Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I come to the floor this evening to continue the effort to revolutionize American energy. We had the first breakthrough here just about a week and a half ago where the U.S. House of Representatives took the first step in the clean energy revolution.

I think it was long overdue, and I think it is going to be much enjoyed by Americans, because what we did about a week and a half ago was take the first step toward freeing ourselves from the shackles of oil and gas and in fact starting down the road toward clean energy with a high-tech clean energy future.

The way we did that, we reeled back in $14 billion of giveaways to the oil and gas industry, the most profitable industry in the history of the solar system, that had been given under the previous Congress; and we put that money for Americans to use to develop a clean energy future that can depend upon Midwestern farmers rather than Middle Eastern sheiks.

This really was a first step on a long road toward a clean energy future for America. It was a very, very important first step.

This evening I wanted to share with my colleagues some folks I have met whose lives are intertwined with that clean energy future.

We call the clean energy future the new Apollo Project because we believe we need a new high-tech energy future for this country every bit as bold and revolutionary and visionary as John Kennedy's original Apollo Project when he stood behind me in 1961 and said America was going to place a man on the Moon and bring him back safely in 10 years, and that happened.

We believe that we need that same spirit, that same idea that our genius, our innovation and inventiveness in America can create new technologies to provide us new energy.

The people I wanted to talk about tonight are all people I have met in the last month and are people who I believe exhibit why we need the new Apollo energy project and why it was a good idea for Congress to have created this clean energy fund, take money out of oil and gas and put it into clean energy. I would like to talk about some of those folks.

The first two people I want to talk about are exhibits A and B as to why we need a new clean energy future.

One is President Note of the Marshall Islands who is a gracious fellow. I met him on Bainbridge Island awhile back.

When I talked to him, he told me about the plight of his Nation, the Marshall Islands in the southern Pacific, very, very low atolls. They are essentially coral reefs, and they are just a few feet above sea level. What the President of the Marshall Islands told me is that his Nation is now threatened by sea level rises associated with global warming, together with the coral reefs that can be occasioned by acidification in the ocean and increasing water temperature, again because of global warming and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

What President Note told me is that, for the last year or so, they have had to take emergency provisions to keep the sea from encroaching where they live, essentially. They are now starting to have active consideration of where folks will have to go after they leave the Marshall Islands when the seas swallow the Marshall Islands or make them uninhabitable.

Another problem they are having is the storms are increasing in severity as well.

So here we have the President of a nation state who was in Seattle this weekend pleading for us to take measures to stop global warming to try to preserve his nation. I thought this

could be the first nation really destroyed by environmental catastrophe associated with an energy policy that is polluting the atmosphere with so much carbon dioxide.

President Note was pretty convincing that as an act of humanity we should not allow his nation to drown, and to me it was sort of a common-sense, human thing to do, to ask me to talk to my colleagues about what we could do about that, and so I am here tonight.

The second person I want to talk about is the director of relocation for a town called Shishmareff, which is a town on the northern coast of Alaska. This is a town that has been there for 4,000 years in some village system or otherwise. For 4,000 years, people have enjoyed living there, but now they are being swallowed by the sea. The Arctic Ocean is essentially intruding into the town.

If you go and google Shishmareff, Alaska, you will see pictures of the houses simply falling down into the ocean. For a combination of reasons, the tundra is melting underneath their houses, and the ocean is intruding because an ice barrier that formerly protected their village has melted. So they are both having the tundra melt underneath them and the storm waves coming in and washing away the town.

About 3 weeks ago, the town voted to move 13 miles, move the whole town, kit and caboodle, to the mainland. They are now on a coastal barrier island, and this will be the first town, Shishmareff, Alaska, the first town that falls victim to global warming in the United States, the first American town.

I cannot be thinking that that is something to be proud of, that we have an energy policy that allows the oil and gas industry and others to put untold amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It is actually destroying an American town.

I think we ought to rally to the idea that we do not allow American towns to be swallowed by a problem. We have got to solve the problem.

So there are two people, the President of the Marshall Islands and the leader of Shishmareff, Alaska, both of whom are having their communities literally being swallowed up and having to move at some point because we have an energy policy that is fit for the 19th century, not the 21st century.

That is the bad news, but now I want to shift to some people I have met who have given me a huge amount of confidence that we can deal with this problem. Because I think if you spend time talking to the scientists and the inventors and innovators, as I have during the last year, you would be convinced that Americans, the country that had people who invented the light bulb, the jet airplane, went to the moon, perfected the Internet and mapped the human genome, are capable of creating a new energy future that will not allow the destruction of other American towns. The reason I believe that is because I know these people. I just want to share some of the people I have met in the last month.

Last Friday, I met people from a company called General Compression, and these are scientists who have invented a way to make a compressor about 80 percent more efficient which does not sound too thrilling, I suppose, until you think what it can do. Because what they can do with this compressor is put it on the top of a wind turbine and use the wind turbine that blows in the wind to compress air and then take that air and can pump it down into subterranean caverns and keep stored air under high pressure that then can be vented and used like a big battery. When you vent this compressed air, it can drive a turbine and generate electricity.

Now, the upshot of all this technology is it means that we can take wind turbines and essentially connect them to a giant battery in the form of compressed air to store that energy. This is very, very important in the effort to have clean energy because now we can make wind turbines part of the grid. We can have energy that wind turbines create. We can have access to it even when the wind does not blow. Wind does not always blow, except here in the House of Representatives, of course.

So this, for the first time, when this technology is perfected, and it is not perfect yet, will be able to perhaps double the revenues that can be generated from wind turbines, a clean energy source that does not emit one pound of carbon dioxide when we generate that electricity.

