Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 4 o'clock and 20 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Friday, January 18, 2008, at 10:30 a.m.

Madam Speaker, yesterday I introduced The National Diabetes Coordinator

Act, H.R. 4836. As some of my colleagues who have worked on issues relating to diabetes may be aware, the Federal Government spends over $80 billion per year treating diabetes and its complications.

Since 1980, the number of Americans suffering from diabetes has doubled to more than 20 million, and that number is projected to double again by 2025.

The serious complications stemming from diabetes--including heart disease, high blood pressure, stroke, blindness, amputation and renal disease--are well documented and even more importantly, they are largely preventable with proper management and treatment.

To that end, H.R. 4836 would establish a National Diabetes Coordinator to coordinate research and prevention activities throughout the federal government, including agencies such as the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Defense.

We need this kind of comprehensive approach to get our hands around what is rapidly becoming an all-encompassing epidemic. A recent study found that one out of every eight Federal health care dollars is spent treating people with diabetes. The total amount of money spent on diabetes is nearly equal to the entire budget for the U.S. Department of Education, roughly $80 billion.

While we expend vast resources on this effort, of that $80 billion, less than 1 percent is spent on direct diabetes prevention. When you also consider that 18 of 21 Federal agencies spend money on diabetes, there is a clear need for a National Coordinator to establish a strategy to prevent and reduce diabetes and its complications.

We have seen evidence that this approach can work. A recent Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, AHRQ, study demonstrated that Medicare and Medicaid could save $2.5 billion a year by presenting diabetes and its complications with appropriate primary care. The city of Asheville, North Carolina saved $2.000 per employee with an innovative diabetes management program. The NIH-sponsored Diabetes Prevention Project proved that we can prevent and delay diabetes and its complications by 58 percent.

A National Diabetes Coordinator will provide the Federal leadership necessary to maximize the funds the Federal Government is currently spending to save money and lives. Further, a National Diabetes Coordinator with specific responsibilities to work across agencies to prevent and reduce diabetes and its complications will be a model for how the U.S. can deal with other chronic diseases such as heart disease.

As we consider how to move forward in the fight against diabetes, I encourage my colleagues to think of these statistics: one in three kids born today will get diabetes, and that figure rises to one in two in minorities. Further, 32 percent of the Medicare program is spent on the 18 percent of beneficiaries with diabetes. We need Federal leadership provided in H.R. 4836 to help reverse these trends and make a difference for future generations.

Madam Speaker, as much of America now knows, yesterday in a split decision, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted to approve new media ownership rules that in many ways are far worse for the public interest than anything previously revealed by FCC Chairman Martin.

Prior to yesterday's vote. Chairman Martin had attempted to portray his proposal as a ``moderate compromise'' that would allow one company to own both a daily newspaper and a low-rated broadcast TV station in only the 20 largest media markets. But research from Free Press-- collected in the Devil in the Details report--exposed how the loose and ambiguous ``waiver'' standards in the proposal left a giant loophole for companies to sidestep the ban in any market and for any station.

The final rule, rewritten in the middle of the night before the hearing, retains all of the original loopholes and adds additional loopholes that appear to allow cross-ownership mergers in virtually any market.

While I had held out hope that the FCC would delay this vote given the outpouring of public commentary opposing the rule changes, it is clear that the Chairman of the FCC is not listening. I see no other choice than to push for congressional action, and to that end, yesterday I introduced H.R. 4835, the Media Ownership Act of 2007, in the House to stop these new cross-ownership rules from going forward.

I am pleased to have been joined by my Washington State colleague Representative Dave Reichert in this bipartisan effort, and it is my hope that we can move swiftly to prevent these new rules from going into effect. This effort is the companion to work being done in the Senate Commerce Committee where a bipartisan group of Senators have led the effort against these changes.

When Chairman Martin was before the Energy and Commerce Committee earlier this month, I asked him how he could ignore the public outcry he heard when he visited Seattle, Washington, where--despite less than 5 days notice--thousands turned out and stayed until 1 a.m. on a Friday night to voice their concerns. I asked him how we could believe that he had thoughtfully considered the public's concerns, when less than 3 days later, the Chairman published an op-ed in the New York Times outlining his plan for media consolidation.

Clearly, Chairman Martin is not listening to the American people, and now we need to step up and ensure that their voices are heard. I hope my colleagues here in Congress will join me in this eftort, and I hope this legislation moves swiftly.

Mr. Speaker, today the Federal Communications Commission may do violence to its own name. The idea of communication is that you speak, but you also listen. And in a stunning act of bureaucratic arrogance, the FCC today may refuse to listen to the thousands of Americans who have told them to listen to America and not change the media consolidation laws.

The FCC went out and held these hearings, including in Seattle, Washington, where thousands of people came and told the FCC in no uncertain terms that their arrogant effort to remove these productions for the first amendment could not stand, and yet they refused to listen to Americans who told them that.

We know that when we lose access to information, democracy suffers. I hope the FCC today might have second thoughts and decide that part of their job is listening to the American people, in fact, the highest part of their job. And we're going to do everything we can, if they do this today, to stop in the tracks this effort to undo protection against media consolidation.

Mr. Speaker, we are starting a clean energy revolution today. It is not the end of that revolution, it is not perhaps even the beginning of the end of that clean energy revolution, but it is the end of the beginning for two important points.

First, we are starting a revolution in transportation today in the United States, and exhibit A in that regard is the GM Volt. The GM Volt, which GM hopes to have in mass production, is a plug-in hybrid car. You plug it in at night, you drive it for 40 miles just on electricity, zero gasoline, and after 40 miles you use a hybrid train with gasoline and someday cellulosic ethanol for the remaining part of your range.

Our corporate average fuel economy standards, which we make the first

strides in in three decades, will enhance the opportunity for Americans to have not just a few miles here or there per gallon, but a revolution in transportation.

This car will get over 100 miles per gallon of gasoline. This car will operate all on electricity for the first 40 miles. It is this revolutionary attitude that we need to have in America, and we make the first steps, and the first shots in that revolution are fired today.

But it is not the end of that revolution, because we have much more to do. We did not succeed this week in advancing renewable energy to have 15 percent of renewables. We did not succeed this week to advance tax relief for those emerging new businesses.

But exhibit A, on the renewable energy front, is a picture of the solar thermal array produced by the Austra Energy Company. This company this last month signed enough contracts for 500,000 homes to be heated by solar thermal energy which, within the decade, will be price competitive with coal-based energy if we succeed in our next steps in this clean energy revolution. That is why we will be back next year to have the true clean energy revolution America deserves.

Mr. Speaker, I come to the floor this evening to talk about a great vision for America's clean energy future, and it's very timely that America adopts a new vision for our energy future because we know Americans have some challenges when it comes to energy right now.

We're going to, tonight, talk about a vision for a way to revolutionize how we use and how we generate our energy that will solve some of the problems that Americans are experiencing tonight, and I think there shouldn't be any debate about what those challenges are.

We are paying well over $3 a gallon for gasoline, with no relief in sight. We've seen it go from, I don't know, $30 or $40 a barrel during the start of the Bush administration to now approaching $100, $95, $100 a barrel. Again, fossil fuel costs continue to go up.

We're engaged in a security threat from the Middle East where we are sending about a half a million dollars a minute to the Middle East to the place, to the terrorists who come to attack us, and sending money to the Middle East and have them turn around and attack us as the 22 generals who testified in front of our global warming committee told us is not a very prudent security policy.

We're engaged in a war in the Middle East, the place that there is security concerns because that's where a significant part of the oil is in the world.

So we know we have economic challenges because of rising gas prices. It's hitting us right in the pocketbook every time we go to the pump. We know we have security concerns because of our addiction to the Middle East, and now we know that global warming is an additional threat that we simply have to respond to.

Now that Americans have seen 1 million square miles of the Arctic melt, the size of six Californias simply disappeared, melted in the Arctic this year, together with the melting of the tundra, the changing weather patterns. We've certainly seen it with our rainstorms we had in my State. I represent the State of Washington. We had 10 inches of rain in 24 hours, an unprecedented event. This type of heavy precipitation events are consistent with global warming. We know we have a global warming threat that we've got to deal with.

So we know that we have some challenges when it comes to energy, and we know none of those challenges are going to get better unless we do something about it. This energy problem is not going to get solved by the tooth fairy or simply sort of pleasant wishes for the market to solve the problem. We know we have to act. We know we have to have a plan. We know we have to have a vision. And we know it has to rely on something that we're rich in in America.

And there's one thing I've got some good news tonight we'll talk about at length. We are rich in intellectual talent in America. We are the best innovators, best tinkerers, the best inventors humans have ever seen. And there was a fellow back in May 25, 1961, who really understood that. He came to this Chamber on May 25, 1961, John F. Kennedy, and John F. Kennedy came and stood right behind me in here and said that America was going to accept the challenge of putting a man on the Moon in 10 years and bringing him back safely. Now, that was a President who understood the innate capability of the American people to invent their way to solve any challenge we set our mind to.

And President Kennedy really, that was a gutsy thing to say again. He was ahead of the curve. He was ahead of the technology. That technology to get to the Moon was hardly even on the back of an envelope at that time. You know, at that moment, our missiles were blowing up on the launch pad. The Russians were way ahead of us in the space race. We'd only put Spam in a can up for 15 minutes. We hadn't even invented Tang yet.

We didn't know how we were going to get to the Moon, but John F. Kennedy knew that we could invent our way to solve this technological challenge and we did it. And we're here tonight to say that Americans have the same level of can-do spirit, the same level of optimism, the same level of technological prowess that we had in the 1960s, and that we can do for clean energy what John F. Kennedy did for space, which is to create a whole new clean energy revolution for the economy of America and grow our economy at the same time.

So I've introduced with some of my colleagues a bill called the New Apollo Energy Act. The New Apollo Energy Act basically uses the word ``Apollo'' because it's the inspiration for what we know we can do, which is to invent our way to a new clean energy future just like Kennedy in the original Apollo project did for the Moon project.

Well, I have some really good news. The House of Representatives last Thursday, with 235 votes, with some bipartisan support, essentially committed ourselves and accomplished five steps towards this clean energy future, and we are shortly going to take a fifth large leap for mankind in clean energy. So stealing a little bit of the language from the original Apollo 11 project, we now have had five small steps for energy independence and clean energy, and we are now starting to work on one giant leap for America's clean energy revolution.

And I wanted to talk tonight about those five steps that we have taken in the House, and the bill is now over the Senate, and one of the reasons we are here tonight is to encourage the Senate to follow the House's lead to the extent we can and move forward on these clean energy steps. And before I yield to my friend, Ron Klein, who has been a great leader in the freshmen class on these issues, I want to start with just the first step that we took last Thursday.

Last Thursday the House of Representatives, in a history-making step forward, passed the first improvement in our fuel economy standards in 30 years. For 30 years Americans' efficiency standards have been frozen, locked in stone and haven't made 1-mile-per-gallon improvement since 1983. In fact, and this blows my mind, the cars we drive get less mileage today than they did in 1983. We have mapped the human genome. We have invented the Internet. But the cars we drive get less mileage.

Well, we're doing something about that. After 30 years of Congress being

captured by forces against and in opposition of progress, we have increased by 40 percent the mileage standards by the year 2022 from 25 miles a gallon to 35 miles a gallon. That is a square deal for Americans. It is common sense, and we have done it in a way that protects our domestic manufacturers so that they are not exposed to a flood of new imports from across the seas, and we do that by having what is called the two-fleet rule that has been preserved.

Now, the reason this makes sense and the reason it's going to work is a combination of a couple of factors. First, it is a fact that we have got the best geniuses in the world right here in America when it comes to designing cars, and I know because they are designing some cars that are going to blow this record out of the way. By 2022 we are going to have cars that are way beyond 35 miles a gallon. I want to talk about one of those cars.

One of them is the General Motors Volt. And I have here today a picture of the General Motors Volt, a car that General Motors hopes to have in production 5 years from now. This car exists. I saw it at the Anaheim Electric Car Association Convention last weekend in Anaheim, California. And this car is a miracle because it is what's called a plug-in hybrid car. This car uses new lithium-ion batteries designed by A123 Battery Company in Massachusetts. And this car you plug in. You go home at night and plug it into your garage outlet. You unplug it in the morning. You drive 40 miles with no gasoline at all, free of gasoline from the Mid East or anywhere else, for that matter; 40 miles, zero pollution for 1 to 2 cents a mile. Gasoline costs 9 to 12 cents a mile to run your car for 40 miles. After 40 miles if you want to drive 40 miles, and 40 percent of Americans' average trips are over 40 miles a day, then you use hybrid technology to use a combination of gasoline and someday cellulosic ethanol and electricity like the hybrids now run to run your normal 250-, 300-mile range.

Now, that is a tremendous deal for Americans who get low-priced fuel for 40 miles, zero CO2. Similar cars that are on the road today get 100 miles a gallon of gasoline today using this combination of electricity. And when we use cellulosic ethanol, we'll get 500 miles a gallon of gasoline using a combination of electricity, a hybrid. Now, this technology is going to blow that CAFE standard away. And after talking to the scientists at this electric car convention, I am very convinced that this is going to happen, and GM has certainly put big money behind this. So I'm very excited about the first step, which is to improve automobile efficiency, to talk about that tonight.

With that I would like to yield to my friend Ron Klein from Florida, who has been a leader in the freshmen class. Thank goodness this freshmen class has shown up. That's one of the reasons we are making these strides tonight.

Yes. And I want to dovetail the second step. We've got five steps we're going to talk about tonight. The second step is on the taxes to really level the playing field for new technologies.

