Floor Statements

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of S. Res. 857, submitted earlier today.

I ask unanimous consent that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and that the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of Calendar No. 442, S. 4052.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the committee-reported substitute amendment be considered and agreed to and that the bill, as amended, be considered read a third time.

I know of no further debate on the bill, as amended.

I ask that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of Calendar No. 443, H.R. 1193.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the committee-reported substitute amendment be withdrawn; that the McConnell substitute amendment at the desk be agreed to; that the bill, as amended, be considered read a third time and passed; and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it adjourn until 3 p.m., Monday, December 5, and that following the prayer and pledge, the morning hour be deemed expired, the Journal of proceedings be approved to date, the time for the two leaders be reserved for their use later in the day, and morning business be closed; that upon the conclusion of morning business, the Senate proceed to executive session to resume consideration of the Behm nomination; further, that if any nominations are confirmed during Monday's session, the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table and the President be immediately notified of the Senate's action.

Madam President, if there is no further business to come before the Senate, I ask that it stand adjourned under the previous order.

Mr. President, I rise today to discuss the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act. I want to talk about essentially three big issues: the importance of the bill, what is in the bill, and the cost of the bill.

The first question is--and when I used to appear before the Maine Legislature, the first question always was: Why are you here? What is the problem?

Why is this bill so important? It is important because the essence of our defense policy since World War II has been deterrence, and deterrence means maintaining the capacity to inflict unacceptable costs on any potential adversary and the will to impose those costs if necessary.

What we are really talking about in the Defense Authorization Act is the capacity; that is, what is it that we have at our disposal that can impose costs on our potential adversaries such that they will refrain from aggression and initiating a conflict--a conflict which, in this day and age, would be catastrophic.

Why do we have a defense bill? Why do we have a defense establishment? Why do we have ships and airplanes and space capability? In order to deter possible aggression.

Why is this important?

I am just finishing a book by William L. Shirer called ``The Collapse of the Third Republic.'' Everyone knows Shirer's great book ``The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.'' This is a subsequent book that he wrote in the late sixties about the French Republic and the relationship between France and England to Germany in the early days leading up to World War II. The central message or rather one of the central messages of the book was that the failure of France and Germany to deter and meet the aggression of Hitler early in the period leading up to World War II, as early as 1936, led to the conflagration of World War II.

I would urge anyone who questions this assumption to Google: Rhineland, 1936; Sudetenland, 1938. Those were places where Hitler could have been stopped, and not with an enormous expenditure or investment of troops or materiel, but by an almost token resistance from the Western European powers, which they utterly failed to do. Then we had the rearmament of the Rhineland; the takeover of the Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia; and, of

course, in September of 1939, the invasion of Poland, leading to World War II, where 55 million people were lost.

Shirer makes the point and most historians make the point that this was avoidable. Had Hitler been confronted early, before he completely rebuilt the Nazi war machine, World War II could have been avoided, and all of those tremendous losses in this country and around the world would have never happened.

Deterrence is also a key to nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons haven't been used in a confrontation or a conflict since 1945. Why? Because of the concept of deterrence. That those other countries--and there are other countries that have nuclear weapons--realize that if nuclear weapons are used, they will pay an enormous and unacceptable price. That has been the policy of this country for over 70 years, and it has worked. It has worked. But it only works as long as the adversary believes that we do, in fact, have the capacity to inflict that kind of punishment.

Deterrence is a matter of credibility. You have to have a credible deterrent in terms of the actual capacity, and you also have to be credible in terms of your will to use it. Indeed, at this point in our history, we are talking about deterring the potential use of nuclear weapons in regard to the Ukraine conflict by Vladimir Putin.

Deterrence means that capacity has to be credible. And the problem is, here in this country, we have allowed our nuclear deterrent to deteriorate and age to the point where we are having to, in effect, rebuild it, not from scratch but rebuild it substantially. And all at the same time, the triad: bombers, missiles, and submarines. We have to rebuild them, and it is happening at the same time, and it is expensive. It is because this work was deferred for the prior 25 or 30 years that we are now having to do all three legs of the triad at one time, which adds substantially to the defense budget, but it is necessary in order to maintain the deterrent that keeps the peace.