So here is a tremendous breakthrough that could make radical changes in our energy policy by perhaps doubling the efficacy, at least the revenue generation of wind turbine farms. We have had a bunch of them go up in the State of Washington. We have the largest wind turbine farm in North America in the State of Washington, which is already as cheap as any other type of energy that we have. So there is one company.

The second company, the day before I had in my office a company called A123 Battery. It is a company in Massachusetts, scientists who have spun off of MIT, largely; and A123 Battery company is a company that has developed a lithium ion battery which has tremendous capacity essentially for storing electricity. They have now signed an agreement with General Motors in an effort to provide the battery for the Volt, the first plug-in hybrid that GM has announced they would like to build in several years.

A123 Battery company, it is exciting because their technology, once it becomes commercialized, once it becomes packaged in a reliable source that we can make sure we can put in our car, will allow us to have plug-in hybrids, a car that we can take home at night, plug into a garage outlet, next day drive it up to 40 miles on electricity. And over 60 percent of our trips are under 40 miles a day, but if you want to go over 40 miles a day, then you have an auxiliary internal combustion engine that will burn either gasoline or ethanol that can take you the rest of the mileage as far as you want to drive.

So it is a plug-in, flex-fuel hybrid vehicle. Plug-in meaning you plug in at night, flex-fuel meaning runs on a gasoline or ethanol, and hybrid means it has electric and internal combustion engine.

So this company now has sort of answered the $64,000 question of how we are going to have enough battery capacity; and all they need to do, as they explained to me, is to mount some engineering. The science is there. Now they need the engineering.

This is very exciting to think that in 5, maybe 6, 7 years, we will be able to have an electrical driven car, by and large, that we can distribute energy over the electrical system.

Think about when you put those two companies I just talked about, put those two companies together. General Compression, which can perhaps double the efficacy of the wind turbine, that can generate electricity that goes out over the wires to your garage, that you plug in your car at night and drive off and get 40 miles on electricity and unlimited mileage on your gas or ethanol, a clean system, with zero carbon dioxide emissions. There is some pretty good news, and they are not the only one.

Now maybe we will not have wind turbine-driven electricity. Maybe we will have clean coal. You know, most of the energy is from coal, from electricity right now in the United States, and it is very dirty, huge gigatons of carbon dioxide which are responsible for global warming, but there may be a way we can burn it cleanly.

We can put it through a combined cycle process that can take the carbon dioxide out of the stream. We turn the coal into hydrogen. We burn the hydrogen in a gas turbine, and that generates electricity. But we have got to have some place to put the carbon dioxide so it does not get in the atmosphere. We basically sequester it, and we pump it under high pressure into the ground, and it stays there for hundreds of years, but it takes a lot of energy to compress that CO2. For every two coal-fired plants, you have to have one just for the energy to suppress this CO2.

But a company I talked to yesterday called RAMGEN in Tacoma, Washington, RAMGEN has a nascent technology using a very sophisticated technology to increase the efficiency of compressors by very significant amounts, which would allow us to compress this carbon dioxide and use much less electricity to do it.

So here we have a situation where we have these three companies I just talked about that may mean we would be able to have affordable, clean coal

electricity to go into our electrical grid to power our plug-ins; and, if not that, then we have wind turbine technology to power our plug-ins with a battery that works.

That is a beautifully elegant system that can keep the Shishmareff towns and the Marshall Islands that are being swallowed by the sea and keep us having cars that do not have to drive on oil from the Middle East. That is a pretty nice system. So there is a lot of great news out there, because there is a lot of great innovation out there.

But the question is, what can we here in Congress do to accelerate that rate and that pace of innovation, and this is the third thing I would like to address tonight. We have talked about the problem. We have talked about the people who are solving it, innovation, but we have a role here, too, to help accelerate that rate of innovation.

I would like tonight to talk about some of the things, not all of the things, but some of the things we can do here in Congress.

First, what we can do is try to accelerate the rate of the commercialization of this plug-in hybrid battery. It is still going to take some engineering to make sure the battery is put in sequence in a crash-worthy system.

We can pass a bill I introduced last week with some colleagues called the grid plug-in hybrid vehicle bill that will use some of this $14 billion that we have set aside for research that will help this industrial application get off the ground. It would also provide incentives for consumers to buy these products so we can help increase the demand for them; and, of course, we know once we increase demand, the cost of these goes down, the more we have on the road.

The bill would also create a Federal testing ground. We have several of these now that help prove the concept of these--that prove these concepts work, and we would build on that by providing another test facility to certify the safety and reliability of these systems.

So here is one bill that can help speed this transition to an electrical driven car, and we are very close to doing it. It may happen without Federal action, later rather than sooner, but we cannot wait. We cannot wait because of our dependence on foreign oil, and we cannot wait as the scientific panel will come out with its report this Friday again noting the danger we face as a country as a result of global warming.

So that is one thing we can do, pass this plug-in, flex-fuel hybrid vehicle bill.

Secondly, what we can do is make it easier for people to generate their own electricity. You know, photovoltaic energy where you put solar cells on your roof is becoming close to being market-driven. There are some very, very exciting things going on in photovoltaic energy right now.

A company in California called NanoSolar is producing 450 megawatts of thin cell solar cells which they hope will decrease the cost of photovoltaic cells dramatically, another company called MiaSole. But we want to make it easier for you. If you want to put it on your roof, when you generate more electricity, you are feeding it back into the grid, to basically--to sell electricity you grow at your home, home- grown electricity back to the utility company.

We want to make sure that you can get paid for that. So we have another bill called the net metering bill. Net metering basically means that you net on your meter what you used from the utility against what you produce and sell back to the utility.

This bill would create a right for you as a consumer, under certain rules that were set up, to sell your electricity back to your utility, make sure you can hook up, have a Federal standard to do that. That is the key to being able to get to what we call a distributed generation system, where we can have generators all around the country, including on our rooftops and our businesses and our homes, not just in large coal plants and large hydroelectric dams.

