Floor Statements

Madam Speaker, today, with bipartisan support from 151 of my colleagues, I introduced the National Forest Roadless Area Conservation Act of 2009, which will protect 58.5 million acres of pristine wild forests by prohibiting new road construction and reconstruction and providing critical ecological protections. Roadless areas provide clean drinking water to over 60 million Americans, recreational opportunities, and undeveloped habitat for more than 600 threatened, endangered or sensitive plant and animal species. In Washington, 2,015,000 acres of roadless areas, almost 22 percent of our wildlands, are at stake. Washington State crown jewels, like Eagle Rock and Dark Divide, should be preserved for future generations. This legislation will codify the Clinton Administration's Roadless Area Conservation rule to protect these lands and move us closer to permanently protecting our nation's unique and invaluable wildlands.

In 2001, President Clinton issued the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, protecting 58.5 million acres of National Forest land (30 percent of all National Forest land) from new road construction. The Clinton Roadless Rule was the result of a two-year rulemaking process that included the most extensive public involvement process in federal rulemaking history. The U.S. Forest Service held more than 600 meetings, with more than 1.6 million Americans submitting comments to the plan, where my constituents and many other Americans voiced their overwhelming support for the rule.

While the Clinton Roadless Rule enjoyed enormous public support, the Bush Administration fought a multi-year battle to overturn it. In 2005, the Bush Administration issued a new roadless rule that removed protections and opened roadless areas up for further development. In addition, numerous lawsuits have tracked the roadless rule's course, both in favor and opposed. Recently, the 9th District court has decided in favor of the 2001 Roadless Rule. This legislation will permanently protect our nation's roadless areas and remove all ambiguity concerning their conservation and protection.

As a native Washingtonian and a lifelong outdoorsman, I grew up exploring and enjoying our National Forests. It is my hope that my grandchildren will be able to explore and enjoy the same untouched and protected forests that I have grown to love. By carefully and thoughtfully conserving our National Forest lands, they will be here for future generations to come.

I have led the fight for our roadless areas in Congress since 2002 and will continue to seek ways to protect our National Forests.

Madam Speaker, today, I introduced the bipartisan Geothermal Production Expansion Act with Representative Mike Simpson, and I thank him for his leadership on this issue. Our bill will ensure that we tap into clean geothermal energy using on-the-shelf technologies.

Geothermal energy has great potential to add clean energy to American electricity supplies. It is especially promising as a renewable resource because it is a base load power which doesn't require any fossil fuel backup.

However, at this point in time, proven geothermal resources have at times gone undeveloped in instances involving adjoining federal lands because speculators increasingly drive up the cost of federal lands adjacent to a geothermal development site. This hurts developers who take on the upfront cost of exploration and developing a site because when an exploration proves fruitful, the developer is bid out of the market due to extremely high leasing costs for adjacent lands. In many cases, the end result is that the development is halted and no clean energy comes online.

Already under EPACT 2005 amendments, BLM is allowed to issue three different noncompetitive leases for geothermal resources, which include: non-competitive geothermal leases to mining claim holders that have a valid operating plan (having invested capital), direct use leases and leases on parcels that do not sell at a competitive auction.

The Geothermal Production Expansion Act is a targeted approach to the aforementioned speculation problem, simply creating a fourth category whereby the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) may issue a non-competitive geothermal lease, allowing qualified companies who hold legal rights to develop geothermal leases on certain adjoining lands.

An added benefit, the bill will significantly accelerate the development of geothermal projects by reducing the time spent on nominating and waiting for an auction, which can add a minimum of one- to-two years to the development phase of a geothermal resource.

This bill is a reasonable policy to ensure that developers who have invested substantial capital and made high risk investments can secure and develop geothermal discoveries. Additionally, it will help add renewable, domestically produced energy resources to the American consumers' electricity supply. I believe that this is an important issue and I hope that the House will soon consider this legislation.

Madam Speaker, yesterday, the actor Sigourney Weaver showed a movie in the Capitol which was scarier than her movie The Aliens because it was fact, not fiction, and it was a movie documenting the acidification of the oceans caused by carbon dioxide that we burn that goes in the atmosphere, goes in the water, and makes the oceans acidic. This documentary showed that the waters off the Pacific coast soon will be so acidic that they can actually melt shell life.

The reason I mention this is that yesterday the EPA rolled out proposed rules to do something about these noxious gases. Some have said we shouldn't do that, but those are the same people saying we shouldn't pass a bill. They're saying we shouldn't regulate CO2 here, there, or anywhere.

I urge all of us to move forward on a bipartisan basis to stop ocean acidification by passing the energy bill we passed in the House. We hope the Senate will pass it. That's a route to do it. But, one way or another, we've got to save the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.

