are fueled by hydrogen. The reason why is because we have way too much carbon dioxide in the air, and it is creating great challenges for these young pages who are sitting down here at your feet, Mr. President. They have a planet to worry about. I will be around for maybe 30 years or more, but I will not be here in the Senate, I assure you, for 30 years or more. They are going to be around here for, gosh, 70, 80, 90 years or more, and they have to worry about this planet, and we have to worry about this planet for them and for our own kids and, eventually, hopefully, for my wife and me, our grandchildren.
We want to make sure they have a planet to live on and to grow up on, and we have way too much carbon, and if we are not careful, it is going to continue to get worse rather than better.
Here recently, just in the last several months, we have had 13 Federal Agencies that have come together to say the situation is even more dire with respect to the threat of climate change, global warming, severe weather than we thought. A month or so before that, an arm, if you will, of the United Nations had a similar kind of report, and the forecast was equally daunting and really frightening.
So the reason we are trying to encourage people to buy electric- powered vehicles and to buy hydrogen-powered vehicles is to reduce carbon in the air.
Why do we care about cars, trucks, vans, and their emissions? The largest source of carbon emissions in this country today is not coal- fired utility plants. It is not cement plants. It is not our buildings. It is our vehicles, our mobile sources, and so that is why we focus on these issues.
The question of whether we need tax incentives forever, permanently, for electric vehicles, I think you can argue we probably don't. The battery technology in this country and this world is getting better and better.
I just want to say to the Presiding Officer who was from Massachusetts and was the Governor there for a number of years, there is a company there--and I think they are still in the Cambridge area-- A123 battery, and they are one of the earlier pioneers in battery technology for vehicles and others.
My son actually was offered an internship there when he was at MIT one summer. So we have been interested in this industry for quite some time.
I go to the Detroit Auto Show just about every year. People ask: Why do you go to the Detroit Auto Show? Up until about 6, 7, 8 years ago, Delaware built more cars, trucks, and vans per capita than any State in the Nation. Think about that. More cars, trucks, and vans per capita than any State in the Nation.
We had a Chrysler plant at one time--4,000 employees in Newark, DE, near the University of Delaware. We had a GM plant--4,000 employees at one time,--very close to Wilmington, DE. We lost them both, like that, at the bottom of the great recession when Chrysler and GM went into bankruptcy, which was a huge blow to the economy of a small State, as you can imagine.
The reason I used to go to the auto show all the time in Detroit was so I would know whoever was running GM, I would know who was running Chrysler, so that if they ever thought about closing our plants, we would have somebody to call and to go see and say: You don't want to do that. We lost them both at the bottom of the great recession.
The reason I tell that story is to explain why I have an interest in the Detroit Auto Show. Eleven years ago at the Detroit Auto Show, at the beginning of the auto show on Monday--it is about a 5-day event-- they have what they call the reveals, and they show all the new cars and the concept cars and everything, all the new technology. Eleven years ago, the car of the year was a Chevrolet Volt, V-o-l-t. The Chevrolet Volt is a classic hybrid. You get about 38 miles per gallon on a charge, and then it ran on gasoline for the rest of maybe 300 miles. That was the car of the year, and they sold a number of them but not huge numbers--not huge numbers.
Ten years later, about a year ago, the car of the year was the Chevrolet Bolt, B-o-l-t. The Chevrolet Bolt is a classic electric vehicle, and it gets about 140 miles--or it did at the time when it was debuted--about 140 miles on a charge, and now more than that, I think.
When I was at the Detroit Auto Show last month, we saw electric- powered vehicles from American car companies, Korean car companies, Chinese companies that get up to 250 miles per charge--250 miles per charge. That is encouraging. What it is going to do is encourage a lot of people who hadn't even thought about buying them to do that.