This is a pretty simple thing to do. It has been blocked now for 4 years in Congress. We are hoping that it can get through this year, a simple thing to do.

Third, we have got to increase our research and development in all of these high-tech energy fields. I just mentioned several of them. There are many others, wave power. We now have the first wave power plant that has been proposed off the coast of Oregon, 50 megawatts, with buoys that bob up and down underneath the surface that can generate very considerable electricity. There is enough electricity that could be generated off a 10-by-10 square mile area off the coast of California that, if the buoys can be shown to survive ocean conditions, can have all the electricity California could use. It is pretty amazing.

Now, there are hurdles to show that these buoys can survive in the wave power, but we need to do more in the wave conditions. We need to do more R&D on this. We need more R on the clean coal. We need more R&D on the solar thermal, which we are having great success with lately.

The reason we know this is because when we compare this to other major challenges, we are really pathetic. We are pathetic when it comes to doing R&D and energy right now.

You know, this challenge we have is at least as visionary as going to the Moon, but it affects our planet rather than the Moon. Yet we are spending one-seventh of what was spent and invested in the new Apollo Project, one-seventh per year what we spent on getting to the Moon.

That is a sad commentary on our failure to act with dispatch when it comes to energy. We would not have gotten to the Moon, probably ever, had we had such a skimpy, weak, pathetic amount of research into this basic science. We have all this explosion of information going on between nanotechnology and biofuels, which we haven't even yet talked about tonight. We have got to ramp up that Federal R&D. That is the third thing we need to do.

Fourth, we need to have major steps forward to advance our biofuels potential in this country. We have enormous potential in this country for biofuels. I have read the last few days some articles and newspapers by pundits who get to say anything they want. They don't ever have to run for election, so it doesn't matter what it is, really, I suppose.

But these pundits have suggested that biofuels could not play an important part of our role, and those people are not talking to the scientists who recognize the breakthrough technology that we are on the cusp of enjoying in this country to dramatically increase the productivity of biofuels. Now, we know we are already producing very significant sums of ethanol and some biodiesel in this country. We know that that can increase.

But what folks don't understand is that these biofuels, we are ready to take giant leaps forward to leapfrog the corn ethanol that we now use, and corn ethanol right now is what we might think of as the first- generation biofuel. It is kind of like the Wright brothers' flier. It works, you can fly, but it is just a start. We are going to enjoy succeeding generations of biofuels.

The first one that we will have will be cellulosic ethanol. Cellulosic ethanol is a fancy term that basically means instead of just using the seed of a plant to distill ethanol, you use the whole plant. You don't just use a kernel of the corn. You use everything, what they call the corn stover that grows above the ground. You mash it up, and you put an enzyme in it to break down the carbohydrates in the cell, then you distill the carbohydrates and you make ethanol.

When we do this, we will increase the productivity of the Midwestern farmer by a factor of two or three, not 5 or 10 percent, but by a factor of two or three. We will generate two or three times as much energy and money per acre as we are generating right now. This technology is ready for the first commercial plant, which should be in Idaho, a company called Iogen, that is ready as soon as they get a loan guarantee from Uncle Sam so they can build the first commercial plant to do this.

When we do this, we will be able to have a very significant amount of our transportation fueled by domestically produced biofuel. This is not me just saying this. This is the Department of Energy that has done extensive analyses of this, Department of Agriculture, a whole suite of agronomists

who have looked at it, who have basically concluded that in 25 years we can have 25 to 30 percent of our transportation fuels fueled by this, by this stream of domestically produced ethanol.

That is just a beginning. That is a second generation. A third generation could include algae. Algae has the capability of producing 50 times as much at least per acre as even the second generation of biofuels.

There is at least one company that has at least one commercial application of that technology now, basically to make diesel fuel out of algae. That is the kind of thing we need to invest in, and that is what we need to start doing.

Last, I want to mention something that is pivotal to driving these technologies, and that is the technologies that I have talked about tonight all operate under an enormous competitive disadvantage. They have to compete with other industries that have a huge subsidy that they don't get, and that's the subsidy that the fossil fuel industry has because they get to put their carbon dioxide, their pollution, in the atmosphere for free.

Now, you think about that. If a coal-fired utility right now can put its garbage, its pollution, its carbon dioxide, its pollutant that is damaging the Earth's atmosphere, that is damaging the atmosphere by the megaton and not pay a dime for it, in unlimited amounts, now, compared to what you do and what we do when we go to our county garbage dump with a pickup full of stuff out of our garden, goodness knows what we have got in the back of our basements, we have to pay money to dump our stuff in a limited space, because there is only a limited space in a garbage dump.

But utilities that put all this pollution in our atmosphere, which has limited carrying capacity for carbon dioxide, get to do it for free for as much as they want. That is a huge subsidy of those industries.

If you are a small company in California building solar cells or ocean-powered technology or wind turbines, or if you are a farmer in Ohio that is going to build cellulosic ethanol and sell it, you don't get that subsidy. It is an unfair subsidy, and it needs to stop.

The U.S. Congress needs to stand up on our hind legs and pass a cap and trade system to cap, to limit, to put a ceiling on the amount of carbon dioxide that can go in our atmosphere from these polluting industries. When we have that cap, when we limit the amount of carbon dioxide that can be put in, two things are going to happen.

We are going to protect our atmosphere for our grandchildren; and, second, we are going to give a boost to these new businesses that are really ready to start producing these products to become commercially available for the clean energy future of this country. That is a big two-fer, a clean, healthy environment and an energetic economy.

All of the things I have talked about tonight will help produce both things. This is a situation where we are going to have the cleanest policy in congressional history and the most robust economy in American history once we develop these new technologies, because we need to be the country that fulfills our destiny as being the inventors of the world.