Madam Chair, I rise to express my support for H.R. 3221, and to express my gratitude to Chairman Miller for including in this bill a very important section to close gaps in college degree attainment and completion.

Section 783 of the bill, which provides for innovation in college access and completion national activities, authorizes the Secretary of Education to award grants to innovative programs that improve student outcomes for college bound students.

In 2007, only 27.8 percent of college freshmen, or roughly one- fourth, went on to complete their degrees. In the highly competitive 21st century, America can little afford to fall behind in the technology curve; today, China graduates eight times as many engineering students as us, and India five times more.

We have an abundance of bright students in this country, and by increasing the number of individuals with postsecondary degrees, any expenditure we make towards that end will be returned many times over as these graduates enter the work force and start contributing to what is already the world's largest and most advanced economy.

In June, I introduced H.R. 3259, to establish grants for college success and completion. My bill, coauthored with Representative Reichert, would encourage and help students from low-income and disadvantaged families attend college. This group of Americans represents the last great untapped source of American brainpower, as only 6 percent of them are expected to earn a bachelor's degree by age 24--seven and a half times smaller than the expected graduation rates of students from wealthy backgrounds.

I urge passage of H.R. 3221, and encourage my colleagues to continue investing in America's future by cosponsoring H.R. 3259.

Mr. Speaker, at my townhall meetings, I was amazed at

how much consensus there was about health care reform. People liked health care reform.

What they didn't like were things that are not actually in the bill. Because of the massive disinformation campaign on this bill, people didn't like things that weren't there.

There were more hallucinations about this from opponents of this bill than there were when Timothy Leary was doing business in Haight-Ashbury in the late 1960s. Take this hallucination that this bill is going to insure illegal immigrants. You look at page 132, it says, ``For purposes of this division, the term `affordable credit individual' means, subject to subsection (b), an individual who is lawfully present in a State in the United States.''

Look at page 143, ``Nothing in this subtitle shall allow Federal payments for affordability credits on behalf of individuals who are not lawfully present in the United States.''

Now, the President was challenged during his joint address to the U.S. Congress. I will tell you what, if there was a deception, it wasn't by the President of the United States.

And it is time for us to call out those people who spread hallucinations, phantoms, boogeymen. People want health care and this reform. We are going to pass it.

Mr. Speaker, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. Speaker, I want to just make a point that this program has been spectacularly successful from an environmental perspective. It was originally criticized that we did not call for high enough efficiency improvement in these cars. The people have fixed this problem for us. We are seeing average increases of efficiency of 60 percent--well, well above what was required by Congress.

For one car company, 78 percent of the cars that they're buying are over 30 miles a gallon and 39 percent above 30 miles per gallon. The American people have seen spectacular improvements in efficiency and in environmental performance.

I want to thank the Speaker and Mr. Obey for essentially assuring us--I'll take it as that, almost--that we, in fact, are going to replace this money. I hope it is in the CR. It is necessary to achieve our efficiency goals.

Madam Speaker, it gives me great pleasure to announce that this August, the Suquamish Tribe will be hosting the annual Tribal Canoe Journey from August 3 to August 9 at the town of Suquamish on Washington State's Kitsap Peninsula. Native Americans have lived on the shores of Puget Sound for thousands of years. Canoes carved from massive cedar logs were the traditional mode of transportation for Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest. In 1851, pioneers established the city of Seattle, named for Chief Sealth of the Suquamish and Duwamish Tribes, who helped non-native settlers survive their first years in the Northwest.

As the United States expanded westward, the Suquamish and other Native American tribes struggled to preserve their culture. In 1855, the Suquamish tribe signed a treaty that ceded their ancestral lands-- including much of what is now my district--and moved to a reservation west of Seattle. In 1904, Old Man House village, the home of Chief Sealth, burned to the ground and was not rebuilt. For the first time in millennia, traditional canoes no longer plied the waters of Puget Sound.

In 1989, the Suquamish tribe hosted the Paddle to Seattle, the first intertribal canoe journey in more than 100 years. During that journey, people from the Helitsuk Nation invited canoes to travel to their village in British Columbia. In 1993, twenty-eight canoes answered their challenge. Since then, canoe journeys have been held annually to celebrate the traditional Native American culture of the Northwest.

I am pleased to announce that more than 100 cedar canoes from over 90 Native American tribes are expected to make the voyage to Suquamish in August, celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Paddle to Seattle. Canoes will land near the former site of Old Man House village, where visitors will receive a traditional welcome. The Suquamish Tribe expects more than 12,000 visitors and 5,000 campers to participate in the week-long cultural celebration.