One of the reasons folks are still reluctant to buy them is because when you drive around the country and you have your electric vehicle or a hydrogen-powered vehicle for a fuel cell, when you are driving around, you need a place to refuel and to recharge, and you can't take the time--well, I have 6 hours to recharge my battery. People don't want to do that. They might be willing to spend 30 minutes to do that and grab something to eat, but they want to be able to recharge their batteries conveniently. They may want to refuel with hydrogen conveniently, but we don't have nearly enough places around the country. We are trying to create new corridors, densely populated corridors, places to recharge batteries and to refuel hydrogen tanks, but we have a lot of work left to do.
So you put that in sort of the mix. I think not just as Americans but as inhabitants of this planet we want to reduce carbon emissions from the largest source of carbon emissions on our planet--mobile sources.
Among the incentives for that right now--I am looking for a new car.
In my minivan, my Chrysler Town & Country, which I bought the year I stepped down as Governor, I just went over 498,000 miles this week. I promised my wife that I would buy a new vehicle when this one went over one-half million miles. I want it to be an electric vehicle, and I want it to have a great distance between charges. I want to make sure we have a lot of charging stations around, not just in Delaware but all over the country, so I can refuel that baby when I save enough money to buy it.
We have this tax credit in place for the first people who buy these cars, and then, basically, we need to make sure we have an investment tax credit around for a good while, and maybe phase it out over time, in order to encourage people and businesses and so forth--like Wawa, for example, and other gasoline stations--so they will be putting in their own money to put in those hydrogen fueling stations and the electric charging stations.
Why is this important? Here is why it is important. We used to measure our rainfall in the country by the inch; we now measure it by the foot. I was speaking with a farmer earlier today, and he told me that last year in Delaware we had twice as much rain as we normally have. They planted their crops in the spring. We raise a lot of soybeans and corn in Delaware. They planted a good crop in spring, and it was washed out. They came back after it dried out and planted a second crop again, and a couple weeks later, it got washed out from the rain, and again the third time. Finally, they just kind of gave up. They gave up, and that is not a good thing.
We had wildfires out in the great Northwest--Northern California, Oregon, Washington, Montana--this last year that were bigger than my State of Delaware.
Right here in Ellicott City, in Maryland, where they have--have you heard of the term ``100-year flood''? A 100-year flood is something that occurs about every 100 years. A 500-year flood is something you would expect to occur every 500 years. In Ellicott City, MD, in the last year or so, they had two 1,000-year floods. Think about that. These are floods that are supposed to occur every 1,000 years. They had two of them in 18 months. That is not good.
It is not just Ellicott City; it happens in other places as well. We have had more category 5 hurricanes than we have ever seen. I think the last 4 years have been the hottest 4 years on our planet. We know that climate change is happening, and this is real. We see the vestiges every day, and we need to do something about it and continue to do more about it going forward.
The good thing about it is, we can do more about it and create economic opportunity. We can reduce bad emissions from cars, trucks, and vans and create economic opportunities.
The auto industry in this country has basically let it be known that they would like to see the regulation put in place by the Obama administration about 3 years or so ago on fuel efficiency standards for cars, trucks, and vans. The auto industry says: You know, we would like to have some flexibility on those standards so that the monitor requirement gets more stringent going forward under the Obama regulation. Other companies have said they would like to have greater flexibility in the near term, maybe 2021 to 2025, and the Obama regulation was silent after the year 2025. They said: We would be willing to handle greater, more rigorous standards going forward after 2025, but give us flexibility in the near term.
I think that is not a bad idea. They say that if we will do that, they can avoid a lawsuit with California and 12 other States that want to make sure California and other States have the ability to set their own fuel efficiency mileage requirements.
The auto industry doesn't want to be involved in litigation with California or anybody else in the next 5 years. They ought to have certainty about the fuel efficiency standards their cars, trucks, and vans are going to have to meet in the years to come. The reason is that they need to make huge investments, and they need a long lead time for these investments. They are competing in an international marketplace against the rest of the world. The rest of the world is going to be willing to produce very efficient electric-powered and hydrogen-fueled cars, and they want to be able to compete with them.