You know, China is going to need this technology. They are building one dirty coal-fired plant a week, and they are going to need clean energy technology. We should be the one selling it to them.

Here is a great way to restore the imbalance of trade between us and China. One of these companies, the director of Ramgen, this company that may be able to do this clean coal technology, was going to China today, and here is a perfect example of how we can start to fix this terrible trade imbalance we have when we can be the sellers to the world to this clean energy technology.

So, in summary, there is some good news and bad news here tonight. The bad news is we have some fellow Americans whose talent is being destroyed by global warming in Shishmareff, Alaska.

We have a fellow citizen in the world, the Marshall Islands, whose country is being devoured by global warming. That is the bad news.

But the good news is we have a great combination of innovators, inventors, business people that are ready to tackle this problem and create these new technological solutions to this problem. One day we will be driving clean cars. We will have cleaner homes with better efficiency. We are going to lick this problem of global warming at the same time we are going to grow the U.S. economy.

That is a message that this Congress, I am proud to say, is now sending for the first time. We have broken the chains of the oil and gas industry. We have broken the chains of the 19th century, and we have entered a new century of clean energy technology.

I will look forward to more successes so we can help Americans continue to invent. It really is the American destiny to pass the new Apollo energy project and do just what John F. Kennedy did, take this country to a new vision.

Mr. Speaker, today we really do begin America's clean revolution in this bill. Every revolution has a beginning. The American Revolution began at Concord; the aerospace revolution began at Kittyhawk; and America's clean energy revolution begins today with this bill. And years from now when we have licked global warming and we have achieved energy independence, we will look back to this day as the first step on the road to clean energy for America.

Today we are going to break the shackles of oil and gas. We are going to free Americans to invent, to innovate, to create the clean technologies we need in energy. This is only common sense.

We pay once at the pump for gasoline already. We shouldn't have to pay again on tax day on April 15 to line the pockets of the oil and gas industry. It is common sense.

Our national resources should be going to the innovators who will lead us in energy in the 21st century, rather than to those who have kept us in serfdom to the oil industry, an industry of the 19th century. Change is afoot starting today.

Now we are going to unleash the talents of the Nanosolar Company in California. It is perfecting thin cell solar cells. We are going to empower the Ocean Power Technology Company that is perfecting wave energy, enough wave energy off the California coast to light the entire State. We will get loan guarantees to the Iogen Corporation, which is going to build the first cellulosic ethanol plant in the Western World in Idaho starting today.

Today we recognize that the solution to our energy challenges is not below our feet in the ground. It is above our shoulders in our brains, and we are going to unleash the intellectual talents of America to see that that happens.

I will be introducing again the New Apollo Energy Project bill, which will marshal our Nation's talents, just as John Kennedy marshaled our national resources in the original Apollo Project. Today is the first step of the new Apollo Energy Project. Tomorrow I will introduce the Plug-In Hybrid Bill, a bill that will hasten the day when our cars are powered on clean energy, clean electricity, and clean biofuels so we can get our energy from Midwestern farmers rather than Middle Eastern sheiks.

These are just two of the many steps on this long road of the clean energy revolution; and there is no silver bullet to our energy challenges, but there is a silver lining, and that is the genius of the American people. Today we are freeing the genius of the American people. It is long overdue.

Regarding clean coal, we believe clean coal could be part of our energy future, and we need to do research in it to find a way to sequester carbon dioxide so that resource can be used. But in doing so, we can only do it if we have some limitation on carbon dioxide. The FutureGen project will never be built unless we have a limit on carbon dioxide. That is the only way it is going to be built. Democrats stand for research on that. It is part of this bill, it is part of clean energy.

Mr. Speaker, we come here to the well tonight to continue this discussion about energy. I have enjoyed listening to my colleagues Mr. Bartlett and Mr. Gilchrest, who have been talking about the need for changes in our energy policy to effectuate an energy efficiency policy for this country, to use our innovative talents to come up with new technologies to deal with our energy challenges, and to really bring our energy policy from the 19st century into the 21st century. And the good news is tomorrow, Thursday of this week, in just the third week of the 110th Congress, this new Congress is going to start with a big step out of the 19th century, which has been represented by the last Congress, and into the 21st century, which is represented by this Congress, and I am pleased to report to the House tonight and to the country, tomorrow the Democratic majority with some help from some of our friends across the aisle will pass a bill which will cause a major shift in the energy policy of this country.

In the last Congress there was a clear direction of the energy policy of this country, and under the last management of the U.S. Congress the basic operative rule was to give billions of dollars of taxpayer money to the oil and gas industry, the most profitable industry in the history of the solar system, over $10 billion in tax breaks to the oil and gas industry. Tomorrow, that money will be returned to the citizens of the United States for the use in developing a truly 21st century energy plan.

Tomorrow, the Democratic majority held Congress or House of Representatives will pass a bill which will reel back in $14 billion of taxpayer money that was sent to the silk-lined pockets of the oil and gas industry, and that is a good thing for Republicans and Democrats and Independents and for our grandchildren for reasons we will talk about tonight. It is a good reason because when we reel that $14 billion in giveaways to the oil and gas industry that happened in the last Congress, what we will do tomorrow is take that $14 billion and create a fund of money belonging to the American people that will be used for the development of new technologies, creative new sources of energy, energy efficiencies, more efficient vehicles, more efficient appliances, and a way to beat global warming.

So we are going to convert the giveaways from the oil and gas industry that happened in the last Congress to an investment in the future of our country to have a new energy technology, technologically based future for the energy source of this country. We are going to do it for three reasons. And perhaps those three reasons are obvious, but I want to state them.