I have many friends in Maine who come up to me and say: ``Why are we spending so much? Why are we building nuclear weapons? Let's get rid of them.''

The problem is, aggression and evil exist in the world--always have, as far as we can see; always will. The best war is the one that doesn't happen, and the most likely way to prevent war is for the potential adversary to know that the costs imposed upon them will be unacceptable.

People also come up to me and say: Why are we providing this money to Ukraine?

I don't get a lot of this, but occasionally people say: Why send money to Ukraine? We need that money here at home.

That is when I always say: Google Rhineland, 1936; Sudetenland, 1938. Because Putin has told us who he is. He has told us that he feels the greatest tragedy of the 20th century was the dissolution of the Soviet Union. He wants to rebuild the Soviet Union. Ukraine is the first piece. I don't think there is any doubt that, if he was allowed to just march in and take over Ukraine in a matter of weeks without any significant resistance, the next irritant for him would be the Baltics and then Hungary, Moldova, Slovakia, and Poland.

Maya Angelou said if someone tells you who they are, you should believe them. Putin has told us who he is. He wants to rebuild the Soviet Union. That is why Ukraine is so important. That is why what we have done, what we have provided, and the leadership this administration and our country has provided to other countries in the world in order to resist that aggression is so important and critical-- critical to avoiding a much worse conflagration involving all of our countries down the road. That is why it is so important. When a dictator takes property, they are going to keep going, and that is why what we have done in Ukraine has been so critical and important.

Well, Putin has told us what he wants to do, and we have joined with the rest of the world and the incredibly brave and resourceful people of Ukraine to stop it. That has to be continued.

I am going to talk about cost in a few minutes, but one quick note on cost is that the only thing more expensive than maintaining a credible deterrent is war. Occasionally, you see a bumper sticker that says: You cannot prepare for war and avoid war at the same time. I believe that is actually wrong. The only way to avoid war is to be prepared. History is full of examples that that is the case, that aggressors look for weakness. They look for an opening. If they find none, they are going to pull back. That is the entire theory of our defense posture and the expenditures that we are making on behalf of the defense of this country and the free world.

So what is in the bill? It is a long bill. There is a lot in it, but a couple of highlights. First, there is a raise for the troops. There is more money for the people who are defending our country, which they deserve. In a time of inflation, they deserve a significant raise, and that is in the bill.

Another piece that is in the bill that I think is very important in terms of our veterans--and, of course, we are just coming out of the Veterans Day observance last weekend--is funding and attention in the Defense Department to the transition from Active-Duty service to veteran status. I believe that we should be spending as much or the Defense Department should be spending as much time, money, and effort on the transition out of the service as they spend on recruiting to bring people into the service.

The data is that the tragedy of suicide among our veterans is most acute in the first 2 or 3 years after separation, and that tells me that is where we should focus some additional attention. In fact, that is in this bill.

There is an enormous commitment to technology in this bill, to artificial intelligence, to quantum computing, to hypersonics, to cyber, which is the sort of frontline of the potential for aggression that is going on right now. There is a low-level cyber war going on right now. Just ask any business in America. I talked to a utility executive recently whose company is being attacked 3 million times a day, sometimes by State actors, sometimes by ordinary criminals or ransomware. But cyber is one of the most serious challenges we face, and, again, that is addressed in this bill.

Another thing that is addressed, as I mentioned, is upgrading the nuclear triad, not because we like building submarines or missiles but because we must have a credible deterrent, so that, particularly so those dictators in North Korea or other countries that have nuclear weapons will not be tempted to use them. They have to know that the price to be paid is unacceptable. There is also counter drug policy in the bill. All of those things are an important part of what this bill does for the country.

I want to digress for a moment on process. This bill is a prime example of the bipartisan process that ought to govern all of our proceedings here in this body and in the other body of government. And, indeed, over the last year, that has been the norm. Five of the six major bills passed in the last year in this body have been bipartisan, and that is the way it ought to be. And that is the way it is in the Armed Services Committee. This bill was reported out of the Armed Services Committee with a 23 to 3 bipartisan vote.