So here is a situation where we can do good things for our planet-- clean our air with respect to climate change--and we can do good things for the auto companies.
(Mr. SCOTT of Florida assumed the Chair.)
I see our new Presiding Officer, who just slipped into his seat. He used to be a Governor, and he used to do a lot of customer calls in Florida. I have done a lot of customer calls in Delaware, asking my businesses three questions: How are you doing? How are we doing? What can we do to help?
When I ask the auto manufacturers what we can do to help, they say: Don't get rid of the electric vehicle credit. The idea of phasing it out over time might be OK--not overnight but over time
The other thing is to make sure we put in place investment tax credits for fueling stations for hydrogen and charging stations for electricity.
The current administration does not take the threat of climate change and severe weather as seriously as the rest of us. In my State we see it every day. Delaware--which, you know, may be 70,
80 miles to our east--is the second smallest State. I like to say it is the 49th largest State in America. But we are sinking, and the seas around us are rising. If you go down the east coast as far as Florida, you will find that in Florida, especially southern Florida, they have similar kinds of problems and concerns. This is real.
What should we do about it? Well, the current administration should not lead a fight, in my judgment, to get rid of the current regulations that I described earlier and put in its place a regulation that basically says there will be little to no increase in fuel efficiency standards as we go forward. I just don't think that is smart, and, in the auto industry, that is not what they are asking for. They are asking for near-term flexibility, longer term certainty, and more rigorous standards. They think that would be good for their bottom line, and they could sell more vehicles.
We had a committee hearing yesterday--actually a markup and business meeting in the Environment and Public Works Committee for the nomination of Andrew Wheeler to be the Administrator of the EPA. We haven't had a Senate-confirmed Administrator for just over--about 1 year, maybe a little more than 1 year.
Scott Pruitt was the first EPA Administrator for this administration--not a friend to the environment and someone who turned out, I think, to be ethically corrupt. He is gone, and Andrew Wheeler is the Acting Administrator; he was the assistant administrator. He has been nominated by the President to be the Administrator for the EPA.
I didn't realize this a couple months ago, but when somebody is in a position like this, when they are the assistant administrator--in this case the EPA--and the person who leaves as the Administrator leaves a vacancy, the President can appoint the assistant administrator as the Acting Administrator. It is kind of like a promotion but in an acting form. That is good for 210 days. Sometimes you may have a situation in which someone is not the assistant administrator of the EPA or an Agency but is just plucked out of the air by the President and plopped in as the Acting Administrator. That person doesn't have 210 days--a period in which they can stay there and do the job as Acting Administrator. Andrew Wheeler does. For all intents and purposes he will be the Administrator in an acting capacity for 210 days.
So we are saying to the administration, to our colleagues on the Environment and Public Works Committee, there is no real need to rush through the nomination until we resolve our differences in a couple of areas, and one of those areas deals with emissions from mobile sources, the greatest source of carbon in our air.
Another issue we have a lot of interest in--the automobile industry does; so does the utility industry; so does the Chamber of Commerce--is a regulation from the last administration that was actually promulgated in 2012. It is called MATS, mercury and air toxics standards. The mercury and toxics standards regulation, basically put in place in 2012, says to the utility industry: You have to reduce your emissions of mercury by 2050.
Why do we care about mercury emissions? Because if you are a pregnant woman and you ingest fish with large amounts of mercury, you may do serious damage to your unborn child. It can also do serious damage to the life of the woman, but the real concern is brain damage for unborn children because of high levels of ingestion of mercury by pregnant women of childbearing age.
We are not talking about something that affects 100 or 1,000 women a year. We are not talking about tens of thousands but literally hundreds of thousands of people who are at risk. So we have in place a MATS mercury and air toxics rule. It was adopted in 2012. The utility companies initially said: Well, we don't like that. We don't want to do that.