Tomorrow when we pass this bill, we will create a fund called the Strategic Renewable Energy Reserve. Not really much of an acronym; I didn't get to name it. But the Strategic Renewable Energy Reserve will be a fund with $14 billion that will be taken back from the oil and gas industry and be used for our inventors, our businessmen, our academicians, our people who are doing great work to develop new sources of energy, and we will do this for three reasons. I will go through them quickly.

Number one, we will use this fund to develop a domestic source of energy for this country. We will use this money to develop the new advanced biofuels, the second generation ethanol, the cellulosic ethanol, the advanced biodiesel systems so that we can start buying our fuel from Midwestern farmers rather than Middle Eastern sheiks. We know the trouble we are in in the Middle East due to our dependence on Middle Eastern oil, and we are going to break that oil addiction, not rhetorically, but in reality.

Second, we are going to use these funds to develop new clean energy sources that can stop global warming. We are going to have energy efficiency which can have efficient appliances rather than dirty appliances that waste energy. We are going to have energy efficient cars, plug-in hybrids, flex fuel vehicles that can use biofuels developed in the Midwest; energy created by wind turbine, solar energy and perhaps clean coal, wave power. You name it.

We have a thousand flowers that are going to bloom in energy if we use this money in a smart way to stop global warming.

And, third, we will use this money to create a new energy source of jobs in this country. It is about time to start building fuel efficient cars in this country, new technologies here. It is time to reel those jobs back in.

So I am very excited what will happen tomorrow. It is the first step in a long road of what we will talk about tonight, the new Apollo Energy Project. And we have a new Member of the U.S. House who has brought a new vision of energy, Mr. John Hall of New York. And I will yield to Mr. Hall.

If the gentleman will yield. Very much so, it is claiming what should be rightfully ours. We essentially gave away oil that belongs to the citizens of the United States, and gave it away with no royalties. It was a giant, giant giveaway program. And subsidies in certain circumstances are appropriate for nascent growing industries, but this is a mature industry. There was no reason to give a company that made $20 billion profit last year more of our taxpayers. You are paying twice when that happens. You are paying at the pump, and then you are paying on April 15 when you are paying taxes that are given to these oil and gas companies.

I want to just touch on your wind sample. Today I had the Director of the Bonneville Power Administration that runs the electrical grid in the Northwest today, and he was telling me that wind power today is cheaper, cheaper than essentially any other system that we have to generate electricity, at least in the Pacific Northwest, cheaper than coal even.

For those that say wind cannot be an integral part of the system, a study came down from a Minnesota group last week which evaluated how one can integrate wind because the wind does not always blow. It is not a totally reliable system, so you have to integrate it into your system.

They concluded it is so cheap you can integrate it by having backup gas turbines sometimes to kick in if the wind doesn't blow with minimal to no increases in prices.

This revolution that is happening in energy that we will start tomorrow, sort of the Concord Bridge moment for the energy revolution here, is all over the country. You mentioned in your neck of the woods, it is not just the Midwest, in Washington State we are going to have the biggest biodiesel plant in the Western hemisphere. It is going to be up and running next year.

Minnesota has huge growth in wind power. Wisconsin has a company that is building wind turbines so fast they cannot fulfill the orders. Missouri has just started three huge wind farms. This is something all over the country.

When I talk to businesses, what I find is there is not a State in the country that does not have some business that is going to benefit from what we will start tomorrow, which is new energy revolution. California in Silicon Valley is developing these new solar cells that could be 30- 40 percent less expensive. A company called Fiber Forge in Colorado is starting to make composite bodies for cars that could be 40 percent stronger and half the weight. This is a national effort. All of us will get to brag about it some day.

I would like to yield to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Klein), a new Member of Congress. Thanks for joining us.

I was talking to a businessman the other day who wants to develop the Chinese market to sell China thin solar film technology to become the distributor in China of a technology developed in America. Talk about a great thing for our balance of payments.

You talked about the original Apollo project. We have named our bill, the first step we will talk about tomorrow, the New Apollo Energy Project because we believe, as John F. Kennedy did, that we have unlimited innovative capacity. But what we don't have at the moment are policies to put that innovative genius to work.

For instance, we are spending less than 16 percent on energy research in total in this country. We are only spending 16 percent of what we spent on the Apollo project. That is just abysmal. We had at least as much of a challenge as trying to get to the Moon.

I had a utility executive in my office today. He told me this factoid: We spend more on research about dog food than the utility industry does on new energy in this country. I don't want to belittle dog food, it is important, but we need to boost our research. Tomorrow we will put $14 billion back into the pockets of Americans to use in part for research, the tremendous things that are going on. Every time I pick up the phone, I learn about a new technology being developed.

I yield to Mr. Hall.

There is so much good work going in to stop those things that you are talking about. To mention two instances of success on energy efficiency, I was talking to the Vice President of Dow Chemical yesterday. Dow Chemical historically has not been looked at as a company on the forefront on environmental issues, but they got a star last year for their energy efficiency program.

They have saved 42 percent of their energy since 1990. They have reduced their energy since 2000 by 22 percent by just adopting commonsense measures, some of which you might have talked about, by having energy efficient appliances and lighting, by looking at how they monitor the energy in their building. So a 42 percent reduction of their energy usage, and they did that because it is good business, not because it is some granola-crunching idea. They did it because it is good business. And we will create a fund tomorrow to help businesses and individuals go down that road.

Second accomplishment, California. California has essentially, while the average American uses 50 percent more electricity than they did 10 years ago, 50 percent, California has been stable for the last 10 years. They have not gone up one kilowatt hour. And the way they did that was to help people invest in energy efficient light bulbs, energy efficient windows and appliances. As a result, they use 8,000 kilowatt hours per person per year, and the average person uses 14,000 kilowatts.

Does that mean people in California are living in the stone age? They are still taking hot tubs in Marin County and still putting out movies in Hollywood. They are living a good life there, and their economy is booming. But they are doing some commonsense things with energy. That is what we are going to start tomorrow.