I don't think our constituents are very happy about paying $3-plus for gasoline. They are less happy on top of that to then throw in some serious change, about $21 billion, with a ``b,'' of the money they send to Uncle Sam on April 15 that is now shelled out to the largest oil companies that are making more profits than any corporation in the history of this solar system. And there is nothing wrong with profits, but there is something wrong with taxing Americans to add to those profits to, frankly, a very mature industry. This is not like this is a new industry that we are helping to get going. They've been around since 1880 or 1890 from the fields of Pennsylvania. This is a very mature, very profitable industry.

So what we have done in this bill is reel back in the misbegotten largesse that has been shelled out to the oil and gas industry to the tune of $21 billion. And what we are using that for is to help Americans adopt new clean energy technology. And it's going to be taken away from about five major oil companies, and it is going to be given to 300 million Americans that can use tax breaks when they buy a fuel- efficient car like this plug-in hybrid car or when they weatherize their house and put in more insulation or when they want to buy energy- efficient heating or cooling.

This is like taking from the few, if you will, who never deserved it and giving to the many who need this help

now to adopt their old infrastructure, houses, cars, businesses, to the new clean energy. And it is going to do something for our business community too, and I want to talk about that. And this is Florida- specific. Mr. Klein represents Florida. I want to talk about a technology that is a kind of technology that we should be assisting.

This is a picture of technology called solar thermal technology. This is designed by the Ausra Company, A-u-s-r-a. The Ausra Company has developed a way to concentrate the Sun's radiant energy on a pipe. You can't see this very well, but this is a pipe of water that is essentially heated up by the reflected Sun rays. And they have discovered a way to make these mirrors very inexpensively and then heat this water and develop steam and drive a steam turbine and generate electricity. This company just signed a contract for 300 megawatts for a utility in Florida, enough for somewhere between 250,000 and 300,000 homes that they are going to produce electricity for with zero carbon dioxide, zero greenhouse gas emissions in Florida, 177 megawatts in California. And they believe that, within about a decade, once you make enough mirrors so you bring down the cost per unit of mirror, they will be able to compete with coal-based electricity.

Now, what makes sense, and what we have done, with a few Republicans' help, and it's not many but a few, we have reeled back in that $21 billion from the oil and gas companies and we have redirected some of that assistance to a company like the Ausra Company so they can develop this new technology. Now, that is a proactive action, and I am very happy to report that second small step.

Now, the gentleman wanted to talk about a specific technology. I would like to yield to him to talk about that.

Well, I hope that that occurs.

And I'm really excited about power off our coastline as well. We have a little coastline off the Pacific coast which actually has the potential to generate power from waves. Mr. Klein talked about power from currents, where you can have turbines that turn, like a windmill or rotary moving mechanisms, but we also have huge power from waves that simply go up and down that are generated by the wind. And off our coast right now, we have some buoys going into the water, and as they bob up and down, they compress water, and that generates compression that turns the turbine that generates electricity. And this is a technology that is in its infancy, but there is enormous power in our wave power. In a 10x10 mile stretch off the Pacific coast, there is enough electricity for all the electrical needs of California, for instance. So, here's another technology.

I want to compare this technology to wind power. I've got a picture here of the largest wind farm in the western hemisphere, it's in southeastern Washington, in my State. These are, I think, almost three- quarters to one megawatt. That's enough for 1,000 homes, each one of these turbines. They are somewhere between 250 and 300 feet high. And what that power represents now is absolutely clean power, which today is the least expensive power that we can buy in the Pacific Northwest. If you want to get the cheapest power you can buy right now, this is the cheapest power essentially that you can buy, cheaper compared to even coal fire, or as cheap as a coal fire plant. That's why there is huge demand for these turbines. Actually, the pricing has gone up because there is so much demand for them, people want to buy them.

The reason I mention wind in conjunction with wave power and tidal power is a lot of people think that wave power and tidal power is sort of where the wind industry was about 20 to 25 years ago, in its infancy. When this started, people laughed at it. They thought it was like a big tinker toy with a bunch of folks living in a teepee that were dreaming up. And for a long time it was ahead of its time. Now it is commercially viable, it is supporting thousands of jobs. The Speaker's State of Pennsylvania has a company called Gamesa that is manufacturing these turbines. In Iowa, the Clipper Turbine Company is manufacturing. We want to make these and put them out to the world.

That's why the third step, we've talked about the first two, the auto efficiency standards, the tax fairness provisions, and now the third step we've taken is what we call the renewable electricity standard, which requires 15 percent of our electricity to come from a combination of renewable energy, clean energy sources, wind, solar, wave, enhanced geothermal, and efficiency. And we believe if we simply create those demands for these technologies, if you demand it, they will come. And these technologies will take off once we have these demands.

So, this is an important part of the package. Some of our colleagues across

the Chamber and in the Senate are balking at this. If we don't get this through now, we will next time. We will make some adjustments to it and get it through, because once people find out about these technologies, they're ready to rock and roll.

I yield to Mr. Klein.

And what we have found, the genius of this, like you said, once the demand is created for these renewable energy prices, there is a very, very tried and tested rule that kicks in, which is, they become cheaper over time. And people say, well, gee, some of these things cost more than coal right now or oil and gas. Well, that's true right now, but look at what the experience has been over the last two decades. These are graphs from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory of the renewable energy cost trends over the last 25, 27 years, and there is remarkable consistency.

Wind energy started out in 1980 about 30 cents, 32 cents a kilowatt hour. It came down dramatically, until now it's down to in the range of 6 to 8 cents in this graph, that actually might be a little optimistic, in the year 2000. Look at this enormous reduction over the last 20 years because of improvements in technology, and the fact that once you have scales of economy, you manufacture more of these, they cost less.

Same thing with solar thermal technology, that type of technology I showed earlier with the mirrors, heating up the water, started out at 60 cents a kilowatt hour in 1990, gone down to about 8 cents a kilowatt hour now in the year 2000. Again, these are, frankly, a little optimistic. These charts are a little less than the numbers I've heard quoted, but you get the general trend that it's incredibly down.

Photovoltaic solar energy, that's the kind most of us are familiar with, which you have a silicone panel, and it just takes the sun's energy and spins off an electron and creates an electrical current, started at 100 cents a kilowatt hour, now it's down to 22, 24 cents a kilowatt hour.

And what we find in these charts, in almost all these technologies there is almost this kind of law, I don't know if it's got a name yet, when you increase by a factor of 10 the number of units of these renewable sources, the price comes down 20 cents. Now, what does that tell us? We know two things for sure; the cost of fossil fuels is going up, and it isn't coming down. China is coming on like gang busters. They're demanding. They want to start buying the oil for their cars, too. And as their economy grows, that demand is going up. And we know we're not producing, we're not keeping up with the pace of demand for the increase in our oil production, so fossil fuel is going up over time.

We know these renewable sources are coming down over time, including geothermal, which is coming down dramatically again, from 1 dollar in 1980 down to about 26, 28 cents now. So, we know these are coming down. These lines are going to cross. And if we're going to hitch our economic star to some technology, let's hitch our star to the technologies that are getting cheaper, not the ones that are getting more expensive over time. And that's what this bill has done.

I yield to Mr. Klein.

I would now like to turn to the fourth small step that we've taken, and the fourth step that we've taken is to embrace what we call the first fuel of clean energy. And the first fuel of clean energy is not wasting it. What we have found, and I've done a lot of research in this field, almost always the cheapest energy and the most effective energy you can get is the energy you don't waste. The efficient use of energy is the first place we've got to look.

Our bill in many ways demanded more efficiency for Americans. It demands that our lighting industry produce lighting that is 40 to 60 percent more energy efficient. It demands that our air conditioning units become much more efficient, that our buildings become much more efficient. There is a provision in there that we want to create model building codes, that when we build our buildings they won't waste as much energy as they do.

Many people believe that probably 30 to 40 percent of the road we have to travel we will get there simply by not wasting energy. And I want to go to exhibits A and B on that, show you a picture of a couple of folks in Redmond, Washington, Mike and Meg Town. They're standing in their doorway here. Mike is a science teacher at Redmond High School. It's a rainy environment out northeast of Seattle. And a few years ago when he was teaching his kids about clean energy, one of his kids said, Hey, Mr. Town, if you think this is so hot, why don't you build a house like this? And he said, I think I'll do just that.

So he basically set out to build a zero electrical net usage home by using efficiency, conservation, and a little bit of photovoltaic, and he did it. And here is a picture of his home. It didn't cost much of anything more than a normal home of this site. I think you'll agree it's a nice-looking place. It's in a rainy environment, but he managed to make it zero net electrical usage by doing some commonsense things. He used a little additional insulation. He used energy-efficient windows. He designed a home that uses a little bit of what's

called passive solar heating, so the solar rays, when we get them in Seattle, which is twice a year, I think, on August 12th and 13th, heats the inside of the home. And he did some photovoltaic array. He put on himself these darker panels up here on the roof that he actually put on.

And now Mike says one of the great joys is, first off, he uses about half as much energy as a normal home. And when he does use it, he's producing it largely with his PV system. And when he's generating more than he uses, his meter runs backwards. And he says there is nothing more fun than going out and watching your meter run backwards as you're feeding electricity back into the grid.

So, Meg and Mike Town are sort of walking examples of what our bill is going to do, which is to help Americans weatherize their homes, make sure their businesses are using energy-efficient appliances, and when we do that, we're going to use this first fuel. That's kind of a commonsense thing to do.

So, I want to move to the fifth step now. And the fifth step that we took is we adopted what's called a renewable fuel standard. In a renewable fuel standard, we guaranteed that we will have 32 billion gallons of biofuels that will be homegrown in the United States in the next 20 years. And the reason we said that is we think it makes more sense to get our energy from middle western farmers rather than Middle Eastern sheiks. And it doesn't make a lot of sense to take our subsidized agricultural products, export them, take the money from the international buyers, and then just ship it to Saudi Arabia. It's just kind of a shell game with money. Let's cut out the middle man and grow our own.

For those who doubt we can do that, I want to refer them to a little company in Grays Harbor, Washington, and I like to tell a little story about this company.

This is a picture of the Imperium Biofuels biodiesel plant in Grays Harbor, Washington. It is on the coast of Washington State. Imperium Biofuels is the largest biodiesel plant in the world, and it is in Washington State. It produces 100 million gallons of biodiesel, principally using canola oil, some additional oils that they are using, soybean and a couple of others. This company started from a guy in Seattle, Washington, who was a pilot, who got tired of flying airplanes, he got bored of flying airplanes and decided he would start an energy company. He started brewing up biodiesel in his garage. And the part of this story I like is he went to the Rainier Brewing Company and he got two old brewing vats from the Rainier Brewing Company, and he started brewing up biodiesel. What a great can-do story. He went out and raised some capital and now built the largest biodiesel plant in the world, and plans on building 10 or 20 more of these.

Now, with the capacity of biodiesel and with advanced forms of ethanol, and I am talking about advanced forms of ethanol, we have the capacity to provide 25 to 30 percent of all our transportation fuels from homegrown United States crops without jeopardizing our food chain, without jeopardizing the production of our domestic food supplies. And the reason for this is, and if you talk to John Plaza he will tell you about this, we have the capability of using whole new types of biofuels. We know we use corn ethanol now. But we only use the seed of the corn. We only use the kernel. We are now going to have cellulosic ethanol which uses the whole plant, all of the carbohydrates, from the stalk, the stem, what they call the corn stover, from wheat chaff that is now left on the ground. There is a company called Iogen in Idaho that is planning to bale it up and make that into cellulosic ethanol. When we do this, we will be able to produce a significant part of our transportation fuel.

So this is our fifth step. It is common sense. It is home grown. And for those who have heard a lot of controversy about corn ethanol, I have been talking to the scientists on this. You will be blown away by what is coming. There are crops now in development, one called miscanthus by a company called Mendel Biotechnology in Hayward, California. It is a crop they have developed that is four to five times more productive than corn per acre of ethanol. Now when farmers can start selling four to five times more ethanol per acre than they are today, we will decrease the pressure on our land. This crop uses less fertilizer and less water than corn today. So we look at corn ethanol as sort of the DC-3 of biofuels. It is a start. We are going to move forward to the Boeing 787, which is cellulosic ethanol.

What is neat about this is a lot of these things are happening in areas that have previously been quite depressed. This is an area that has really been hurt when the timber industry has had some tough times. And now we have got this, and there are two other very green industries that have developed in Grays Harbor, Washington.

You look around the Midwest where the ethanol plants have gone up, these communities have really revitalized. A lot of them have been using co-ops. This is not all money from Wall Street. These are co-ops where people have banded together and built their own industry. It is a very unifying experience when these communities do this.

We see this happening in the inner city where we are developing green collar jobs, where we are improving the efficiency of older buildings. When you have a green collar job to rebuild a building to make it energy efficient, that job doesn't get shipped to China.

It is right here. It is a local green collar job. That is why we are excited about that.

We talked about the five steps we took last Thursday: number one, auto efficiency, which we are calling for; number two, commonsense tax fairness to move some of these things away from oil and gas to these new businesses and consumers to help them; number three, the renewable energy standards so we can have clean energy electricity; number four, the efficiency standards that Mike and Meg Town used to such effect to allow your home to be efficient; and, number five, the renewable fuels standard where we are calling for advanced fuels.

And by the way, our renewable fuels standard requires these advanced biofuels. It requires about two-thirds of this to be from these advanced forms, not just corn ethanol, but advanced forms of ethanol in the future. So those are five significant steps.