Native American tribes have long struggled to preserve their traditional culture. The 2009 Tribal Canoe Journey is part of a cultural resurgence among Native Americans in the Northwest, and I am honored to recognize its importance before Congress today.

Mr. Speaker, our current health care system--and it really is not a system--is not up to the standards of America. I want to address the issue of cost. Our wages have been going down a black hole of health care costs. Health care costs are rising two to three times faster than our wages. If we want to know why we're having trouble making ends meet, it's because our money is going into health care much faster than our wages are improving.

Now what does the other party have to solve this problem? Nothing. We are offering some suggestions on ways to have higher quality health care costs, reduce the cost, and reduce the rate of medical inflation. There is one principle that we ought to have on a bipartisan basis: you can't beat something with nothing. I am encouraging our Members across the aisle to join us to bring change to this system so we can restrain the rate on medical inflation and pass health care reform.

Madam Speaker, in the first years of the 20th century, Gifford Pinchot fought to protect our nation's forests and rivers from unsustainable logging as the first Chief of the U.S. Forest Service. Nearly a century later, his grandson, Gifford Pinchot III, established the Bainbridge Graduate Institute, or BGI. The Institute, situated on a sustainably-designed 210 acre campus near Seattle, is dedicated to educating the business leaders of the 21st century in sustainable management. I am honored to recognize the Bainbridge Graduate Institute for helping to shape the sustainable leaders of tomorrow.

As we face the new challenges of the 21st century, successful businesses will have to consider environmental and social sustainability. The Bainbridge Graduate Institute offers graduate degrees in Sustainable Business Administration as well as certificates in Sustainable Business and Entrepreneurship. The goal of these programs is to change the way companies operate and incorporate sustainability into business decisions.

Although it is a relatively new institution, the Bainbridge Graduate Institute is quickly garnering national recognition. In 2007, Business Week named BGI as one of its top global design schools, joining prestigious institutions such as the Harvard Business School, Rhode Island School of Design, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Last fall, BGI named Jon Strauss, former president of Harvey Mudd College, as its new president. The Institute's distinguished faculty includes graduates of Stanford Business School and Harvard University.

I am pleased that the Institute is also attracting support from the business world. Some companies, including technology giant Hewlett- Packard, indirectly support BGI by paying for their employees to attend its programs. Clearly, sustainable business practices appeal to even the largest companies. I believe that we can simultaneously grow our economy and improve the health of our environment. The Bainbridge Graduate Institute and programs like it give our economic leaders the knowledge needed to achieve both goals, and I am honored to recognize the Institute's achievements.

Madam Speaker, the keepers of the status quo on health care are simply wrong. It is unacceptable for Americans to have their wage increases swallowed up by health care costs.

Our medical costs are rising three times faster than our wages. It consumes twice as much of our economy as it did just 12 years ago. The status quo is unacceptable.

Now some of my colleagues want to defend the status quo, trying to scare Americans to think that we're going to deliver bad medical care. Let me ask them this: Is the medical care at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, so bad? I don't think so.

Our bill, basically--and we are improving this bill as we speak--is going to provide the kind of care that Americans are getting at the Mayo Clinic. Because when our bill passes, it will in fact allow and inspire doctors to do what they do at the Mayo Clinic for half the price that Americans are paying for their medical care in Miami, Florida. Half the price at the Mayo Clinic for what Americans pay in medical care.

We need reform. We're going to pass it.

Madam Speaker, I rise today to introduce the Establishing Grants for College Access and Completion Act of 2009, a bill to increase the number of low-income students from underserved populations and disadvantaged backgrounds who enter and complete college.

It is well established that students from low-income families are 30 percent less likely to have access to higher education, but the disparity in graduation rates are more pronounced: only 20 percent of the lowest-income students are projected to graduate with a bachelor's degree by 2012, compared to 68 percent of the highest income students.

This bill would authorize Federal funding for the Grants for College Access and Completion program, a competitive grant program to support innovative and effective approaches that are currently improving college-going and college-graduation rates for low-income, high-promise students. Eligible organizations would need to show a proven track record of success in increasing the number of students from low-income and disadvantaged populations who enter and remain in college, and have an independent scholarship program supported by non-Federal dollars. Any eligible organization, under this bill, would be able to enter into partnerships with other entities to improve their ability to effectively reach low-income and disadvantaged students.

This bill was written to use taxpayers' money wisely. The Federal grants would be used to provide mentoring, academic support, and supportive services to prepare low-income students to attend institutions of higher education, with 15 percent of the funds coming from non-Federal sources. This bill does not provide any money for scholarships; rather, it will be required that the grantees have established and successful scholarship programs. Finally, the bill has an annual reporting requirement of grantees, so that the Secretary can keep close track of their performance.