Guess what. They did--and at one-third of the cost they expected. It was implemented more quickly than they expected, and the health benefits are greater than they expected.
Now the utility industry, including the rural electric co-ops, including their trade association for utilities, chamber of commerce, National Association of Manufacturers, a whole host of environmental groups and clean air groups--everybody said: Well, we know this MATS rule, the mercury and air toxics rule we are familiar with, and we are complying with it. It is OK. Leave it alone.
The current administration wants to take some steps that would really undermine the ability to uphold that 2012 regulation in a court of law. They are saying they are not doing that, but actually that is the effect of what they are trying to do.
In order to move expeditiously on the nomination of Andrew Wheeler to be the Administrator of EPA, we want to make clear that the mercury and air toxics standards rule does not go away. We are going to comply with what the industry has asked us to do.
The third front I will mention is HFCs--we are really good with acronyms--hydrofluorocarbons. We have refrigerants, and we all have air conditioning in our cars and homes--most of us. We used to use perfluorocarbons in the cooling systems, in our refrigerator systems. They have created real problems for the environment and the atmosphere.
The follow-on product was called HFCs, hydrofluorocarbons. We found this was better for the atmosphere, better for the environment--but not great--and American companies, American technologies have come up with another product to replace HFC. That form of technology is American- owned, and American technology creates American jobs.
We need to adopt and pass a treaty in this country called the Kigali treaty, which makes it clear that the current HFCs, which are coolants for refrigerants, are still a problem, but they can be phased out, and this new technology by American companies can be phased in to take its place. This involves job creation in this country. We are not talking about a couple of hundred jobs; we are talking about thousands of jobs--good-paying jobs in this country, bringing economic value to American companies--not measured in millions of dollars but billions of dollars every year. It is there for us.
This is a situation in which American technology can do good things for our environment, for our atmosphere, for our air, and at the same time create jobs, American jobs using American technology.
I might mention one more, something called--and I just want to say that the EPA is standing in the way of the administration's submitting for our approval in the Senate this treaty called the Kigali treaty. Apparently, the State Department wants to submit the treaty for our consideration. The Commerce Department wants to submit the treaty for our administration, and the EPA is standing in the way. I don't really understand why, but before we move expeditiously on the nomination of Mr. Wheeler, the administration should say: OK, we are not messing with the treaty.
Most of the administration thinks they ought to submit it, and, frankly, so do the rest of us. It is one of those deals, again, that is good for environment, good for public health, creates jobs--win-win.
The last one I want to mention is PFOA. I wish I can tell you what it stands for, but it is a long name. One of the things we found out is that in places where we have military bases--where we have firefighting equipment for planes, air crashes and so forth, and we use that type of firefighting equipment--sometimes the water runs off the tarmac, off the runways and the parking areas, and it gets into groundwater and creates problems with our drinking water. These are substances that are known carcinogens, and we have seen in places around the country-- including places like West Virginia, where I was born, and North Carolina, where my wife is from--this is a real problem. We are not saying--nobody is saying, at least to my knowledge--that it ought to be completely banned. This family of elements, the PFAS and PFOA--we are not asking for a ban; we just want a clean water drinking standard established by the EPA. That is what we want in 2 years--not today, not tomorrow, but in 2 years, creating clean water so that people can be protected.
Those are four things we are asking for the administration to take action on and to make clear. To the extent it
does, we are then prepared to move forward on the nomination, right here, for Andrew Wheeler. My guess is, he will get confirmed, but I think it is important for us to address those particular issues.
At the end of the day, we will improve the quality of life for the people in our country. At the same time, we will create jobs. That is a great combination. It is a real win-win. We can seize the day and win on behalf of our young people and our not so young people. At the same time, we can create a lot of jobs and enhance economic activity. We ought to do that. If we do, the EPA will end up with an Administrator-- one who will be a lot better than the last one. Let's do that.
I thank the Presiding Officer.
I yield to my friend, the chairman of the Finance Committee, Senator Grassley.