Just to note how significant they are, there has been an independent group that evaluates energy policy that has evaluated a very similar plan to this and concluded that when this plan is implemented, it will save more carbon dioxide from going into the atmosphere, the principal global warming gas, than all of our cars and trucks are putting into the atmosphere today. This is a big, big deal. We know we have to reduce our carbon dioxide by probably 80 percent by the year 2050 to prevent carbon dioxide from going over twice preindustrial levels. This is about maybe 35 or more percent of the way we need to go. So it is a very significant first five steps on that path.

For those who are interested in this subject, I want to congratulate Vice President Al Gore for winning the Nobel Peace Prize. I read his acceptance speech, which anyone who is interested in the subject I would recommend it to them. It is available on some Web site somewhere. It is a brilliant statement of the planetary emergency we now have, and I would encourage people to take a look at it because it will give you a sense of urgency that we have.

Well, this is why this is something that can unify us, because it is an economic growth plan, it is something that can unify us, red State, blue State, urban, rural, all of us can get behind economic development. And we have seen instances of that tonight when we have talked about that. I think the bill that we have promoted ought to be able to promote that economic development in rural and urban areas, red and blue States. I really think it is a unifying message.

We mentioned these five steps, but there is a giant leap for mankind that will be on our plate when we return in January, that is, we have to find a way to limit the amount of carbon dioxide that is going into the atmosphere. And the ultimate way to do that is what we call a cap- and-trade system, which we hope to embrace and pass in this House next year.

A cap-and-trade system does two things. First, it caps the amount of total carbon that goes into the atmosphere, the total amount of pollution, the total amounts of carbon dioxide and methane that contribute to global climate change. And we have done this in a variety of pollutants, particularly sulfur dioxide, which we have a cap on. Previous Congresses have put a cap on sulfur dioxide. But we have a giant loophole in that there is no cap today for carbon dioxide and some of these other global warming gases.

So next year, we will be working on a plan to cap the total amount of these global warming gases that go into the atmosphere and give the Americans the confidence and the security to know that their grandkids aren't going to be exposed to runaway climate change associated with global warming. And then we are going to insist that polluting industries that put that pollution in the air have to pay for that. They can't do it for free any more.

Essentially, they have been using the atmosphere like a private garbage dump, like they back their truck full of junk and dump it into your county park. We don't let them do that, dump their junk in our county park, and we are not going to let them dump their CO2 in the atmosphere any more with zero cost.

So there will be a charge associated with that and that will be tradable amongst industries to make it efficient. So when we adopt this cap-and-trade system, we will truly have the ultimate incentive for the geniuses of America to create these technologies, and we will be looking for people's input on this. We hope to have a bipartisan bill to do this, because there is no Republican or Democrat, or shouldn't be in this debate. We want to have something that all our kids can have a future on and we hope to do that. So, Mr. Klein, I wonder if you have any final comments.

Well, we have a ways to go, but we have made five maybe not-

so-small steps for a few people here in Congress and in America. We have one giant leap for mankind to come. But we have got a great start, and this is going to help Americans, both their environment, their security and their economy, and that is three bold steps.

Thanks for your participation, Mr. Klein.

Mr. Speaker, every revolution has a start. May 25, 1961, John F. Kennedy, with full confidence in Americans' ability to innovate, said we are going to go to the Moon in 10 years.

Skip ahead a few years, December 6, 2007, the day we are starting a clean energy revolution to give America economic growth through technological progress, and that progress is happening all across America. In every State, that progress is going to take place, because this bill is going to help innovators.

Let's take a quick run-through where: In Michigan, where General Motors plans on building the plug-in hybrid that you can drive 40 miles with zero gasoline and get 100 miles per gallon with batteries designed in Massachusetts.

In Florida, California, Arizona, Mississippi, a whole host of States, where the Ausra Technology Company has designed a solar thermal process to make C02-free solar energy within 10 years to be competitive with coal-based electricity. For those who say we can't do energy everywhere, where the sun shines, solar thermal energy will work, including in my State, the State of Washington.

We move forward, virtually every State in the country has the potential for biofuels, and here is a picture of the Imperium Biofuels Company. It is located in a former dying timber town of Grays Harbor, Washington. It is the largest biodiesel plant in the world, something America can be proud about, that we will expand.

And lastly, emerging technologies, some of which people have not heard about. This is a picture of a wave power buoy on the coast of Oregon. We have enough energy in the Pacific coast in a 10-by-10 mile stretch to power all of the electrical needs of the State of California. And this doesn't even start to talk about gains from efficiency.

This bill will help Americans insulate their homes, make sure they are using fairly efficient lighting, and make sure that their furnaces and air conditioning are efficient. And a new report just out this week says that we can cut by 50 percent our growth. Pass this bill and start this clean energy revolution.

Madam Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and agree to the resolution (H. Res. 837) providing for the concurrence by the House in the Senate amendment to H.R. 710, with amendments.

Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members have 5 legislative days to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material on the resolution under consideration.

Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Madam Speaker, we're here today to pass the Charlie W. Norwood Living Kidney Donation Clarification Act. And like many of my colleagues, I was pleased when this bill finally first passed the House in March, and I'm happy to report now that we have an agreement with both Chambers of a provision that can pass and be signed by the President into law.

We all suffered a great loss with Dr. Norwood's loss, and we know he was the recipient of a lung transplant himself and was a committed champion of these causes while serving in Congress. So in addition to helping thousands of Americans today in a way to enhance the prospects of living donations, this bill will be a fitting tribute to Dr. Norwood and his efforts.

I also want to thank the Energy and Commerce Committee staff who've worked diligently on this for months, Jessica McNiece, Pete Goodloe, Katherine Martin and Ryan Long, getting this bill in a condition where it can be signed into law.

As many of my colleagues know, this legislation will clarify the procedure commonly known as paired organ donation to make clear that it is legal and, in doing so, will provide hope to thousands of Americans who now are waiting for transplants, particularly kidney transplants, across the United States. Paired organ donation will make it possible for thousands of people who wish to donate a kidney to a spouse, a family member or a friend but find that they're not medically compatible, still allowing them to become living kidney donors.

As of this afternoon, there are fully 97,000 candidates for organ donations waiting on the national waiting list. But there are only 28,931 transplants performed in total of 2006, and only 6,730 were from living donors. Clearly, we've got work to do.

This resolution will take a significant step towards reducing the number of patients on the waiting list and give much more hope for others to hope that, and know that their wait will not be endless.

It's imperative we make absolutely clear that there's no intent by Congress to bar this procedure. Simply put, we want this legislation to save lives immediately, and it will do so when enacted.

I also want to take a moment to salute and thank Dr. Connie Davis, who's a constituent and a friend and a very knowledgeable transplant physician from the University of Washington in Seattle. In addition to her years of caring for local transplant donors and recipients, she's advised me and others on transplant issues as chairwoman of the American Society of Transplantation, the largest organization in the world representing professionals engaged in the field of solid organ transplantation. And her help has been invaluable in putting this legislation together and making sure that those 90,000 patients get access.

So for those thousands of patients waiting today who spend costly and often arduous time on dialysis treatment, their time on the waiting list can be significantly shortened with passage of this bill.

And I want to thank my colleagues across the aisle who worked on this, Nathan Deal and others.

Madam Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

I yield back the balance of my time, Madam Speaker.

Madam Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Madam Speaker, I have come to the House floor tonight to really share some great news, and that doesn't always happen in this Chamber, and the great news is that this week we hope to take a major step forward in our effort to revolutionize the energy economy of America to bring it to a place where we can use the genius of Americans to break our addiction to Middle Eastern oil, to stop global warming, and to grow millions of good-paying green collar jobs in this country. And tomorrow or the next day we hope to have on the floor a bill that will take major strides in that direction to start facing these challenges and really recognizing the economic potential of a clean energy revolution for this country.

We have challenges associated with energy, but we who will bring this bill to the floor believe that we also have opportunities involving energy. And those of us who will be supporting this energy bill believe that we need to look at this from an optimistic, visionary, progressive can-do spirit. And if we hearken to the can-do spirit of Americans, we are going to revolutionize the way we create and use energy in this country. And when we do that, we are going to grow millions of jobs in the process.

If I can briefly just talk about the challenges that we face, and perhaps they are obvious, but I think it is important at least to note them, about why we need a new energy policy in this country. And let me start with the one that perhaps is most obvious to us, and that is that our addiction to Middle Eastern oil threatens our security. It's not a very wise policy. And we were just being briefed by a vice admiral of the United States Navy retired just about 15 minutes ago on this subject. He pointed out that it's not a very good strategic decision to be sending just under $1 million a minute of our money to people who are attacking us in the Middle East.

Funding your enemies is not known as a particularly brilliant strategic move. And Americans know that our national security is at risk as long as we are on the addiction train for the oil coming out of the Mid East.

So we know there is a security reason for our trying to move to a more energy independent position where we are less dependent on oil to run our economy.

Second, we know that global warming is a challenge. I'm certainly aware of this. I represent a district just north of Seattle. My county got 9 inches of rain in 24 hours the day before yesterday. And you will turn on your TV tonight, and you will see these floods. These floods and precipitation events are consistent with the models of what we will see more frequently in the Pacific Northwest with global warming.

We don't want to see that happen. We're seeing it, the last 2 years, we've had these things happen. Mount Rainier National Park was shut down for the first time in 100 years last year because of one of these horrendous rainstorms.

We know that we've seen one million miles of the Arctic melt, just disappear this year, the size of six Californias disappear. We know we have a problem with global warming; we've got to face up to it.

And third, we know that we have a loss of jobs in this country. We've seen a shrinking of our manufacturing base. We've seen outsourcing of our jobs across the world. We're seeing enormous imports coming in from China and exports not going back. So we need to reorient our economy so that we can develop products for export to the rest of the world. And guess what? We have the perfect opportunity to do that in developing clean energy technologies so we can rebuild our economy, and there is a great way to do it.

I want to start by talking about the tremendous strides that Americans are making today in building a new clean energy transportation system for the United States. Now, I get really excited about this. For one reason, two days ago I was in Anaheim, California, at the electric car convention, the 23rd convention of the Electric Car Association in Anaheim, California; and I was blown away by the progress that's being made in the electrification of the automobile.

Now, we have, frankly, not made much progress in increasing the efficiency of our cars since the early 1980s. We did a tremendous thing in the seventies and eighties: we increased our fuel efficiency by over 60 percent in about 5 to 6 years, but then we stopped. Congress stopped, the President stopped, we stopped dead in our tracks from making any progress on fuel efficiency.

Well, for 30 years now we haven't made one mile a gallon improvement. Think about how pathetic that is. Since 1983, we've started the Internet, mapped the human genome, we've even invented the cup holder for our cars; but we haven't improved the mileage they're getting by even 1 mile a gallon. Well, this week, tomorrow or the next day, we hope to pass on this floor a provision that will make the first improvements in 30 years in our automobile efficiency standards that were so incredibly successful in the early years. We need to simply start getting back up on that improvement train because that's what America is about, which is constant improvement.

And we intend to raise it to 35 miles a gallon, which is certainly obtainable, and I'll talk about why we know it's obtainable in a few minutes. We know that's a very obtainable goal, and we hope to pass that. And this is why this is important. I did a little research on this; I've done a lot of research on this. I actually just recently wrote a book about this, so this is where I got a lot of this information. When you write a book about things, you tend to go out and ask a lot of people questions. And what I learned was that if we had simply continued making the same improvements in mileage that we made from 1976 to 1983, if we had simply continued on that rate of improvement, we would be free of Saudi Arabian oil today. Think of what that would have meant to our national security if we were free of that oil influence in our foreign policy. Well, we have to get back in that good habit of expecting more fuel efficient cars.

Now, we know this is capable of happening because we know essentially the technology has become better in our cars; it has simply gone to power and some other things rather than fuel efficiency. But this 35- mile-a-gallon standard I know is achievable because today I am driving a car that gets 45 miles a gallon. This car, it's convenient, it's safe, it carries five people comfortably. I'm 6 foot-2 inches, 200 pounds. It carries me and a big cherry tree in the back very conveniently. So we don't even have to wait until 2020 or 2022 to do this; we have cars that can do this today. But we know that we're going to make transitions, both in cars and trucks of all sizes, to move to more efficiency.

But I'll tell you what's coming. What's coming very shortly is not just these little incremental half-mile, one-mile, two-mile-a-gallon improvements. What is coming is wholesale giant leaps forward in automobile efficiency. And I want to show you why I know that's going to happen, or believe it's going to happen.

This is a picture of a car, the GM Volt. The GM Volt is a car that General Motors hopes to put into mass production in 5 years or so. It would be the first American mass production plug-in hybrid car. The GM Volt is a plug-in hybrid car. And the way a plug-in hybrid car works is ingenious. It has a hybrid system which runs, essentially, the wheels with electric motors. And a hybrid system works partly on an electrical battery system and part on an internal combustion engine that right now is burning gasoline, and some day will burn cellulosic ethanol or biodiesel. But what a plug-in hybrid does is it allows you to charge your batteries at night, and then for about 40 miles all you use is electricity.

So when the GM Volt comes out, you will be able to plug in your car in your garage, unplug it tonight, go about your business. For the first 40 miles, it's all electric; no carbon dioxide coming out of your tailpipe, no gasoline being burned whatsoever. And the daily usage of a car for 60 percent of Americans is less than 40 miles in one day. So when these cars become available in widespread availability, 60 percent of the trips of Americans could be all electric, without using a drop of gasoline.