I keep a little running tally in the Armed Services Committee when it comes to amendments. And this year we had 433 amendments proposed going into the markup of the Defense Authorization Act. They were negotiated. They were withdrawn. They were modified. But we ended up with 44 amendment votes. Six were on a party-line basis--6 out of 44 were on a party-line basis. All the rest were bipartisan, either voice votes or rollcall votes that were bipartisan. That is the way this process works, and that is the way this bill has come to this body.

Now, let me talk a minute about cost. You often hear--and I hear it sometimes at home, sometimes down here--that we spend more on defense than the next 10 countries in the world combined. Yes, but no other country in the world has the global responsibility that we have. No other country in the world has the global role that we have; that has to look in all directions, not just one direction to one neighbor but in all directions. We have an enormous responsibility, whether we like it or not, as the most powerful country in the free world. And that means we have to support and defend freedom, democracy, the values that we have based

this country on. We have to be the first line of defense.

So the fact that we spend more than other countries, I don't think that is really the question. I think the real question should be: How much are we spending with regard to our overall economy and our Federal budget? I think that is a fair question. And the answer is pretty surprising to many people.

This is the percentage of national defense of Federal spending, in relation to total Federal spending, going back to 1952, 70 years ago. In 1952, during the Korean war--and by the way, it was as even higher during World War II, but in 1952, about 70 percent of the Federal budget was for defense.

As you can see, it trends down through the fifties and sixties and seventies. In 1987, it was 28 percent of the Federal budget. Today, it is 13 percent. It is at the lowest level it has been in 70 years as a percentage of the Federal budget.

I think that surprises most people. They think all we are doing is spending money on defense. As a percentage of the Federal budget, it is actually the lowest it has been in 70 years.

The other way to look at this, that I think is perhaps even more important, is the percentage of national defense spending of GDP, of our gross domestic product. That is really a fair measure. In other words, what part of our economy is devoted to defense spending?

Again, going back to 1952, it was around 14 percent--14 percent of our gross national product was spent on defense; 1987, 6 percent; today, 3 percent.

So people who argue that we are spending way too much on defense and why do you spend--they are looking at the raw dollars, but they really ought to be looking at how big a part of our economy are we devoting to defending this country and the freedom and values of the rest of the free world: 3 percent.

Now, should other countries be paying a reasonable share? Absolutely. And many of them are stepping up. We are seeing significant increases in defense expenditures on behalf of many of our NATO allies and other countries around the world because they realize they have a responsibility too. But I think this is really an enlightening way to look at this in terms of what does this bill really mean? How expensive is it? The answer to that question is, it is half as expensive as it was 35 years ago. And it is about 20 percent of where it was 70 years ago. Is it a lot of money? Absolutely. The question is, What is it for? What it is for is, preventing war.

As I think I said earlier, the only thing more expensive than maintaining an adequate deterrence is war itself. And that is what this bill is all about.

We have passed the National Defense Authorization Act every year for the past 62 years. I deeply hope and believe in the interest of this country, of our citizens, and of the entire free world we are going to do so again in the next month.

There is no more solemn responsibility we have. To go back to some of the first words of the Constitution, in order to ``provide for the common defense'' is one of the major functions--that is in the preamble, that is the overarching--``insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense.'' Those are part of the essential function of any government. It is our responsibility. I deeply hope in the next several weeks in this body we will meet that responsibility.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, today I wish to recognize the outstanding career of Jaci Holmes and congratulate her on a well- deserved retirement from the Maine Department of Education. For nearly 35 years, Jaci dedicated herself to advocating for Maine children and ensuring that their educational needs are not only met, but surpassed.

Jaci started her career in education as a kindergarten and first grade teacher where she quickly saw the importance of providing strong educations from the beginning of childhood. This passion and understanding brought her to Westbrook College in Portland, ME, where she chaired the early childhood education department for 7 years and used her experience in the classroom to help others to become educators themselves. Her passion for education, particularly early childhood education, only grew as she joined the Maine Department of Education-- DOE--in 1989.

At the DOE, Jaci has served under five Governors and 13 Maine DOE commissioners--a remarkable feat that is a testament to her dedication to education and Maine's children. Her time at the department included tenures in several senior roles, including 12 years as the director of the child development services system and most recently as the Federal and State legislative liaison since 2000.