We had a meeting with Hank Paulson today, Secretary of the Treasury in the Bush administration, and he had made an interesting comment. I am very impressed with him, though I have been pretty critical of the Bush administration, because he has been a pretty outspoken advocate that we need to do something about global warning.

He said everything he has learned since taking the job as Secretary of the Treasury, he comes from a very successful Wall Street career, has been worse than he thought. The deficit, the situation in Iraq, everything he has learned has been worse than he thought, except energy, because he has learned about the new innovations going on around the country.

What we want to do is help businesses, like the Iogen Corporation, which is ready to build the first commercial cellulosic plant in America in Idaho. They are ready to go, as long as they can get their loan guaranty. They have 300 farmers that are going to give them their straw left over after wheat. They are going to chop it up, put an enzyme in it, and then free the carbohydrates and distill that into ethanol, and, boom, you have a product that is three to four times more productive per acre than the current type of ethanol we get from our farms.

Ocean Wave Technologies has the first permit for wave power in the United States off the coast of Oregon, a 50 megawatt plant. They are using a technology now that is in the water in Hawaii, generating technology with this buoy that is anchored below the water. It goes up and down and creates a force thoromatically that runs a generator. They are generating electricity today for the Navy. They are ready to make this a commercial operation. They need a little help to get started.

The Nanosolar Company, a company that was started, and the fellows who wrote the first two checks were the two guys who started Google. They have done pretty well for themselves, and they wrote a check to a couple of entrepreneurs in California, and now they are ready to do 450 megawatts of thin cell solar, where you use a solar panel that has one- fiftieth the width, using a selenium, iridium, gallium and caesium type of technology that they think can be 30 or 40 percent cheaper.

Another company trying something like this is called Miasole.

These are the companies that need help, not the big oil companies. And what we are doing tomorrow is shifting the subsidies that have been given away to the oil industry, an 18th century technology, and helping these new-generation technologies come on.

By the way, in this debate we are the optimists. We should identify who is on what side of this. We are the optimists who believe global warming can be dealt with. The pessimists say we can't.

Now, they are giving up. The debate about global warming is over. And I know it is over because yesterday the Exxon Corporation, which has fought tooth and nail the science on global warming, basically withdrew their support from the political organization that has tried to create doubt about global warming.

So when the Exxon Corporation agrees it is time to start getting serious about global warming, I think the debate is over. And now the question is, how can we join on a bipartisan basis to find solutions, and we are starting this tomorrow. I hope we draw some votes from some of our colleagues across the aisle.

I yield to Mr. Hall.

I want to comment that some people have argued this is sort of peripheral or tangential sources of energy, niche types of energy. I think it is important to realize the scale of energy that we have available domestically. It is enormous.

When you talk to the scientists about this, the wave power in a 10- mile-by-10-mile stretch of the California coastline, that is 100 square miles, if you can imagine 10-by-10, there is enough wave power using this existing technology to generate all of the electricity used in the State of California. That is not hypothetical. That is actual wave power that is available. That is not a niche technology.

In Montana, if we can a find way to burn coal cleanly, and I say if because we are a long ways from being able to do that, to segregate and store the carbon dioxide below ground, but there is enough coal in Montana, just Montana, if we can find a way to do that, to power the electricity needs of the entire Nation for decades.

Just to give people a sense of the scale of this, with solar energy, in a few hundred square miles, there is enough to light the entire Nation, if we get solar power down to a market-based price. It is more expensive than electricity right now from a coal plant or a gas-powered plant.

But what we are learning is that for all the technologies we have talked about today, solar, wind, wave, efficiencies, where some day plug-in hybrids, plug our cars in and run on clean electricity, every single one of those technologies has come down in price dramatically as the technologies have improved and as we have scales of economy.

Wind power has come down in price 80 percent in the last decade. Solar is coming down. There is a factor basically every time, if I get this right, every time it goes up, and I am going to have to check to make sure. In fact, I will not use it because I can't remember what it was, but there is a ratio that has been clear with solar power that has come down. Every time you ramp up production by a factor of X, you get a Y percentage decrease in price, and that has been a constant.

What we have learned is that we know there are two curves. Fossil fuels are going up because China is coming on gangbusters and demand is going to go up. We might reach peak oil. We don't know. But we know fossil fuels are going up long term, and these are coming down, and we want to be on the downward sloping path.

So one of the things we want to do eventually, in our new Apollo project, is to have a renewable portfolio standard to say that a percentage of our electricity will be generated by clean energy sources by the year 2020. We just did this in Washington by popular vote.

I yield to Mr. Kline.

I want to comment on two really exciting transportation alternatives. One is public transportation.

The city of Portland, Oregon, has demonstrated the ability of America to reduce our CO2 emissions to deal with global warming. They are the first city in the Nation to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions to 1990 levels, which would be consistent with the Kyoto Treaty, which may be a treaty we do or do not eventually adopt, but they have been the first city in the Nation to reach these 1990 levels, to roll back their carbon dioxide emissions.

One of the principal ways they did it was they embraced an incredibly popular light rail system to move people. Rather than sitting on freeways for hours at a time, you go down to Portland on a convenient, much-loved system that has now been voted on five times successfully in Portland because people love this system. It is convenient, it is safe, it is cheap, and it saves us from global warming.

So if we have a transportation policy in this country that helps communities work in that regard, we will make some strides.

The second thing I want to bring up is a technology called plug-in hybrids, which I think could be maybe the ultimate vision for us in the next decade, and that is to develop our cars so we go home at night and we plug them in. You take power off the grid, electricity generated by clean wind, clean solar, clean wave, clean coal, or a variety of technologies. These are cars that today are running, that can run 20 or 30 miles just on electricity. And then when you run out of juice, you start running on your motor.