Now, what happens after 40 miles is you essentially then burn either gasoline, or at some point ethanol or biodiesel, with a combination of the remaining juice in the battery to go the rest of your mileage, with just as much total range as you originally would experience with our normal cars. And when you do this, the combination of that juice in your battery you're plugged in with, and if you run the whole tank dry, you're going to get over 100 miles a gallon of gasoline. And there are cars today doing this. There are several hundred cars already doing this on the road across the country, running these plug-ins. There is quite a number of them that are Toyota Prius conversions that have been converted into these plug-in hybrids.

Now, this is not just some pipe dream. I asked GM to bring this car to Capitol Hill and they showed it to my colleagues a couple of months ago. It was at the car convention yesterday, and people were looking at it like it was the hottest thing on wheels at this convention, because it is. It gives us the opportunity to make a serious break of our addiction to Middle Eastern oil. And it gives Americans the ability to drive a car for 1 to 2 cents a mile for energy from electricity. Gasoline is costing anywhere from 9 to 12 cents a mile to operate a car right now.

So this is a tremendous break for Americans, when these cars get on the road. And we'll be talking about 100 miles a gallon of gasoline, not just 35 in our CAFE standard. GM has hundreds of millions of dollars in investment in this vehicle, and we know that this is a very serious effort in this regard.

Now, there are a couple of virtues I would like to talk about. This car gets better with age, and I'll tell you how. When you use electricity off the grid, you know, some of the electricity is produced with coal that is putting in carbon dioxide in the air and is adding to global warming gases. But as the grid becomes greener, which it will as we use more solar thermal power and as we use more wind power, the energy, the electrical juice we use, will become greener and your car will become greener. It will become a better car, a more efficient car. Now, there are only two things I know of in life that gets better over time, wine, and plug-in hybrid cars. So we're very excited about the progress of this.

I'll give you another little bonus. When you have a car like this, you can rent your batteries to the utility companies. And the utility companies are very excited about being able to ignite, when you're charging your batteries, essentially store their energy in your battery and then draw it back out, if you're not driving your car. They call it a load-leveling service. And they will pay you money for the right to use your battery. And some economists have suggested it could be a value of $2,000 to $3,000 a year. So that's a pretty sweet deal, potentially being paid by your utility company to really move forward.

So this thing is knocking them dead at the convention, and for good reason. And it shows why this 35-mile-a-gallon potential is very, very achievable. And I'm going to be very excited when we get this bill up on the floor.

With that, I would like to yield to my good friend, George Miller, who has been leading this visionary effort for years here in the U.S. Congress.

Would the gentleman yield for a minute on that point?

I think that's a really important point, that when you embark on a technological effort like this, like the original Apollo Project, we called our bill the New Apollo Energy Project because we understood when we embark on a technological journey like this, we develop all these new subordinate incidental technologies, and we've seen all the benefits from the Apollo Project.

The secret of this car is the battery technology, really. Now, there is some really cool stuff. This glass weighs probably 70 percent less than normal glass. These tires are superefficient because of the way they are designed. There is a lot of weight-saving devices. But the real genius is in the battery. There is a company called A123 Battery. A bunch of folks started it from MIT in Massachusetts. Now they are manufacturing a lithium ion battery that you use right now in your drill. You are using your big drill. Those are lithium, the new hot ones. ``Hot,'' meaning they work, not meaning that they are physically hot. They've taken those batteries and now designed one to work in a car. And I point this out because I talked to a young man named Luke, and I am embarrassed I can't remember his last name, yesterday in Anaheim, and he was with this A123 Battery company. And I said what is the status of this? He said that it is going gangbusters. I am working in a way that all we have to do is put them in a rectangular situation rather than a cylindrical. But the look in this kid's eyes. He is in his upper twenties, and he is managing this project in his upper twenties. The look in his eyes were just glowing with this development of this brand new stuff. And he was jumping up and down being so excited. And that is the kind of spirit that we have the capability of igniting again.

Well, actually, the bill, as I understand, will not be writing off nuclear energy. It has been difficult to grow largely in cost. The utilities simply have not purchased it because of its cost even though it has been very heavily subsidized by the taxpayer to the tune of billions of dollars; it still has remained so expensive, the utilities have simply not ordered new plants. It was really not Jane Fonda that ended the growth of the industry; it was simply the cost and economics of it. And this bill does not eliminate that that will be on the floor in the next week.

I want to address, I know, the gentleman from California, and a lot of these good ideas have come from California. Certainly Governor Schwarzenegger has been active in supporting this effort to move to more fuel-efficient standards, and many of them are in California.

I want to address something electricity quick, and then I want to yield to Mr. Blumenauer if I can. The gentleman has pointed out that if you are going to have plug-in hybrids, then you have to have electricity to run the plug-in hybrids. But tonight we are going to have some discussion about the multiple systems of clean ways to generate electricity. I want to point to one of them, a company that I have learned about, a company called AUSRA Energy, and their name came up when we were debating the renewable electrical standard.

In this bill, we have a provision that calls for 15 percent of our energy to come from clean, renewable sources by the year 2020, 15 percent clean renewable sources, and a quarter of that can also come from efficiency standards. So I was talking some time ago to some of my colleagues about this from the State of Florida in August when we had the first version of this bill, and my colleagues were expressing the concern that we couldn't do solar energy, for instance, in Florida. Now, that surprised me, because I thought on the license plates it says ``The Sunshine State.'' Nonetheless, Florida does not have as perfect solar energy as does Arizona. There are a few more clouds in Florida. It is maybe 10 percent not as productive as Arizona.

But a week after that conversation, I found a company called AUSRA Energy had signed a contract with a Florida public utility for I believe it is in the nature of a couple hundred megawatts, enough for thousands of homes, both in Florida and in California. And what this company does, this AUSRA company, it uses flat panel mirrors which are in these long rows oriented toward the sun. They are inclined toward a pipe. There is a pipe that is elevated towards these mirrors. It focuses the rays of the sun on that pipe. It heats the water. The water develops steam, the steam turns the turbine, and presto, you have electricity with zero CO2 emissions, zero CO2 emissions, and zero gasoline imports from the Middle East.

And I have looked very carefully at their projections of cost. They have a very realistic path to get to a position to produce electricity as cheaply as coal within the next decade or so. Now, this company is real. It is not a bunch of people in teepees just thinking about this. They have signed commercial contracts for the production of this electricity using this technology.

Now the reason this is so exciting to me is that previously, we have talked for years about photovoltaic energy. And most people who think about solar energy think of photovoltaic, which are basically panels that directly produce electricity from the silicone-based panels, and those are making strides that are very significant with what is called thin-celled photovoltaics. But here is an entirely new way of producing electricity using essentially radiant power, thermal power from the sun, heat to heat energy, and these work really well in tandem with natural gas producers. So we have multiple ways. We will talk about some of these others. And these new technologies just keep popping up.

I want to yield to Mr. Blumenauer, a leader from Portland, Oregon, which has been a great city to demonstrate how to use energy efficiently. It is the first city in America to develop a transportation system that gives people choices about how to move around the city, and as a result, it is the first city in America where people have driven less in 1 year ever in American history, and that is because of, in part, Mr. Blumenauer's leadership helping develop some of the land use planning and public transportation systems, besides being a great advocate for bicycle riding.

I really appreciate Mr. Blumenauer's observation because it is so true. What we have seen, where we do have military product development then spins off into the civilian sector to all of our benefit. We are going to see that now. Right now the Pentagon is helping to develop a biofuels-based airplane fuel. They are very excited about not being dependent on Middle Eastern oil for the security operations of our own military, and they want to develop a biofuels-based airlines fuel. Boeing is doing the same thing on a civilian basis. They have entered into a consortium with Sir Richard Branson to develop a homegrown biofuel so you can run a jet engine. And the reason it is right to be optimistic about these things is the phenomena that Mr. Blumenauer talked about, and that is that things get cheaper as we build more of them and we learn more about technology.

Solar power, every time we have increased the number of units we have sold of solar power, the prices come down 20 percent. There is a curve. You can watch the price come down. It has come down over 80 percent in the last 2 decades. Over 80 percent. And the reason is, besides the fact you discover new techniques, you simply have scales of economy; the more you make of this stuff, the less it is per unit. And that is going to be true predictably for solar thermal as well as the continuation of the photovoltaic world. When we do that, the thing I want to focus on is we want to sell this technology to China.

We want to start putting stuff in boats and shipping it to China and India. We want to take the GM Volt and ship it to Japan. Let's start exporting these things that we grow here with homegrown technology. We know we can do that. We have done it in the past because of good old American know-how.

I want to tell one story about good old American know-how. This is a guy I got to know. We talked about electricity as a source of fuel for transportation. But there are others. There's a guy named John Plaza I met in the course of working on this. John Plaza was an airline pilot 4 or 5 years ago.

Mr. Blumenauer, any closing comments before you go?

We know you're going to produce a great bill for us tomorrow or the next day. Thank you for joining us.

The story of John Plaza is, to me, just a perfect example of what America is about and why this is such a great economy and a great Nation. John was an airline pilot several years ago and he said he got a little tired of flying across the country and reading a book in the cockpit, to the extent that is allowed. He decided to look around for a new opportunity to sort of do something creative.

He started to think about the ability to use biofuels to run our transportation system. John was one of the first people to make biodiesel. He started to essentially brew up biodiesel almost in his garage just a few years ago. Then he decided to make a commercial operation. So he went out and raised some money from a fellow named Matthew Tobias, who did well at Microsoft. They went out, and this is one of the part of the stories I like, they bought two big vats that were used at the Rainier Brewing Company to brew beer. They took those vats and they started to brew biodiesel in a little warehouse on the shores of the Duwamish River in Seattle.

That went so well that they went out to the capital markets and raised tens of millions of dollars to build a real first-class biodiesel facility. Now, in Grays Harbor, Washington, and this is a picture of the Imperium Energy Biodiesel plant, you will see these large tanks used for storage. The Imperium Biodiesel Company now has the capability of producing 100 million gallons a year of biodiesel. It is the largest biodiesel refinery in the world, and it started because one fellow, John Plaza, had this idea and a can-do spirit and optimism and courage enough to go out and start a business to do this.

Now, this is what America is all about. When we pass an energy bill, the kind of things we are going to do are going to help these small business people to start businesses and grow them in the field of clean energy. Now, this company has plans to build perhaps 20 refineries around the country. It is a realistic, a realistic goal to believe that we can produce 25 percent of our transportation fuels in the next 20 years or so by having homegrown biodiesel-advanced forms of ethanol and really make a dent in our oil addiction.

Now I want to, if I can, address for a minute the prospects for these biofuels because I know people have heard about corn ethanol and people have raised concerns that it's not the last word in ethanol. And it is true. Twenty-three percent of our corn now goes to the production of ethanol. It's producing high quality, effective fuel and it's working very, very well. It has some limitations in that we only use the kernel of the corn now. We only use a small percentage of the total fiber that the plants produces.

But on the horizon is an advanced form of ethanol called cellulosic ethanol. Cellulosic ethanol is an ethanol where you take the entire plant, kernel, leaves, shoots, roots, stems, stalk, corn stover, wheat straw, everything you can get your hands on, you mash it up, you mix it with an enzyme that helps break down the fibrous structure of the plants, freeze the carbohydrates. You then use the carbohydrates to distill it into alcohol or ethanol, and ethanol is an alcohol, and basically make high-quality fuel.

Now, cellulosic ethanol, the first plant in America for commercially produced cellulosic ethanol, ground was broken for it the week before last. The Range Company in Georgia is the first one that has the capability of building this advanced form of ethanol. When we do that, we will improve the amount of fuel we produce per acre by a factor of four to five times, potentially, over what we are producing in

corn today, using advanced enzymes and using potentially some additional crops besides corn.

A company called Mendel Biotechnology in Hayward, I visited a few weeks ago, they have developed a plant called miscanthus. Miscanthus is a relative of sugar cane, which can grow through wide, wide areas of the Midwest. It's 10 to 12 feet tall. It uses less fertilizer than corn, it uses less water than corn, and it can produce three to four times as much fuel per acre using the cellulosic ethanol technique. They are now growing test plots of that to see how far north basically this can be grown and in what conditions.

That is not the only plant. There are several other plants. In Idaho, the first loan guarantee has been given to the Iogen Company, among six counties across the country to use essentially wheat straw left in the field as waste. They are going to bundle that up, bale it up, expose it to an enzyme, and do cellulosic ethanol using what was previously a waste product.

By the way, I misspoke. The Range Company in Georgia does not use an enzyme; they use a reactive process. It's a little different than that use of an enzyme to break down the cell structure. Both of them use basically the entire fibrous part of the plant.

The point is that corn ethanol can perhaps be considered as the first generation of biofuels. It is successful, doing a great job, with certain limits that we need to get past, and we can and will get past them if we simply use our know-how. That is what we are doing across the country in these companies, which reminds me of kind of a basic principle. The idea of our energy bill, in part, that we will be passing we hope this week, takes a position that we need to make a fundamental shift on how we think about energy. In the past, all we did was look below our feet for energy. Now we need to start looking above our shoulders and between our ears because ultimately it's intellectual capability and intellectual capacity that is the only infinite power of energy in the universe. That is what we are starting to use. And that is why America is going to do so well in the clean energy revolution, because when there is a transition technologically, America wins. When there is a transition to aeronautics, we win, as we have done with Boeing. When there is a transition to software, we win, as we have done with all our software businesses in this country. We are going to win in this clean energy transition because we do well in developing these technologies, some of which we have talked about tonight.

Now, besides biofuels, there's additional fuels under consideration. We know fuel cells have the potential to use hydrogen, which is under active consideration. At least one company will be bringing a commercial hydrogen fuel cell car to the roads in the next 2 years. There are fleets now using hydrogen fuel cells.