In these positions, Jaci played an instrumental role in shaping two decades of State and Federal education legislation. Her guiding hand can be seen throughout many of the most meaningful modernizations of the way students learn and are supported. This legacy of extraordinary impact was epitomized by the key testimony she provided Congress on the reauthorization of the Federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act--IDEA. Thanks to her feedback, the IDEA was able to better meet the needs of Maine's children with disabilities.

During the pandemic, Jaci did what she has done throughout her entire career and stepped up to serve Maine's children. In the height of the COVID-19 crisis, she served on the elementary and secondary school emergency relief team and helped to oversee the distribution of the CARES Act funding to Maine schools.

Jaci's lifetime of public service is truly admirable, and I know that others will be inspired to carry on her work supporting Maine's next generation.

Jaci, your dedication and presence at the Maine DOE will be dearly missed and not soon forgotten. Thank you for all that you have done, and I hope that you will enjoy your retirement and some more time out on Casco Bay.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that my defense fellow, Dustin Mondloch, be granted floor privileges for the remainder of the 117th Congress.

I also ask unanimous consent that the following interns from my office be granted floor privileges for today's session: Mateus Voltolini, Timothy Ryan, Hayley Smith, and Colter Adams.

Mr. President, I rise today to honor the career one of Maine's most dedicated, respected leaders: Dana Connors. Dana is part of the fabric of Maine, and it is almost impossible to concisely recognize the impact he has had on our State.

Dana, a proud native of Aroostook County, started his career as a municipal manager in Presque Isle after graduating from the University of Maine. Here, he served as city manager for 16 years, where he built a reputation as an advocate for common sense, a consensus builder, and a good listener. His exceptional ability to put a fine point on issues and present a case for the greater good brought him to State government, where he served as Maine's Commissioner of the Department of Transportation under both a Democratic and Republican Governor--a true testament to his bipartisan values.

In the time I have known him, it has always been clear that Dana served the people, not any party. It is due to this unimpeachable dedication, that people have always trusted him implicitly. I am one of those people, and when I was lucky enough to serve as Governor of the great State of Maine, Dana was my first and only choice to be my transition director. Shortly after in 1994, he became president of the Maine State Chamber of Commerce, where he has served our business community admirably for nearly 30 years.

It is here at the chamber where perhaps he has left his largest legacy. There has never been a greater advocate for Maine's businesses, and his legacy will continue to echo throughout our State for generations. Because of Dana, thousands of Maine businesses have been able to thrive, employ hard- working Maine people, and make our State the greatest in the Nation.

While his retirement will undoubtably leave a large void in the business community, Dana has instilled the same work ethic and understanding of the needs of Maine businesses in his team. They will continue Dana's legacy and ensure the growing success of the State that Dana devoted his career to.

Dana has made the Maine State chamber a shining example of professionalism. His instincts--and his fashion sense--may be a hard act to follow, but his ability to lead always includes a path for others to succeed. Thank you, Dana, for your friendship, your leadership, and your dedication to public service. Maine is better for it.

Mr. President, Friday, September 16, 2022, marks the National Prisoners of War and Missing in Action Recognition Day. On this day, we join together to honor the brave men and women of our Armed Forces who have been prisoners of war and for those who remain missing in action, including the 477 Mainers still unaccounted for. This solemn day is a painful, important reminder of the sacrifices endured by servicemembers and the immense, incalculable loss and uncertainty borne by their families and communities. Let us renew our commitment to bring answers and closure to the loved ones of those missing in action and to care for all those who have endured the painful silence of these losses.

Today, I join people across Maine and our Nation in saying, ``You Are Not Forgotten.'' The phrase is reminder of our duty to leave no American servicemember or veteran behind, no matter where they may be. I stand humbled and grateful to those who answered the call of their Nation to protect our way of life. We also pay tribute to those who have been POW/MIA and have returned to their loved ones. We have a solemn obligation to take care of them and their families so that they can enjoy the freedoms they sacrificed for.

To the families who have lost their sons and daughters and to the comrades who have lost their friends and companions, know that today and every day we stand with you through your hardships and in honoring the selfless service of America's POW and MIA.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, this is going to be an unusual set of comments for me because I am going to start out with some personal history, which I hope will make sense in terms of what I want to address.