If we have a flex-fuel hybrid plug-in car, we are going to be in really great shape in this country, because we can plug it in and get clean electricity. We have the pipes to deliver it, which is the electricity grid. You plug it in at night, you run your first 20 or 30 miles, then you use ethanol that you bought from our local farmer in the Northeast, or in Iowa, or eastern Washington. And if you don't like that, you can burn gasoline as well.

General Motors just announced their first sort of proposed car, called the Volt. They ran it out at their show just 2 weeks ago in Detroit at the auto show. Now, we have to improve the batteries to really make them commercialized, but that is where our money should be going, to improving the batteries so we can have plug-in vehicles, rather than going to the oil and gas industry.

So tomorrow we are going to make a decision to take money we gave to the oil and gas industry and give it to these companies, to the extent we can, to help develop these new technologies for batteries and a whole host of other things. These are lithium iod batteries, and they are close to being commercialized. There are a few security issues they have to work with to make sure they are stable and workable, but that is a good shift for the country.

Sure. And we can do things essentially at no cost to the Federal Government. For instance, loan guarantees. If we guarantee a company that wants to start a plant, like this Iogen cellulosic ethanol plant, if we do a loan guarantee for them, there is a high level of confidence it is going to work, and it never costs us a dime, assuming that it works. But it helps them get the capital to give security for the investors to do that.

That is a good investment for the country, if we choose wisely. But these companies will tell you they have to cross the valley of death, to get from development, where they have their prototype, until they can really commercialize it. And that is where Uncle Sam can happen.

And we will get a lot more bang for our buck helping a battery company that will help us drive plug-in hybrids a few years from now than we will just giving it to a company that made $22 billion last year in the oil and gas markets.

That is a better deal for America. Mr. Hall.

And I think it is important to point out the tremendous payback to our economy of relatively small Federal investments. Look at the computer industry. It grew by leaps and bounds because of the Apollo project. There is more computing power now on a wrist watch than there was in the original Apollo space vehicle because we developed computer based software systems as part of the Apollo project.

Our medical device industry with these exotic materials largely came from the American space program, and these were relatively small investments.

By the way, we spend less today on research and energy than we do in a month in Iraq by a factor of about 10, just to put this in perspective. We are talking about for a family's budget a lot of money, but for the Federal budget fairly small amounts of money that can have absolutely tremendous payoffs.

I want to talk about one other thing that we think we need to help these companies too, though. If you want to start a company that will generate clean electricity with no carbon dioxide emissions today, you don't have a huge advantage because of a loophole in the law that a coal company has right now that is putting their carbon dioxide up the stack. That coal company that has what we call dirty coal, where you just burn it and you put your carbon dioxide, you dump it into the atmosphere, they have a huge loophole in the law because they can put as much CO2 into the air as they want the tape. They can't put as much sulfur dioxide, they can't put as much nitrogen oxide, they can't put as much particulate matter, but they can put as much CO2 into our atmosphere that you and I own jointly, with no charge. And the company that is going to make a clean industry, they don't get any benefit like that. We have to close that loophole. There has to be a way that there is some charge imposed on polluters who use our atmosphere to dump their carbon dioxide. And that is a loophole that needs to be closed to help these innovators as well to level the playing field.

Now it is really interesting. We are getting some support for this idea from some unusual sources. Duke Energy, I think, the third or fourth largest electrical utility in the United States, they burn massive amounts of coal, I think 40 or 50 percent or more of their electricity is produced by coal. But they recognize the need to have what they call a cap and trade system that caps the amount of carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere. And in part they realize that, I think, because when you impose some cost on this pollution it inspires these new companies to be able to create new technologies that are clean. So we hope ultimately the U.S. Congress will adopt a measure that will level the playing field and not allow these dirty plants to continue to pollute our atmosphere for nothing. You know, when you and I go to the dump it costs us 25 bucks to dump our pickup load of junk at the dump. But a company that burns coal can put their carbon dioxide and just dump it into our atmosphere, gigatons for nothing. That needs to change

And what we are finding is that more and more companies are actually accepting this idea, thinking it is a good idea because one, it will drive innovation. It will help us invent new technologies. But second, they realize this works. What we are talking about is a thing called a cap and trade

system. We cap the amount of carbon dioxide that can go into the air and we allow polluting companies to bid and trade for the right to put that pollution in. It is the most economically efficient way to do it. And what the companies have discovered is that when we do this, it works. When we did with sulfur dioxide in the 1980s it cleaned up the air and it actually ended up helping the economy.

It created jobs in creating these scrubbers. It helped our health and it actually, if anything, increased the gross domestic product. So what we are seeing is that some of these visionary companies are embracing this idea and it makes sense.

Today when I was talking to the Treasury Secretary, Mr. Paulson, I said, you know if we don't do this we are going to be wasting a lot of money. The Bush administration has supported a program, basically, it is a combined cycle way of using coal that you can make into hydrogen and sequester the carbon dioxide. It is called ``future gen.'' We are going to have a future way of generating coal based electricity. And I think it is a good idea to invest in that type of research to see if we can burn coal, take the carbon dioxide, stick it in the ground forever and we will have clean electricity. But the Bush administration is spending $750 million of taxpayer money to do that. But the plant will never, ever, ever be used or built if the Bush administration's policies succeed because they don't want to have any charge for carbon dioxide, any regulation on the amount of carbon dioxide going into the air. Well, if you are a coal company and you have got to invest money in this future gen program but you can put your carbon dioxide in the air for free, are you ever going to build this kind of machine that President Bush wants to build? It doesn't make any sense. So if we are going to do research in this new technology, it only makes sense also to have some regulation in the amount of carbon dioxide that goes into the atmosphere. Otherwise these technologies will be developed and never used. And that is not our goal, Mr. Hall.