This is a bus transit system in the East Bay area of San Francisco. This is one of the first hydrogen fuel cell buses. They run it over a catalytic bed and they produce electricity and water. That is it. The only thing coming out of the tail pipe of this bus is water. I got the honor of the first Congressman to ever drive a bus, and I didn't hit anything. So it was a success. And I can warrant these are clean, wonderfully quiet, and people are enjoying them today down in the East Bay area.

These fuel cells, because there is an issue about the distribution of hydrogen; it's going to cost money to build a distribution system for hydrogen. They are probably going to happen first in large fleets like buses and transportation systems. But I think there is good reason to believe that we are going to see a lot more use of this in the next decade or so, particularly in these fleets, further application. So we have lots of alternatives.

Yes.

I appreciate Mr. Rohrabacher's comments. I won't make any cracks about the need to improve the imitation. Your Governor is doing great work on this. I appreciate your sentiments.

I want to mention a point. There is a technology I had not heard of. You have mentioned this inventor who's working on this in California. One of the things that is so much fun is you learn about people doing this great work around the country. That particular invention, who knows, it may not go anywhere. Some of the things we have talked about tonight may not pan out to be commercially available. But if we have a strategy that spreads our bets and looks at multiple sources like any good investor does, you spread your investments around, some are going to work out really well, some are going to be just kind of okay, and some of them are going to be duds. And we are going to experience that in this. But because of the genius around the country, we are going to have a lot of successes. So I appreciate your comments Mr. Rohrabacher.

I just want to point out a couple of other new cutting-edge technologies people may not have heard about that can help fulfill our need for a 15 percent renewable electric standard. This is a picture of wave-power buoys that are now going off the coast of Oregon, the first ones in the country to harness the power in waves. There's enormous energy in waves. If you have ever seen a big freighter go up and down, you understand how powerful the sea is just going up and down.

There's enough energy in a stretch off the coast of the Pacific in just a 10- by 10-mile square. If you just took a 10- by 10-mile square and captured the energy from those waves, it would produce all the electricity for California. Now we are not talking about doing that, but what is under investigation right now is the ability to use this type, and there are two or three types of these buoys, and as they bob up and down, they pressurize a column of water or hydraulic fluid or air and turn an electrical generator that runs in a wire to the shore, and you have got electricity. One of these buoys could power potentially a thousand homes. They are quite powerful.

Ultimately, they are being tested right now and we're finding there's actually more energy than we even thought. That means more stresses. We are learning a lot about the stresses, on how you deal with those stresses. But the Department of Energy has testified to us that they believe that wave power could produce 10 percent of our entire electrical needs in this country in the next couple decades. Now that is very significant. It's just this new idea.

Tidal power is a similar effort. I have a picture of that. We have tidal power that also uses a turbine that looks like a wind turbine and also can produce electricity.

One more comment I want to make about the best source of energy, and that is energy that we don't waste. Energy conservation and energy efficiency is what we need to call the first fuel. Energy that we don't waste is always the cheapest energy to buy.

Finding a way not to let energy escape from our house is almost always the cheapest way to save money on energy.

I just want to point out a couple, Mike and Meg Town. Mike is a teacher at Redmond High School near the Seattle area. Mike and Meg a couple years ago decided to build a home that was essentially a net zero user of electricity, in part because Mike, who was a science teacher, was always talking about this, and one day his kids said, Why don't you go build a house that does this? So he did.

Mike and Meg built a house in very wet, soggy Redmond, Washington. It is one of the wetter areas around. And what they did was they incorporated some sort of commonsense measures into their home to make it very energy efficient, with extra insulation, good windows, just sort of commonsense things, not to let air leak out from your doors, a decently insulated hot-water heater, some planting to allow solar energy to come in to heat up the home. They then put on some panels. You see these black panels on the roof, Mike actually put these on himself.

Now this is a home in wet, rainy near Seattle, Washington, that is a zero net electricity user, saving money, because his meter runs backwards. When these photovoltaic cells are producing electricity, his electric meter runs backwards. That means he is getting a credit against his electricity bill. Now he has essentially, taking into consideration some of the credits he is receiving, a zero electrical bill.

His heat, he has a very small little heater that one of these days he is going to burn wood chips, and wood chips are a biosustainable fuel, because when you burn a biological product, all you do is return CO2 to the atmosphere that the tree or the grass took out.

I point this out because here is people doing real things in a rainy climate, saving energy the old-fashioned way, just doing kind of commonsense things, and our bill calls for provisions that will increase the standards in our homes and our appliances so that we will not waste energy. It is the first fuel, and we are going to use it in a very commonsense American way, and it is going to be a major, major part of our effort to revolutionize our energy system.

So I look forward this week to making a major step forward in the field of energy. We are going to unleash the forces of market and the entrepreneurs around the country, and the homeowners who want to save on energy bills, and the people who are getting tired of paying $3-plus for a gallon of gasoline, and the people who do not want to be addicted to Middle Eastern oil so we don't have to be exposed to security threats from that region, and the people who don't want to fund the terrorists who are attacking us, and the people who see the future of global warming as being a threat to our grandchildren.

This is something that you can unite the Nation, red and blue States, rural and urban. This helps inner-cities, it helps rural communities. It is something I hope we get broad support for.

It is going to be a great day for America when we start this clean energy revolution. It is truly something in the American can-do spirit.

Madam Speaker, this week, I was honored in my D.C. office by a visit from hard-working faculty and teachers from the Northshore School District. The U.S. Department of Education has awarded Inglemoor High School with the prestigious Blue Ribbon Award. Principal Vicki Sherwood led the school to this merit by ensuring that students had a high, consistent performance in reading and math.

Inglemoor has been successful in providing a range of educational programs to fit a variety of students' needs. From offering rigorous international curriculum to delivering educational services for students with special needs, the staff is willing to provide creative educational support.

I grew up in a family of educators where my father and four members of my immediate family were teachers. My son followed their footsteps and earned his teaching degree. As a parent, I know what it is like to seek for your kids the best education possible and this passion inspired my public service. It takes a great deal of commitment to provide a quality education. Let us today honor the staff and faculty of the Northshore School District and applaud them because reaching the Blue Ribbon-level of achievement is no easy task.

Mr. Speaker, last Friday, the FCC held the last of six public hearings about proposed changes to media ownership rules. They did so in Seattle after I called for that meeting so that people in the State of Washington could let their government know what they thought. It was really an unbelievable showing at this hearing. The FCC callously only gave them 5 days' notice. But still it is estimated that 1,000 people showed up on a Friday night for a 9-hour hearing that ended up at 1 a.m. on Saturday morning.

Most Friday nights Americans won't be going out to hearings. But in Puget Sound country, and indeed across the country, people understand how important a media consolidation could be as a threat to our diversity and our democracy, and 1,000 people showed up to testify. I encouraged my constituents to attend. I want to credit Reclaim the Media, the Free Press and the Seattle Times who also got the word out about this important hearing.

At the hearing, FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein prophetically stated that if the FCC quickly proposed a new rule, ``you know your input was dismissed.'' He was right, unfortunately. Despite the protestations of almost every single witness in Seattle on Friday displaying the overwhelming sentiment against this consolidation, on Tuesday, one business day later, Chairman Martin announced his plans to end a 32-year-old ban on radio and television broadcasters owning newspapers in the Nation's largest media markets, including right in Seattle where 1,000 people asked him not to do so.

The fact that Mr. Martin had an op-ed piece published in Tuesday's New York Times just a couple days later shows this was clearly a preordained decision and that appearance in Seattle was just a stunt, and, frankly, an insulting one to the citizens who attended. He went through the motions, but Seattle people did not.

Now, those people knew that weakening the ownership rules would allow the media landscape to be dominated by a few massive corporations, putting too much control in a few hands and producing a system where only the powerful can be heard in our democracy. It would lead to a lack of diversity of voices, programming that is out of touch with local concerns, as well as a continuation of the homogenization of our news and our entertainment.

Already, consolidation has brought us to the point where in the average radio market, two companies control 70 percent of market revenue. That is why the Senate voted to overturn the first try, the first run that Mr. Martin and then-Chairman Powell took in 2003 to loosen these rules. It is why a Federal court tossed out the ill- advised rules in the Prometheus decision, and it is why we need to stop a second attempt to do the same thing that 1,000 people in Seattle asked to be stopped.

Therefore, I am working with my colleague, Congressman Maurice Hinchey, to reintroduce our legislation that would derail Commissioner Martin's cross-ownership scheme that is so contrary to the wishes of the public. Mr. Martin claims that his proposal is a modest one. In fact, it would impact half of Americans who live in the top 20 media markets and could impact even more with possible waivers and exemptions. I wish 1,000 voices in Seattle and thousands more in hearings across the Nation would have knocked some sense into a particular commissioner, maybe three of them on the FCC who are heck- bent, or perhaps hell-bent, on loosening media consolidation rules.

Now that this Federal agency has disclosed its real plan to move ahead with a plan that runs so counter to public sentiment and the public interest, the time has come for Congress to weigh in. We are one voice that the

FCC can't tune out. It is time for Congress to act. Let's make sure the will of the American people is heard, not just this preordained stunt by an FCC commissioner.

Thanks, Mr. Blumenauer, for leading this discussion. You know, when people come through the Capitol here, you can see them beaming with pride of the Capitol, and it's because we lead the world in democracy and people feel good about this building. Now, they're going to have another reason to feel good about the U.S. Capitol and the House of Representatives, because we intend to be the greenest parliamentary Chamber in the world. And, in fact, we probably will become the first zero carbon, become a carbon-neutral legislative body, the first in the world. And that's something that America can take pride in. And we're accomplishing that because we want to, on a bipartisan basis, do these commonsense things to try to reduce our CO2 emissions.

And we're doing that. Switching from coal, first, to natural gas in our power plant, which reduces carbon dioxide something like 20 to 30 percent. We're then taking a look at the possibility of going to a totally renewable fuel of wood pellets grown in New Hampshire and some other places which would go to essentially zero CO2 on a net basis.

Under the leadership of Nancy Pelosi and Dan Beard, we're having a green cafeteria. A new contract's been let so our cafeteria reduces by 50 percent the matter of waste. And when you reduce waste, you quit using energy.

Yes.

And the importance of this waste disposal from a global warming position is that every time you reduce the amount of waste you throw away by a ton, you reduce the amount of carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere by two tons by not wasting all that production and energy associated with it.

So what we're doing in this House is doing what a picture I have here of Mike and Meg Town of their home in Redmond, Washington, one the rainiest places in the United States, who built a home that's essentially carbon neutral. By doing the same kinds of things they're doing in their house, we're now going to do in the people's House, which is to use some commonsense waste disposal systems, decent insulation, energy-efficient lighting, energy-efficient heating and cooling system. They use solar photovoltaics to get to a carbon neutral house.

People are doing this across the country. I'm proud to say we're starting to do it in this House. And I know I'd like to yield to Mr. Farr who can help us on that.

Well, the point I would like to make is to point out why these things are happening. They're happening because of leadership. We have leadership from the top with Speaker Nancy Pelosi who, when she assumed office I think in the first week or two, said we're going to have a green House of Representatives, and we're going to save money in the process. And she had a good leader, Dan Beard, take charge of this.

And the reason I point this out is that you look at, in corporate America we see similar leadership. The President of Dow Chemical, who 10 years ago basically said we're going to save money, they have now reduced their energy usage by at least 30 percent, and they intend to reduce it another 20 percent. And when I asked him, Why did you do this? He said, Really simple, it saves money.

British Petroleum, a petroleum and oil company under the leadership of former Chairman Sir Henry Brown, had reduced their usage of energy and saved $300 million and actually met what would have been their CO2 emissions target. It happens because of leadership.

And I want to comment on one thing the House is doing as well. We are committing to buying green electricity. That means electricity that is generated by non-CO2-emitting sources. And I just want to make a point. This is not something that is just a pipe dream; it is really happening.

I want to show two types of technology that are working today. One, I want to show a solar thermal technology. This is a solar thermal technology manufactured by the Ausra Energy Company. The Ausra Energy Company just signed contracts with the Florida Public Power and Light Company and the California Public Utility for over 400 megawatts. That's enough to do over 400,000 homes of pure CO2 solar energy. And the way this works is, they've discovered a way to manufacture mirrors that are flat, that are very inexpensive, that focus the radian energy of the sun on a pipe that has water or a liquid metal in it, very long sheaths here. This is several acres of mirrors. This hot water then makes steam, the steam makes CO2- emitting energy. And they intend to make this for prices competitive with coal within the decade.

Now, I point this out for our Members in the Chamber who think we can't do solar power in Florida. It's happening in Florida now, and in California. And if people think that this is some type of thing that just the hemp-wearing folks of America believe in, people are going to make money on this, because for every two acres of these mirrors, you can power 1,000 homes. This is not just to run your little fan, it's to run all of your electricity in your house. And that's what we intend to do in this House, because this House, under the leadership of Nancy Pelosi, understands the future of technology to allow this.

I want to point out just one other technology that has the capability of helping in this regard, and I will show just a quick story.

This is a picture of the Imperium biodiesel company. It's called Imperium Energy. It's in Grays Harbor, WA. You see these tanks here; this is where biodiesel, which is essentially a zero CO2- emitting biodiesel plant, that's in a former failing lumber town that has now reinvigorated the economy of Grays Harbor, WA. It happened because a guy named John Plaza had the guts and the vision to go out and buy some old vats from the Rainier Brewery in Seattle, WA, I used to be a fan of Rainier Brewery, for various reasons, and built himself, in his garage, in a little warehouse, a biodiesel plant, then went out and raised some venture capital and has now built the largest biodiesel plant in the world in Grays Harbor, Washington. And he is now going to be providing biodiesel, going to probably have 10 to 30 plants like this around the country.