I started working in the alternative energy industry in 1983. When I say industry, it was, actually, a very small company developing small hydro projects in Maine and New England. We then worked on the development of biomass projects. We, later on, worked on wind power and then also on the development of large-scale conservation. So my professional life has largely been occupied with energy and particularly with renewable energy.

At the same time, I had a deep history in Maine in environmental matters. I represented the environmental community in Maine before the Maine Legislature, in the seventies, if you can believe that anybody around here was still doing things in the seventies. I also, as Governor, was very active in conservation matters and am proud to say that, during my 8 years as the Governor of Maine, we put aside and set into conservation and protection status more land than in the prior 175-year history of Maine combined. This has been a passion of mine, the protection of the environment, for my entire life--so the history of renewable energy development and also environmental advocacy.

I learned some lessons when I was working in the field of developing alternative or renewable energy. The most important lesson is that there is no free lunch when it comes to energy. There are always costs and benefits. There are always impacts that some people think are terrific and that other people think are not so good. There are always trade-offs.

In fact, I will never forget my going to hearings on hydro projects and having people come and object and saying: We like hydro but not on our river, not on this site, and, by the way, we don't really think you should be ruining the rivers. Why don't you go and do wind power?

Lo and behold, 20 years later, I worked in the area of wind development, of wind power, and people came to our hearings and said: We don't really need to spoil the view in our mountains. Do more hydro.

I am not making that up. I actually lived that sort of conflict.

The second lesson I learned is that you may have global goals with renewable energy but have local impacts, and you often have a controversy about a particular project.

The third thing I learned is that change is hard. Everybody is for progress. Nobody is for change. Change is difficult, whether it is for a local community, a State, or a nation.

The fourth thing: Permitting is hard. Getting permits for renewable energy projects was lengthy, time-consuming, and expensive. This was serious learning that I had during this period in that, if you want to develop even the most beneficial project, you are going to have to go through an often arduous permitting process, and somebody isn't going to like it. There always will be trade-offs.

These were sporadic, small projects. Indeed, in New England today-- and I just checked this morning--about 10 percent of our electricity comes from renewables. This is after almost 40 years of the development of these projects--about 10 percent. We are now talking about a transition in energy to a fully renewable future. Well, if you do the math, that means 10 times the amount of renewable energy development which we have done in the last 40 years, in the next 10 to 15 years. People have to understand that this is a major, major change that is going to require trade-offs. It is going to require us to make decisions and to understand--again, to go back to my basic premise-- that there is no free lunch.

We are now undertaking the largest and most far-reaching energy transition in human history. The transition to fossil fuels took about 150 years. Going back to around 1800, you can see the graphic goes up, but we really got into the real heart of the fossil fuel economy in the mid-20th century--150 years. We are talking about transitioning away from fossil fuels to renewables over 15 years--not 150 but 15.

We have to grasp that this is an enormous undertaking and that it is going to involve change. We are literally in a race with climate change. That is why it is going to have to happen in the next 10, 15, 20 years, because the consequences of not doing it are catastrophic, and we are already seeing that.

I think that we have reached a point at which most Americans realize that climate change is real. The fishermen in Maine know it. The loggers know it. The farmers know it. The people who work with the land and the sea and the atmosphere understand what is happening. They see it. The animals know it. They know what is happening, and that is why we have to make this transition. That is why it is so important that we make this transition, and it has got to be fast. We don't have time to do it over 150 years or even over 50 years. It is a huge change. It is going to involve dislocation, and it is going to involve trade-offs. That is really the question that I want to address today.

There is broad agreement, I believe, that we need change, that we need to develop responses to the global climate change crisis. There is certainly agreement in the environmental community as far as that question is concerned. There is nobody in the environmental community whom I know who doubts climate change or doubts the necessity of taking dramatic action to meet it. Climate change is as real as it gets, and we have to address it.

How do we address it? With nonfossil fuel electrification--fast. If we can do that, we can address the CO2. Really, what we are talking about is the emission of CO2. Is it a problem? Well, the average over the past million years of CO2 in the atmosphere is about 280 parts per million. It varies up and down.

People say: Oh, this is a natural cycle.