For example, efforts are currently underway and proven to improve graduation rates of this student population. A Washington State-based foundation, the College Success Foundation, formerly the Washington Education Foundation, is leading the way, by encouraging low-income and disadvantaged students to pursue higher education, and providing them with support and mentoring services to ensure their continued success in college.

Almost 90 percent of today's fastest growing jobs require some postsecondary education. Students who do not attend and graduate from college are increasingly finding themselves shut out of well-paying jobs. Statistics show that an individual without a high school diploma will earn approximately $1,100,000 less in their lifetime than an individual with a bachelor's degree. Finally, statistics show that the children of college graduates, and even their children's children, are more likely to go on to graduate from institutes of higher education. Should my bill become law, and help students attend and graduate from college, their expected lifetime earnings will more than pay for the little sums of money appropriated through this legislation.

I urge my colleagues to consider this important bill.

Madam Speaker, I rise today to express my support for Representative Rick Larsen's interpretation of Section 782 of H.R. 2454. As a principal author of legislative provisions in H.R. 2454 to protect energy-intensive, trade-exposed industries, I too believe that Congress intends that Direct Service Industries served by Bonneville on the date of enactment of this Act are part of eligible industrial sectors and may receive allowances under Sections 782(e) and 764 of this Act.

Thank you for the opportunity to provide this clarification.

Madam Speaker, today Congresswoman Norton and I introduced the Community Gardens Act of 2009, along with Representatives Matsui, Blumenauer, Moran, Conyers, Jr., Bordallo, Christensen, Dennis Moore, Engel, Kaptur, Maloney, McGovern, Carson, Grijalva, Barbara Lee, Donna Edwards, Woolsey and Cleaver II. We thank them for their support.

Localities across America are already demonstrating an eagerness to harvest fresh fruits and vegetables in community gardens. According to a national study, 1 million households participated in community gardens in 2008, and an estimated 5 million households are very interested in starting a garden plot near their home. Washington state is home to many opportunities by which individuals may participate in a community garden atmosphere. For example, the City of Seattle's Department of Neighborhoods currently maintains 1,900 plots, which serve more than 3,800 urban gardeners on 23 acres of land. This successful program is expanding as interest in gardening grows. With this legislation we can help programs like the one in Seattle, Washington, as well as at 21 Acres in Woodinville, Washington, to expand opportunities for all American households to share in the numerous benefits of local gardening.

The Community Gardens Act of 2009 will establish a grant program specifically geared to help local organizations create community gardens in their areas. Groups eligible to apply for funds include community-development organizations, schools, and state and local governments, among others. By encouraging these groups to construct gardens in their communities, the legislation will promote nutrition, environmental awareness, and neighborhood development.

Existing community gardens illustrate the many benefits of creating such a grant program. These gardens are already helping to beautify neighborhoods by transforming vacant lots and paved areas into ``green'' spaces. They are reducing the impact of nutrient and sediment pollution on local wildlife habitats, forest lands and water quality. They are also teaching our kids about the importance of nutrition and exercise by participating in harvesting healthy food and creating an excellent opportunity for outdoor recreation.

Congresswoman Norton and I are proud to introduce the Community Gardens Act of 2009 and we look forward to working in Congress to ensure that healthy food and healthy lifestyles are available to all communities across the nation.

I will join my colleague from the State of Washington's invitation to talk about Hanford issues at some point. I appreciate the Chair's interest in that.

I want to thank, specifically, the committee for including $1.78 billion for energy efficiency and renewable energy research, development and deployment. But I do rise with some concern that the report proposes to decrease water power R&D from $40 million in 2009 to just $30 million. While I understand that the ocean and tidal-based marine renewable energy industry is certainly nascent at this time, estimates suggest that ocean resources in the U.S. could supply more than 6 percent of our electricity generation if ocean renewable energy enjoyed the same Federal investment as other forms of renewable energy. Many countries already operate projects that generate power from both the waves and tidal and currents; and we should lead in this regard, not follow.

In Washington State these efforts are currently underway. The U.S. Navy and Verdant Power will install a demonstration project in Puget Sound in 2010, and Snohomish County PUD will install a project in Admiralty Inlet just north of Seattle in 2011. Federally backed research is underway at the Northwest National Marine Renewable Energy Center, a partnership between the University of Washington and Oregon State University. In Sequim the DOE's Marine Science Lab is researching ocean energy potential and environmental issues. Hawaii, Oregon, Maine, New York, California, Massachusetts and Alaska are also working to develop this industry. Our colleagues in the Senate have recommended $60 million for water power R&D, and I hope to work with Mr. Pastor through conference to work toward those Senate levels for this important, very promising program.

With that, I thank Mr. Pastor for his efforts.