Now, our proposal in the House to go to a green economy is based on the genius of guys like John Plaza, who know how to blend technology with venture capital and go out and make a buck and help us provide green technology. And this is what we're doing in the House, and I'm excited about it. And I think there is a reason to be proud of it.

I wonder if I could yield to Mr. George Miller, who has been instrumental in this program.

I want to just express an experience that we have had and these companies that have gone down this route have had. Two things they've learned: Number one, hardly anybody gripes about it. I mean it's amazing. We have done all these things we have been talking about here tonight, changing the coal plant, changing the cafeteria, changing paper usage, changing lighting usage, changing some of our transportation usage, and, frankly, nobody is griping about it. We have got 435 people here griping about everything from the weather to the price of bananas, but none of our Members are griping about this because we are finding out that we can accommodate our businesses and our lifestyles just fine if we do this. And businesses have learned this as well. That's the first rule of greening an organization.

The second rule is that people find out that virtue is cumulative. When people take one little step forward, they get into it, and then they take another step, and then they take another step. And companies continue. That's why Dow Chemical, even though they have been spectacularly successful in reducing their energy use by 20, 30 percent, they are going to get another 20, 30 percent because people get excited about it, and we're seeing that.

I wanted to just touch on transportation that Mr. Blumenauer was talking about. Mr. Boehner was criticizing this effort to give our employees flexibility to use cars. I want to mention two technologies that I think can help reinvent our transportation system in America.

One is we are now testing a software system in Seattle which will give you instantaneous ride-sharing so that on your text message or your BlackBerry, you can say I want to go to this theater, get my ride, and this software system will patch you through to whoever is going in that direction. In 5 minutes, boom, you've got a ride. And that system has incredible promise to reduce congestion and reduce your cost of transportation if we can all start sharing rides in that regard. And I'm very excited about this. It has just gone in the first stage of trials.

The second technology I want to mention, this is well beyond the House, but I want Members to know about this. We are having this discussion about improving average fuel economy standards. In the next 2 weeks, hopefully, we will have it on this floor for debating on. But I think the capability exists to blow way beyond anything that we have even thought about in fuel mileage. We're arguing about whether we can get 35 miles a gallon. I drive a car today that gets 45 miles a gallon. I'm six-two, 200 pounds. It's a five-passenger car. It's very convenient and it's safe.

We have a technology coming on in 5 or 6 years in cars that are on the road today called plug-in hybrid cars, and I learned about them when I was writing this book that Mr. Blumenauer talked about. It is plug-in hybrid technology. And here is a car that General Motors has. It is in reality. Here is a picture of it. It is the GM Volt. They want to have it on the road, mass production in

5 or 6 years. And the way it works is using an incredible battery technology. You plug it in at night; it has a little port. You plug it in, charge it for 6 to 8 hours. You unplug it in the morning, go about your driving. You can drive 40 miles with just electricity, no gasoline, no ethanol, just pure juice out of your plug. And it costs two-thirds less per mile than gasoline.

Now, if you want to drive more than 40 miles, then you have a hybrid engine like the one in the car I am driving, in the Ford Escape or Toyota Prius. It will take you wherever you want to go for 200, 300 miles. Someday it will burn cellulosic ethanol as well as gasoline. Right now these cars are on the road today. I've driven one on the Capitol grounds. They get 100 miles per gallon of gasoline today. When you drive it with ethanol, you will get 500 miles of gasoline. And the electricity you use will get cleaner over time. This car will get better over time as the electric grid becomes cleaner. You start using more solar power, more wind power, you actually put out less carbon. Nothing gets better in life as it gets older except wine and a plug-in electric car.

I point this out because when we have this debate on the House floor in a few weeks, some people are going to say, Gee, I don't know if we can get to 35. Baloney. Hogwash. We have scads of cars that get 10 or 15 over that today, and you have a car that is going to get 100 miles per gallon in 5 or 6 years. This is something we can do in this new spirit in the House led by Nancy Pelosi, to head down this route to the future, is one people are going to be happy with, and they have.

I want to note as far as cycling, as a biker myself, the things we are talking about in a lot of communities that are improving their bike options, we are just giving people options. This is not the storm troopers coming down making everybody ride a bike. We are talking about giving Americans more options in how to get to work and back. This is one that in my town of Seattle, every year there are scads more people riding bikes.

Almost, to compliment Mr. Blumenauer's hometown, Portland, Oregon, is the first city in the United States to reduce the number of miles that people drive per capita. And that is a fundamental achievement, and I know how they have done it because they have visionary leadership, Mr. Blumenauer included; they have more public transportation options with light rail and buses, more bike options, better land use, planning that allows people to live close to public transportation options, and they are well on their way to meeting the CO2 targets that they have set. And it has happened because they have simply given people options. They haven't told people what to do. They just gave people a smorgasbord, and people did what was comfortable for them. A lot of it is bicycling, if they can catch Mr. Blumenauer.

Just one general one, and that is that the reason our approach to greening the Capitol works is that we are the optimists in this debate. We are the people who believe that options exist, that technologies will continue to grow, and as a result of that, Americans will have more choices of how they use energy and how they produce energy.

We have mentioned some of those new technologies tonight. I will just give you an example of a couple I've learned about in the last year about how to produce green electricity. We have made a commitment to buy green electricity for the U.S. House of Representatives. I just want to mention a couple of new ways to produce it.

One is wave power. If you have ever watched a big ship bob up and down on the waves, you understand how much power there is on the ocean. We have people capturing that energy and able to create electricity. This is a picture of a buoy. A similar one is going off the coast of Oregon this fall. The first wave power buoys in the world to be deployed were in Hawaii and are now powering some naval stations.

These are designed to essentially capture energy. As these buoys bob up and down, they compress water or air, creating pressure, which drives a generator, creates electricity, goes to the shore on a wire. Each have the capability to power close to 1,000 homes. There is enough energy in the waves in a 10-by-10-mile stretch off the Pacific Coast to produce all of the electricity for the State of California.

We are not guaranteed these are going to work because we have to make sure they can survive the terrible stresses at sea. But according to the Department of Energy, they have the capacity to produce 10 percent of all the electrical usage in the United States. I point this out because this technology wasn't even dreamed of 10 years ago.

Now, we have another option that could be available to Americans that right now, big investment, there's a lot of private investment in these companies. A company Finavera in Washington, a company called Ocean Power Technologies, there is a company associated with Oregon State University in Mr. Blumenauer's State. All work different approaches to this.

A second one that is intended to capture the power of the oceans are tidal-powered turbines that work sort of like a wind turbine, but they work on the currents that are driven by the tides. This is a picture of one. This is one by Verdant Power that works just like a wind turbine, but uses water through the blades instead of wind. Verdant actually has these in the East River in New York City. They are actually powering a grocery store right now with electricity.

We found out when the first six went in the water, there's actually more power than they knew, which actually disabled some of these so they have got to rebuild them to make them stronger, which is good news because there is more power than they thought.

We have someone in the State of Washington looking at potentially powering 50,000 homes with these tidal turbines now in the estuaries of Puget Sound.

I just point this out that we believe there are numerous options; we believe there are technologies that are going to free us from the constraints of the past. We are proving it in the U.S. Capitol. You can look at the dome and see the citadel of democracy and the citadel of new ways to save energy and produce it. I think Americans can be proud of that. I think we have a right to be a little bit, too.

Mr. Blumenauer, I thank you for your leadership on this and in leading in discussion.

We know we can do this. We know, because we have had success. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, we improved our mileage of our cars by 60 percent. Then in 1994 those efforts stopped and we stopped making any progress. Our cars are getting actually less mileage than they did in 1984. If we had simply continued on that rate of improvement, we would be free of Saudi Arabian oil today. Now we have got to get back on this bandwagon of using our brains to get better mileage. We know we can do this.

Just as a closing comment, I want to express my appreciation to the Americans doing this. We are not the only ones doing this in the Capitol. I know a woman on Bainbridge Island that greened up her home. I would like to say we're meeting that bar here in the House.

Again, thank you, Mr. Blumenauer.

Mr. Speaker, I rise to support passage of H. Con. Res. 122, a resolution to support America Recycles Day, the only nationally recognized day dedicated to recycling.

And I want to thank the Chair, Chairman Al Wynn, for getting this to the floor; and my cosponsor, Republican Chris Shays, who has been a leader on so many environmental issues, for working on this issue.

You know, the economic ramifications of recycling are well known. It creates 1.1 million jobs. It has annual sales of $236 billion gross sales, and has $37 billion in annual payrolls.

But I want to focus my comments for the moment on why recycling is so much even more important than it was

originally. We know it has been the most successful environmental initiative in the country's history. It allows people to take individual action to preserve the environment.

But now that global warming is upon us, the wisdom, prudence, and genius of recycling is even more apparent. When 1 million square miles of the arctic melted, the size of six Californias this summer, the need for recycling has become even more apparent.

Because recycling substantially reduces carbon dioxide emissions when it's associated with raw material extraction, with product manufacture, with emissions from landfills or burning carbon based waste, when we conserve material, we don't waste energy, and we don't put global warming gases into the atmosphere.

In fact, the Environmental Protections Agency estimates that recycling a ton of mixed recyclables saves 2.8 tons of carbon dioxide from going into the atmosphere. If we simply increased our recycle efforts from the current 30 percent level to 35 percent, we would reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by an amount equal to the average emissions from 4.6 million households. There is real savings still available to us.

We also have a growing problem with electronic material waste. We only have 1 percent of the 130 million phones currently owned by consumers recycled. We're going to do something about that. I can report in Seattle, at America Recycles Day, Dell, Microsoft and InTechra will raise awareness for recycling of electronics at Safeco Field, home of the Seattle Mariners.

Here on Capitol Hill, the Office of Greening has helped promote the House America Recycling Day. So passage of this bill will certainly support these ongoing efforts. We need to build on them.

It's time for Congress to recognize this important day. I urge my colleagues to support this bill and find something to recycle, and recycle it.

Mr. Chairman, before I comment on this bill, I want to comment on two leaders who helped to get it here, Mr. Klein and Mr. Mahoney. Usually, when freshmen Congressmen have bills in the House, it is something like naming a post office or something. These two fellows have worked a very well-crafted bill that I hope has broad consensus, and they have my admiration for their great work.

I think it is a very important bill for all of us because it responds to the need for a stable insurance market in these areas. Some have suggested somehow this displaces the private insurance industry. In fact, it just allows that market to work. It is preferable to have catastrophe bonds and some reinsurance contracts in advance, rather than trying to deal with catastrophe afterwards through Federal Government bailouts. This is a market-driven way to do it. It makes the market stronger. It spreads the risk in a way that is consistent with our economic system, and we need to pass this bill.

Mr. Speaker, I come to the House this evening to discuss our great irony about our position in the world right now, economically and environmentally.

The irony is that we face some real challenges that touch on our energy-based economy, and I think those challenges are obvious to us tonight, a challenge as oil approaches $100 a barrel, $3 a gallon, and there's no relief in sight.

Americans right now are feeling the pinch associated with fossil fuel costs going up. We have a challenge in that we still are addicted to Middle Eastern oil as a principal source of oil, and as long as we are addicted to oil we will have a problem being wrapped around the axle of the Middle East.

And we have the problem of global warming, which is something that is becoming increasingly clear to us, not with scientific research but with our own eyes. In fact, I was pretty stunned to see the photographs of the arctic this summer where 1 million square miles of the arctic disappeared this summer, totally shocking the scientific community. An area the size of six Californias disappeared, melted unexpectedly in the arctic this summer.

And, of course, that's a big concern because the arctic ice cap is sort of like a big sunshade. It reflects energy back into space. Now that it's gone in the summer, or substantial portions of it, the oceans are absorbing six to ten times more energy, having a pernicious feedback loop, making the problem even worse.

In fact, if you look at the projections prepared by the scientific community showing the arctic ice cap in the year 2000, if you project up to the year 2040, the scientific community basically has found the arctic ice cap will be gone in the late summer months, essentially in my children's lifetime certainly.

And the results of these three challenges that we have, increasing fossil fuel prices, our addiction to Middle Eastern oil and global warming, are certainly great challenges and ought to give us pause.

But I'm here to talk about optimism rather than fear because the great

irony is that these three challenges have the capacity to ignite one of the most positive developments in the U.S. economy ever, and that is sparking the potential clean energy revolution that we're not accustomed to enjoying in the United States.

Our situation is a little bit like it was in the 1960s. If you recall, in the early 1960s, when John F. Kennedy came and stood right behind me here on May 25, 1961, and said that we would put a man on the Moon in 10 years and bring him back safely, that was a very bold and audacious thing to say. At the time, rockets were blowing up on the launch pad, and our computers were in rudimentary stages. We were way behind the Russians. We just put Spam in a can up. We hadn't even invented Tang yet.

But we were driven to going to the Moon by a challenge, the challenge with the Russians, and the need for technological imminence that the Americans felt we deserved and had a destiny to fulfill. Indeed, we did fulfill that destiny when we went to the Moon in the original Apollo project.

Now we have these challenges involving oil and global warming that we can use to the same effect as Kennedy used the challenge in the space race, and that effect is to rally the United States of America to a brighter future and a higher destiny to use our technological genius to develop a clean energy future for the United States of America.