Yes, it varies up and down between 150 and 300 parts per million. It is now at about 420 parts per million. It has gone up 20 in the last 2 or 3 years. The last time we were over 400 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere the oceans were 60 feet higher. We are in unchartered territory in human history right now. We have to deal with it, and we have to deal with it in a hurry.

Where is all of that CO2 coming from? Well, here is a rough breakdown of the CO2 budget, if you will: About 30 percent comes from the generation of electricity--30, 35 percent. Another 30, 35 percent comes from transportation, the combustion of fossil fuels in vehicles. The last 30, 35 percent comes from space heat and industrial use. So that is the budget that we have to deal with. How do we tackle that? With electrification, with the electricity coming from renewable sources.

Now, if you have an electric vehicle and you are feeling really good about saving the environment, you are not saving the environment if the power for that electric vehicle comes from fossil fuels. You are saving the environment if the power for that electric vehicle comes from renewables. So that is what we are talking about, but there are problems with renewables.

Remember, I said I had worked in the wind power business. The wind doesn't blow all the time. The Sun doesn't shine all the time. The term is ``intermittency.'' That is the issue. That is the issue with renewables--intermittency--the fact that there has to be something to supply power when the Sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow.

The answer to that is storage. The real Green New Deal is energy storage. If we can solve that problem in a cost-effective way, then we really can have a realistic, all-renewable future, because what you have with energy storage, plus renewables, is essentially baseload power without CO2. That is really the direction that we are moving in.

However--and this is what I want to really stress--you can't be in favor of electrification; you can't be in favor of renewable power; you can't be in favor of electric vehicles if you are not in favor of mining the lithium that you need for the batteries or in covering a lot of farmers' fields with solar panels. You can't have those things without paying a price. It would be nice if you could.

I would love it if I could wave a wand and say: We are going to get rid of fossil fuels, and we are going to have an all-renewable future. Yes, I want that, but we have to recognize that, in order to get there, there are some things we have to do that heretofore we really haven't been very likely to like.

One of the other issues with renewable power is that a lot of the renewable power is in places where there aren't people. So we have to get that renewable power to the places where there are people.

Do you know what that means? Transmission, new transmission lines, new rights of way. People aren't going to be too crazy about that, but you can't have a renewable energy future without having transmission, and you can't have a renewable energy future without having batteries or some storage technology that, chances are, is going to require Earth minerals that you are going to have to mine.

Geography is a problem. Technology is a problem. This will require trade-offs. We have to keep in mind that we are talking about a global goal--we are talking about literally saving the Earth--but we have to understand that there are going to be costs to do so.

Let's talk about permitting.

One of my favorite stories is when God went to Moses and said: Moses, I have good news and bad news.

Moses said: God, give me the good news.

God says: I am going to empower you to part the waters of the Red Sea, allow my people to go free, and then

have the waters come back and inundate Pharaoh's army.

Moses says: That is wonderful, God. What is the bad news?

God says: You have to prepare the environmental impact statement.

We have got to understand that permitting is part of the process of going to a renewable future.

Now, when I was the Governor of Maine, I had a very clear policy: no diminution--no cutting, no cutting corners--of environmental standards, but I wanted the most timely and predictable environmental permitting process in the country, and I don't think that those two things are in any way mutually exclusive.

When I talk here and work with my colleagues here about permitting reform, I am talking--we are talking--about the process, not the standards. We are not talking about lowering the standards, saying that you can emit more or you don't have to meet clean water standards.

I sit at Edmund Muskie's desk in my office. Lightning would strike me if I were lowering the water quality or air quality standards, but we have got to talk about a process that is timely and predictable.

The estimates are that, to permit a mine in this country, it takes about 10 years--about 10 years. We don't have 10 years to spend on a permitting process if we are going to solve this problem in time to save the country and the planet. We have got to figure out how to do this in a more timely way. How are we going to do it? I don't know the details of the various discussions that are going on here, but I have some thoughts that I have suggested to Senator Manchin and others.

One is one-stop shopping. You shouldn't have to go to five different Agencies. Go to one Agency that is in charge of the permitting process, and let them lead it. Don't make the applicant go to five, six, seven different Agencies.