I am here tonight to share some of the good news that is extant across the United States in all 50 States where tonight there are men and women of genius and entrepreneurial perseverance and business acumen that are building the technology that allows us to beat global warming, break our addiction to Middle Eastern oil and, third, grow millions of new jobs in the clean energy economy that we intend to build.

I will here tonight, when we conclude, finish by saying we will be able to achieve the same level of technological leap forward as Kennedy achieved in space. We will do for energy what Kennedy did for space.

If I can, let me talk about some of the things I have learned in the last year. I have been proposing a bill called the New Apollo Energy Act for some time and, of course, writing a book called ``Apollo's Fire,'' I met a lot of people around the country who are now engaged in this great challenge. I would like to share with my colleagues and the public tonight what I found.

First I want to address the issue of our cars. We got great cars. My favorite is a 1956 Chevy, always was, always will be, but we know that we have a great problem that 40 percent of the carbon dioxide emitted as global warming gases come from our cars and trucks. We know that we are paying $3 a gallon and it's going to go up. We know that we are taking our money and putting it in the pump machine, and it's going right to the Middle East to finance people who are attacking us.

We need to reinvent the car. We need to take a bold leap forward in technology to find a new way to propel the car in a more efficient way. I am here tonight to say that we have the ability to do that in the immediate future.

I want to share with you a picture of a car called the General Motors Volt. This is a prototype of a car that General Motors hopes to have in mass production 5 or 6 years from now. It is a plug-in hybrid vehicle. A plug-in hybrid vehicle, this car is quite stylish, and this physically exists. I actually brought this car to show to my colleagues several months ago. Thanks to General Motors, it exists physically.

The way this car works is that it has a tremendous combination of advance battery technology and hybrid drive train technology that allows it to be plugged in at night. When you have this car, you will be able to take it home, put it in the garage, plug it in. The next morning you unplug it. You can drive it for up to 40 miles on total electrical propulsion, no CO2, no gasoline for the first 40 miles.

The beauty of that, and the importance of that, is that when you operate on electricity from the electrical grid, it may cost as little as 1 to 3 cents a mile for fuel. It costs 9 cents-plus a mile or more for gasoline now, and it's absolutely clean while you are driving the car. Now, obviously there is some CO2 involved in the production of the electricity, but I will get to that in a moment, so it's basically very inexpensive.

Because over 60 percent of all the daily driving is under 40 miles, over half of the daily trips that Americans take will be pure electrical propulsion. Then if you want to drive more than 40 miles before you get home to recharge, you have a hybrid engine similar to the hybrid engines now used in both domestic and foreign manufacturers, to basically use a combination of fuel, and right now it's gasoline, someday it will be cellulosic ethanol, and electricity residual in the batteries to drive until you fill up your tank again or you get back to get recharged.

When these cars are produced, we will get over 100 miles a gallon of gasoline. This won't be some small marginal increments, and you know right now we are debating whether to improve our corporate average fuel efficiency standards up to 35 miles a gallon in 10 or 15 years. These are going to blow right by that. It's going to blow right through the things we are debating right now and leapfrog that technology that is actually available today.

Cars like this are on the road today being driven. I have driven one. They use a lithium ion battery manufactured by the A123 Systems in Massachusetts. People have taken the Toyota Prius. I drive a Toyota Prius. It is a great car. I am 6'2", 200 pounds; comfortable, safe, quiet, works like a dream for us. Folks have taken these Priuses and converted them into a plug-in hybrid car today. They are driving around the streets of America.

I drove the first one that was commercially sold. We are going to have them in mass production in several years, and that's why it's important for this Chamber to send a signal to the auto industry that we are going to have a legal requirement that will improve the economy, and it will be simple to do and economical as well. Economical, because when these are in mass production, they may cost a couple of thousand dollars more than if you didn't have this technology, but you are going to save three or four times that amount in fuel costs later on.

A double bonus of these cars is that as you drive them, as the grid electricity gets cleaner, because as we move to solar thermal energy and wind power energy and other sources, perhaps clean coal energy, we will have less CO2 emissions so the car will actually get cleaner. I mean, except wine, this will be the only thing that gets better with age and put out less CO2 over time.

A triple bonus, according to people who have studied this, these cars have the potential to help the electrical grid where utilities can essentially use the batteries in the car in the garage at night to store energy. Your utility can be generating wind power at night or wave power at night or any kind of power at night, feed that energy into your battery and rent your battery in your garage.

Economists who studied this think the day may come when you are paid $2,000 or $3,000 a year essentially for the temporary rental of your battery once your battery becomes part of the electrical grid. There are companies today in my town of Seattle, Washington, who are developing the software to do that.

The point I think is important to make is that as we talk about setting caps on carbon dioxide, as we talk about increasing mileage requirements for our cars, we ought to have optimism and we ought to have confidence and we ought to recognize what Kennedy did about the can-do spirit of America, that that spirit is going to build us cars that can radically improve our mileage and radically reduce CO2 and then become a source of exports so we can start exporting these cars around the world.

Why can't we sell these cars to China? We can, if, in fact, we will start sending the signals from this Chamber to the industry that this is going to be very achievable. It makes sense once we limit carbon dioxide.

Now, this isn't the only solution to our car woes. General Motors, Ford, Honda, various other companies are also looking at electrifying the car and using a fuel cell hydrogen source to essentially generate the electricity to run electrical motors. That may be as good or better as lithium ion batteries.

It is probably a little further away from commercialization due to the storage issues of hydrogen and the distribution needs for the distribution system of hydrogen, but it is another alternative that at least one company intends to have commercially available in the next several years.

So we now are ready to have leapfrog technology. It's because of the genius of Americans, and it's getting ready to go, and we should not be fearful in this Chamber. We should be confident of our ability to reinvent the car, thanks in part to guys like Felix Kramer, who essentially built one of these in his garage in California and dared Detroit and the rest of the auto industry internationally to build one, and that's going to happen now.

So we know we can reinvent the car. But where do we get the energy for the electrical grid to energize these electrical cars? Well, the good news is that the genius of people building cars is matched by the genius of people figuring out how to generate electricity. I have been stunned in the last year, as I have studied this, and as I have gone around talking to people across America, I have been stunned with the rapidity of the developments that are taking place in the clean electricity field. You literally cannot turn over a rock in this country and not find someone developing a technology that is helping to find a way to generate electricity cleanly.

I want to relate a little story of a company I heard about months ago. It's a company called Ausra Energy, Ausra. Ausra is owned largely by a fellow named Vinod Khosla, who is a fellow who was very instrumental in the development of software, founded Sun Microsystems, was very successful, and now has taken his talents to the field of clean energy.

Mr. Khosla has now looked at all of the potential places where we can develop clean energy, recognizing that the world is going to demand these new technologies. He is a person, as many of the other people will talk about tonight, who did very well in software and Internet, and now see the same potential in the clean energy world as existed in software and Internet. They recognized a market opportunity, and they recognized that there are technological solutions that can fulfill these market opportunities.

A fellow named John O'Donnell sent me an e-mail, who is one of the leaders of the Ausra Company, and it was a really happy e-mail to get. I will tell you why. I was on this floor the first week in August when we were debating what's called a renewable portfolio standard, and in the energy bill that we eventually passed in the House in August, which is a great bill by the way, a good start on this proposal, we were working to get a provision that would call for 15 percent of our electricity to be generated by clean renewable sources by the year 2020.

Of course, we talked to each other on the floor, and I was talking to some of my colleagues from the State of Florida. They were explaining to me, and I was saying, well, you know, there are a lot of different sources of clean energy, biofuels, wave power, clean coal technology. Efficiency in conservation is a form of what we call the first fuel and solar power. When I said that, one of my colleagues from Florida said we can't do solar power in Florida.

I thought that was a little curious because I thought the license plate said Florida, the Sunshine State, but he explained that because they have some clouds in Florida, it's not as productive a solar field as perhaps the deserts of Arizona. In fact, that is true. Arizona might be 10 or 15 percent better than Florida.

But, a few weeks later, I was talking to Mr. Khosla, who told me that his technology has a perfect fit for Florida, it's called Ausra. This is a picture of the Ausra thermal solar generator. The way the Ausra system works is that it is an array of mirrors. These blue long lines are essentially flat-panel mirrors, long arrays. They are quite long. As you can see these mirrors concentrate the sun's energy on a little pipe. You can see this pipe running about here above the long mirrors, and these are all focusing the reflected rays of the sun on that pipe. It heats water and eventually creates steam, and the steam turns a turbine, just like a coal-fired plant would, and generates electricity.

Now, this Ausra technology could be and is, as far as we can tell right now, probably the least expensive of the solar thermal technologies that are being considered. The reason Mr. Khosla explained it to me is because they discovered a way to make these mirrors flat rather than concave, and they can make them a lot cheaper. The other provisions have a concave surface to them. They are much more expensive to manufacture.

Well, as a result of these and other improvements they made, Mr. Khosla's company just signed for ten, I believe, hundreds of megawatts with the Florida public, with a Florida public power utility for the production of zero CO2 emitting solar thermal energy. So here we have a situation in a State that at least some folks didn't think we could produce solar energy, and within weeks we have a contract with a major league, a Florida utility to produce electricity for thousands of people in Florida. And this stuff's powerful. In every 2 acres of these mirrors, you can do somewhere between, you can provide enough electricity for somewhere between 750 and 1,000 homes. This is not just, you know, powering just your fan. It's real electricity.

And now I got an e-mail from Mr. O'Donnell 3 days ago that, in fact, a contract has also been signed, a major public utility in California. And the sky's the limit. Now, this power's a little more expensive than coal-based power now, but the folks who run this company believe that can be competitive in just a matter of a few years once the cost of investment capital comes down and their scales of economy, and the fact that the prices of fossil fuels have not exactly been coming down, witness the price of gasoline.

So in a very few years, this technology has the capability to be as inexpensive or less expensive than traditional fossil fuel-based systems with zero CO2 emissions without sending our money to Saudi Arabia and without digging up anything in the ground. That's a pretty good deal.

Now, there are other companies besides OSRA that have similar technology, and there are contracts being let around the country for them as well. So we have the potential, not the potential, but the existence of real energy. This is not a pipe dream. This exists in reality. And we have the right to be excited about it.

Now, there are many other ways to produce potentially clean energy. One of those potentially is clean coal technology, and research is going on, as we speak, in the potential of being able to take coal, gasify it, draw off the carbon dioxide, take the carbon dioxide and inject it underground into permanent geological sequestration, and then burn coal without any CO2 emissions of any significant amount. And that research is expensive, and it is not a guarantee that this tip of technology will be commercially viable. But it is a distinct possibility.

In fact, an MIT researcher that reviewed this believed it was probable that this type of sequestration technology, putting CO2 underground in either large saline aquifers underground or in two or three other types of geological formations, that we would be able to do this in many, many places in the United States in commercially viable costs.

Now, that technology's being developed too. There's a company called Ramgen Corporation in Seattle, Washington, that has developed a compression technology that costs 30 percent less money that could make this commercially viable to allow true clean coal to occur. And it strikes me that research to make that determination whether this can be done is appropriate investment.

Now, this is to be distinguished from something you might hear called coal-to-liquid, which is a very different thing. Coal-to-liquid is turning the coal into a liquid and then burning the liquid. When you just burn the liquid, for instance, in an airplane motor or a car motor, you end up putting CO2 right back into the air. So coal-to-liquid is not an improvement from a global warming perspective.

What we call clean coal, where the CO2, from its production is actually sequestered underground, is a marked improvement in global warming, and that's another technology that we are

looking at. But there are a host of others, and some of them are off our coastline. And I learned about these technologies in the last year in the course of my research and in the preparation of the new Apollo Energy Act that I've cosponsored.

Off of our coastline in our estuaries, we have enormous amounts of energy in the waves and in the tides. And I have a picture here of some of the technologies that are now under development to harness that energy. And to have a, just to get a sense of the energy that is in our waves, if you've ever been thrashed in the surf like I have, you get some sense of how much energy is in a wave. But it's truly awesome.

In a 10-by-10-mile stretch of the coast of the Pacific, just in a 10- by-10-mile square, there is enough energy in the waves that could power all the electrical needs for the State of California. That's big-time energy. And the Department of Energy has concluded that if we can commercialize wave power technology, it could produce even in excess of 10 percent of all the electrical needs of the United States. So there's an awesome amount of energy off the waves.

In fact, the Pacific Coast of the United States happens to be the, happily, the single most beneficial prospective place for wave power in the world. This has actually been mapped. There are maps of the wave power all around the world, and the best in place in the world is off the Pacific Coast.

So now we have brilliant Americans developing technology to harness that. We have a picture of some of them here. A buoy developed by Ocean Power Technology. As this buoy bobs up and down, it compresses air that then compresses, essentially, hydraulic fluid and drives an electrical generator.

There are others from a company called Finavera that uses a system as the buoy bobs up and down, it pressurizes a column of water that then turns a generator. There are others that look like these large snakes. As they undulate and move up and down, they, through mechanical transference of energy, basically run a generator that then through a wire sends the electricity back to the coast.

Now, the first of these in the Continental United States has now gone in the water off the coast of Oregon. We have them off the, actually powering Navy bases in Hawaii right now that have been in the water now for over a year. We're learning a lot from them. We're learning that there's a lot of energy there. And, in fact, as you might imagine, we've learned that you've got to make them incredibly strong to withstand the forces of the sea.

Now, people, we cannot guarantee that this technology is going to be commercially viable. It is an infant industry. But we know, with the energy available in the waves, and we know the advances we can make, I think it is a reasonable opportunity that justifies investment in this technology, and, in fact, the private sector is making a very large investment in this technology.

Now, there's another type of power called tidal power which involves currents, harnessing the currents that are driven by the tides, by the Moon, of course. You know, this is kind of lunar energy. The Moons run the tides. And we now have technology using turbines that look like underwater wind turbines. There's a picture of one here manufactured by a company called Verdant that is now in the East River in New York.

These essentially work like wind turbines that you've seen. As the tide moves in and out, and of course it's very predictable and happens every day, it spins this turbine very slowly, so it has a minimal impact on marine life and generates the electricity. And these are actually in the water.

Now it's interesting, we found out there's so much energy in these currents these have had to be rebuilt, which is a good sign, essentially, because we found out there's more energy than we knew. So we have substantial energy off of our coastlines that we have potential for capturing.

Now, a lot of people thought ocean energy is where wind energy was about 20 years ago. About 20 years ago, people started to put up these wind mills and generate electricity from them. And when they started, a lot of people thought they were kind of wacky. It was very expensive at the time. It was a new idea and the oil and gas folks kind of laughed at them. That was 20 years ago.

During this succeeding 20 years, we've had continuing improvements of the technology, and now we have wind turbines over 300-foot in height powering over 1,000 homes apiece, producing electricity that is as cheap as any electricity in the Nation.

Today, in the State of Washington, where I hail from, in southeast Washington, we have the largest wind farm in the Western Hemisphere producing electricity as cheap as coal-fired electricity. And now it is the largest most rapidly growing form of energy in the United States, and it has still huge potential to grow because we have enormous resources of wind. In fact, it's growing so fast that the wind turbine manufacturers cannot keep up.

And I'd like to tell the story of an American company called Clipper Wind. Clipper Wind tonight has several hundred Iowans working in Cedar Rapids building clipper wind turbines; good, well-paid American jobs now spinning, and these are also being exported around the world, producing exactly zero CO2 emitting wind energy. And these are American jobs.

And that's what this is about. Whether it's plug-in hybrid cars or solar thermal technology, or wind turbine technology, these are American jobs that we're building. But we're only going to build them if Congress starts to adopt the policies that drive investment into these technologies, rather than just the fossil fuel industry. And that's why we need to take some of these subsidies we've given to the oil and gas industry and we did it in the House bill we passed some time ago, $16 billion, reel it back in and put it into a fund to help some of these nascent industries grow.

And we need a renewable portfolio standard to send a message to the investment community that they can invest in these technologies, because we know there's going to be a demand for them. And we need a cap and trade system so that we don't allow polluting industries to put their carbon dioxide and their pollution in unlimited amounts into the atmosphere. And when those things happen, there will be a gold rush, a flood tide of investment capital into the companies that are developing these technologies. That's what they need. They've got the brilliance. As soon as they have the investment capital, they're going to take off. And as soon as the demand is obvious, investment capital will flow.

I talked to a fellow named John Plaza. He was here three days. John has a really interesting story. He was an airline pilot, and he said he sort of got bored going back and forth. I know what it feels like because I fly back and forth every Monday and Friday. And he decided he wanted to try something new. So he went out and decided he was going to start brewing up biodiesel fuel, literally in his garage, and started to figure out a way to make biodiesel. And he actually came to believe it was commercially viable. So he went and found an investor, a fellow named Martin Tobias, who was successful at Microsoft; raised some capital, built a little plant on the shores of the Duwamish River in Washington. Really wasn't much to look at. Just your typical little tilt-up warehouse.

John was pretty creative. He went to the Rainier Brewing Company, the iconic Big R in Seattle, and he bought two big huge brewing vats from the Rainier Brewing Company, and he moved them down to this little warehouse and he designed a way himself on how to filter some of the material out of biodiesel when you refine it. And he started refining biodiesel, and he started selling it.

Well, that was last year. This year he is leading and has constructed the largest biodiesel plant in the world that puts out 100 million gallons of biodiesel at Grays Harbor, Washington, a town that's experienced some economic hardship because of the decline of the timber industry. And John, in his genius and his business acumen, has built a business hiring people in Washington State, now going to be shipping biodiesel all around. They just signed a deal with a distributor to start distributing it. And the very first committed biodiesel pump from this group called Propel was installed in Ballard, Washington, just a couple of weeks ago.

So here's good old American know-how, can-do spirit, developing a whole

new industry. And the biofuel industry has a very bright future.

I would like to talk just for a moment about biofuels. We know we have corn ethanol today in abundance, and 23 percent of all the corn grown in the United States now goes to ethanol. And it's been productive. The price of gasoline actually would have been worse if we hadn't had that ethanol available. It's bad enough as it is.

But the good news I want to share with you is that we have tremendous cause for optimism that we are going to grow second, third, and fourth generations of ethanol. They're going to be much more productive than corn ethanol that we are using now because the corn ethanol we use now only uses the kernel, a very small part of the total plant. Scientists have now developed ways to use the entire plant, all of the carbohydrates in the plant, what they call the corn stover, switchgrass, and some advanced feedstocks that have the capability to be four or five times as productive per acre as corn.

And I was at a company called Mendel Biotechnology in Hayward, California, a few weeks ago that have developed a grass called Miscanthus. Miscanthus grows about 10 or 12 feet high, a real thick- looking plant. When you harvest it, you take the whole plant. They take it, they chop it up, they expose it to heat and enzymes that breaks down the cell wall and freezes the carbohydrates that then could be distilled into an alcohol. Ethanol is an alcohol. And that feedstock has the potential to produce four or five times as much per acre as existing corn ethanol with less fertilizer and less water needed.

We're also making tremendous strides in enzymes. And there are ways to do this even without enzymes. The very first cellulosic ethanol plant in America had the ground broken 2 days ago, I believe, the Ramgen Company, another company owned by Vinod Khosla that I talked about, and we have five others that are going to begin construction shortly. So conservative estimates are that within the next 20 years, we will be able to have 25 to 30 percent of all of our transportation fuels fueled by biofuels. And the best is yet to come.

Last night I learned about a company called Solazyme. Solazyme is developing a way to make biodiesel from algae that is 50 times as productive as corn per square meter or acre in its productive capability. Now, it's not commercialized yet. It's quite aways from commercialization. A lot of work has to be done. But when that is done, Katie, bar the door when it comes to biofuels. And when we do that, we are going to have plug-in hybrid cars that we can plug in, run for 40 miles, then burn cellulosic ethanol or potentially biodiesel, and have an infinite number of miles per gallon of gasoline because we won't be using it. We will have a decarbonized car. The car may become total electric, but even if it doesn't become total electric, it can become decarbonized by a combination of plug-in hybrid technology and biofuels. And of course biofuels are zero CO2 emitting net because you don't put any more carbon into the atmosphere than the plant takes out of the atmosphere. It's just a little circle. The plant sucks the CO2 out of the atmosphere, photosynthesis kicks in. You make carbohydrates, build the plant, chop the plant up. You make it into biodiesel or cellulosic ethanol. You burn it, and then CO2 goes back up and the cycle is repeated. There is no net CO2, unlike coal and oil. We are taking stuff out of the ground that has been there for a million years, and that has enormous net increases to the atmosphere.

So here we have existing technology that is on the cusp of commercialization and American know-how is going to do it. And that is why we in this Chamber and my colleagues who might be listening tonight, should that be the case anywhere in this fair country, we ought to have confidence that we can move forward with the host of these clean energy policies that we are now considering and realize that the American economy is going to grow as a result of these policies, not shrink, because the world is going to need this clean energy. And it ought to be America that is selling it to China and the rest of the world, and we have every possibility of doing that.

Now, there is another place where the clean energy revolution is going to be really important, and that is in our homes, in a lot of different ways. And some people think that to make our homes electrical-generating units or to make them zero CO2 emitters is sort of a Buck Rogers fantasy, and I have learned that that is anything but true. In fact, on the mall 2 weeks ago, we had a solar decathlon where 13 colleges sent kids, and anybody under 40 is a kid to me now, but these college students that came in and built these zero CO2 emitting solar-powered homes. And they were just delightful to look at and fascinating to behold what these young students had created.

Now, they did look a little different than my home and maybe yours look like because they had the absolute avant guard technology in them.

But I want to show you another home in one of the rainiest parts of Washington, up north in Redmond, Washington. This is the home of Mike and Meg Towne. Mike is a teacher at Redmond High School. And several years ago Mike was talking to his students about the importance of dealing with global warming and all the whiz-bang technologies that he thought was going to come on to help solve this problem. And one of his students said, Mr. Towne, if this is so cool, why aren't you using it? And he said to himself, well, maybe I will. So he and his wife, Meg, decided to go out and build essentially a zero net CO2 home that's solar powered, and they did it. And they did it for very little more than it costs to build a typical home. And here's their home in Redmond, Washington.

I want to note this is a very unusual day because it was not raining when this picture was taken, and it tends to rain a little bit where I live, and it rains even more where Mike lives. This is up towards the foothills of the Cascade Mountains, and it's just a very damp, gray environment. But even in that environment, they put up these solar cells, and you will see that they are incorporated into the roofing material. You can just put them on. Mike put them on himself. They used a little extra insulation, decent windows, designed it in a way to minimize heat loss. And right now they have zero electrical net usage because they feed back into the grid frequently of electricity they are not using, and they netted out to zero. And Americans are going to have that right if a bill that I have been working on for 4 years called the Net Metering bill passes, so that when you generate electricity and you feed it back into the grid, you get paid for it.

The point of this is that this exists today in rainy climates. It's possible almost anywhere in the country. And we are going to do it. And we have a bill in the House that we have now passed this August that will establish building codes that will decrease energy use by 50 percent in our homes and our businesses in the next 10 years of new construction. That is possible to do. We are doing it. Mike and Meg Towne did it. And we are well on our way as part of an important part of the clean energy revolution.

And, by the way, this is going to create jobs, because when we retrofit our homes, when we put in new insulation, when we put in weather stripping, when we put in more efficient heating systems, all of those things generate jobs. And a conservative estimate of the new Apollo Energy Act that I have sponsored is that it will create 3 million new jobs in the next several years.

So what we have seen tonight is a host of new economic opportunities for America. And what I started out with, I was talking about that this is an irony. The irony is that these great challenges of global warming and addiction to Middle Eastern oil and the huge increase in the cost of oil and gas are actually disguised opportunities. And if this Chamber will act, and we would like to do it in a bipartisan basis, to adopt this signal to the market, these technologies are going to blossom.

And I would like to talk about one policy that is of overriding interest, and that is the cap-and-trade system that we need in this country to drive investment in these technologies. Right now we have a broken market. We have a great market failure. And that market failure is that we are allowing polluting industries to use our atmosphere, a scarce resource, and put

unlimited amounts of their pollutants into the air for no cost whatsoever. And that is not only morally wrong; it's economically wrong, because when you have an asset, if somebody uses it up, they ought to pay for that; right? And there ought to be some limit on it. But right now when a utility burns coal and they dump the CO2 in our atmosphere, an atmosphere we have in common, it's like a city park. And we would not allow a utility to back their dump truck into the city park and dump their trash in the city park. We would not allow some refinery putting CO2 into the atmosphere to drive up to the city park and dump their sludge in the city park. But that's what we are doing right now by allowing unlimited amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And that has to stop. We have to develop a limit on the amount of carbon dioxide that goes into the atmosphere. And a cap-and-trade system does that. When we develop a cap, we will put and guarantee Americans that only a certain amount of carbon dioxide can go into the atmosphere every year. It's common sense. We can't continue to put this into the atmosphere without very devastating ramifications. And we need to charge for that as well.

Europe made a big mistake. When they did this, they just handed these permits out, and the utilities took them and then took a huge windfall profit by charging rate payers for an asset that was just given to them. We can't do that. We need to have an auction of those permits to create a price for carbon and to use the market to determine who really needs them and what they will pay for that scarce resource.

And this is a resource owned by the taxpayers. The taxpayers own the atmosphere, not the corporations. The citizens of America own the air we breathe, not the utilities. The Congress has a responsibility to our citizens to take care of that asset, and we are not doing it yet. And when somebody uses that asset, they need to pay for using that asset.

So what we would propose to do is have an auction and let the market determine what the cost of those permits are for polluting industries. And the sooner we do that, the better; the more powerful impact we will have in driving investment to these new technologies, and the sooner that taxpayers will get a break getting paid by something that they own mutually. And that money can then be used for further research and development into these technologies. It can be used to help lower- income folks with their heating and cooling expenses. And it can be used as part of the clean energy revolution. And we need to increase that R and D. We are spending 25 times more in Iraq today than we are spending on trying to solve this energy problem. We spent seven times more on the original Apollo Project than we are spending today on this energy problem. We have got to ramp up our Federal R and D as the private sector does as well.

So in closing, Mr. Speaker, I would like to say that if people come to know the people I have known during the last year; the folks who are developing solar thermal; the folks who are developing clean coal; the folks who are developing advanced forms of cellulosic ethanol and advanced forms of biodiesel; the folks who are developing wind and tidal power; the people who are developing what's called the SIPs industry, the structural integrated panels, where they have built these panels now that you can build a house with them and you can reduce your usage by 40 percent at no additional cost; the people who are developing the plug-in hybrid car, these are the Americans that we need to listen to and have confidence in that they are going to solve this problem. And that is why in the next few weeks in this Chamber I hope we will pass an energy bill that is as bold and as visionary and as optimistic as Kennedy's original Apollo Project. And America deserves nothing less than that because we are just as capable, we are just as smart, and we are just as technologically ambitious as we were in the 1960s. And if we do that, America will produce. It is our destiny. The New Apollo Energy Act will solve these problems and grow our economy at the same time.