Secondly are deadlines--real deadlines, deadlines that mean something--so that the Agency, if it says 180 days, has got to have a decision in 180 days. Eisenhower retook Europe in 11 months. There is no reason that we can't get decisions out of some of these Agencies in less than a year. So deadlines and reasonable timeframes, I think, are part of this process, and an accelerated appeals process, where the appeal of an environmental decision on a renewable energy project, that is related to renewable energy, or that is related to our renewable energy future can go to the courts and get a fair hearing but on a timely basis and not go through a long process that takes, again, years.

Another suggestion I have--and this goes back to my experience of working on renewable energy projects--is there should be some credit given for the nature of the project that you are doing. In other words, if you are doing a project that is going to contribute to the solution of the problem of global climate change, you shouldn't be treated as a strip mall. Some weight should be given to the import and the value-- the environmental value--of the project, vis-a-vis the incidental environmental costs--and I could be criticized for using the word ``incidental,'' but the smaller environmental costs that may be involved in getting there. I think that has got to be how we approach this whole permitting question.

So why am I here today? I am here today to talk to my friends in the environmental community--and I do mean friends, people whom I have worked with all my life--to have them change the way they think about the environmental process and what they have conventionally and historically thought about this kind of action.

Historically, if you go back to the beginning of the environmental movement in the sixties and seventies--and Lord, help me, I was there-- the environmental movement was about stopping things. The environmental movement in Maine began with a proposed oil refinery on our coast. People wanted to stop it because they didn't think it was the appropriate place. But if you think about that, a lot of the environmental movement has been about stopping things, stopping projects, stopping highways, stopping whatever.

What we have to do now is think about facilitating getting things done in order to get to the renewable future that we want. I think that is a very, very important way to look at this process. You can't be for EVs if you are against mining lithium.

Let me give you just a couple of numbers on what I am talking about. Copper--remember, I talked about transmission. Copper, copper wires to transmit electricity, the estimate is--I want to be sure this is right. The estimate is we are going to need as much copper annually by 2050 as has been mined in the entire prior history of the world. In 1 year, we are going to need that much. The estimate is that in order to achieve our climate goals, we are going to have to triple--triple--the grid: the wires, the rights of way, the towers. The grid infrastructure has to be tripled in order to absorb the new and transmitted--distribute the new energy that is going to be needed. If you have electric vehicles, you are going to need more wires to get the power--that is going to be a huge increase; between doubling and tripling is the estimate--of the strength of the grid.

The International Energy Agency--not me and not some commercial group, but the International Energy Agency says that by 2040--that is not that long from now, barely over 15 years--we are going to need 42 times the amount of lithium that we have, 25 times more graphite, 21 times more cobalt, 19 times more nickel, and 7 times more rare-earth elements. Now, we have two choices: We can buy those things from other countries, particularly countries that may be potential adversaries. Do we really want to be dependent on China for this kind of essential material to our environmental future? I don't think so. But if we are going to say we don't want to import it, we have got to get it out of the ground here, and we can't spend 10 years deciding it. I am not saying lower the standards, but I am saying the process itself should not be used as a weapon to undermine projects that are necessary to achieve our ultimate climate goal.

This is a change. This is a change of thinking that is required by the reality that we face. I am here because I want to face that reality. I want to do something about climate change. I want to take the actions necessary, not token actions but the real deal. But it is going to involve these enormous commitments of time, effort, and money and also our understanding--particularly in the environmental community--that there is no free lunch.

On December 2, 1862, Abraham Lincoln came to this Congress to talk about the progress of the Civil War. His problem was that the Congress was being the Congress. They were doing politics, and he didn't feel they were really taking it seriously or understood the massive change that was sweeping over the country. At the end of that speech, the afternoon of December 2, 1862, Abraham Lincoln gave what I think is still the best analysis of how you deal with change that I have ever encountered, and I think it applies exactly in this situation. Lincoln said:

The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy

present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty,

[therefore] we must rise--with the occasion. As our case is

new, so we must think anew, and act anew.

And then here is the key line:

We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our

country.

``We must disenthrall ourselves and then we shall save our country.''

``Disenthrall'' means thinking new and different ways. Let go of the way you thought about these kinds of issues in the past. Disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our planet.

I yield the floor.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have the following article printed in the Record.

I ask that the scheduled vote occur immediately.

I ask for the yeas and nays.