I really appreciate your comment. A couple of comments, first off, about the value of business, big, little, medium, small, all sizes. There are so many companies today that are leading this revolution that we want to assist them. DuPont has done tremendous work on energy efficiency. 3M has done tremendous work on energy efficiency. British Petroleum, an oil and gas company, internally, because of their great leadership, reduced their own carbon dioxide emissions down to 1990 levels. They thought it was going to take them 5 years. It took them 3 years. And they saved $300 million in energy because of doing just exactly what Mr. Hall is talking about of energy conservation. This is a green policy in two ways. Green environmentally and green for profit, and red, white and blue for America. So we have a lot of colors working for this policy.

I want to mention one other thing about our auto industry. We need our auto industry to give consumers cars that we can drive to use multiple fuels. Right now we are all kind of slaves to gasoline. We don't really have a choice. We need cars that will burn gasoline or ethanol, like they have in Brazil. The cars in Brazil drive, almost all of them burn either gasoline or ethanol. And because of that Brazil is energy independent today because they are growing their own ethanol, which we can do in this country. But we need the auto industry to give us this choice, to give us cars that can burn gasoline or ethanol. Now you can make a car for about $85 that does that. That is all it costs. Almost nothing. That is what is costs to put tint in your glass. But we need the industry to do that. And you know, Congress may need to act, and I think it does need to act to get the industry to agree to do that rapidly. The second thing we need is these oil and gas companies to agree to put pumps in that will be ethanol pumps or biodiesel pumps.

That is not happening, because, unfortunately, those companies kind of only are selling gas right now, not biofuels. So we need to act to give consumers that ability to have at least a small percentage in the number of service stations that are going to give us that choice.

We know this can be done because in the 1970s and early 1980s we increased our gas mileage by 60 percent in 8 years. If we had simply continued on that path with the same rate of improvement, we would be free of Saudi Arabian oil today. We need to get back on that path of energy efficiency. We can do that. We can start tomorrow. It will be a good day for energy revolution tomorrow. I am looking forward to it.

Mr. Hall do you have any closing comments here? We are about ready to wrap it up.

When that day arrives they will write a sequel to Tom Wolfe's book about the Mercury 7 program, and he called it ``The Right Stuff.'' Tomorrow Congress is going to have the right stuff. We are going to do a good energy policy.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 10 o'clock and 48 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, January 18, 2007, at 10 a.m.

Madam Speaker, I rise today to bring to the attention of Congress one of the human impacts caused by the indiscretion of government officials regarding the covert identity of Central Intelligence Agency operative Valerie Plame Wilson.

As nearly every American knows, and as most of the world has heard, the covert CIA identity of Valerie Plame Wilson was exposed to the public as part of an Administration response to a critical op-ed published in the New York Times by Mrs. Plame Wilson's husband, Joe Wilson.

The national security ramifications for this act have been discussed thoroughly on this floor, in the news media, and I am quite certain behind CIA's closed doors. Today I intend to call my colleagues' attention to the human toll that this ``outing'' has had on one, often overlooked, individual. That person is Valerie Plame Wilson.

While the media, Congress, and the judiciary have gone to great lengths to discuss the impact of this unfortunate act on politicians, bureaucrats, agents in the field, and the suspected perpetrators of the outing, few have looked at the impact that the outing has had on Mrs. Plame Wilson and her family.

On July 14, 2003, Mrs. Plame Wilson's professional life was forever altered, and her CIA career irrevocably ruined by the syndicated publication of a column, which revealed Mrs. Plame Wilson's identity as a covert CIA officer. Since this time, numerous reports on Mrs. Plame Wilson's personal history have surfaced

in the press, official government documents, and by government officials.

Following the initial outing in the media, Mrs. Plame Wilson's future as a covert CIA operative ceased to exist and her career of two decades was destroyed. On January 9, 2006, Mrs. Plame Wilson resigned from the CIA, recognizing that any future with the Agency would not include any work for which she had been highly trained. For these reasons, and under these distressing conditions, Mrs. Plame Wilson voluntarily resigned from the Agency.

Despite Mrs. Plame Wilson's 20 years of federal service, she does not meet the minimum age requirement to receive her retirement annuity. She has been left without a career.

I am introducing legislation to allow Mrs. Plame Wilson to qualify for her annuity, as one who has served her country for two decades, and waive the age requirement for collecting it. To best demonstrate the annuity for which Mrs. Plame Wilson may qualify if this legislation were to pass, I am submitting for the record a document sent to Mrs. Plame Wilson by the CIA. It outlines her deferred annuity and testifies to 20 years of service. The document bears no indications of classified material as required by CIA procedures, and was sent via regular postal mail after Mrs. Plame Wilson was no longer in the employ of the CIA. Legal experts have assured me that this is not a classified document.

I believe that this is one small measure to help send a message that we must stand up for public service officers, such as Mrs. Plame Wilson, who have been treated wrongly despite their loyalty and sacrifice to country. For those who have been, for all practicable purposes, pushed out of public service for reasons unrelated to performance, but instead seeded in politics, we should not turn our backs.

Central Intelligence Agency,

Washington, DC, February 10, 2006.

Mrs. Valerie Wilson

Dear Mrs. Wilson, This letter is in response to your recent

telephone conversation with regarding when you would be

eligible to receive your deferred annuity. Per federal

statute, employees participating under the Federal Employees

Retirement System (FERS) Special Category, who have acquired

a minimum of 20 years of service, are eligible to receive

their deferred annuity at their Minimum Retirement Age (MRA).

Your MRA is age 56, at which time you'll be eligible to

receive a deferred annuity.

Your deferred annuity will be based on the regular FERS

computation rate, one percent for every year of service vice

the FERS Special rate of 1.7% for every year of service. You

will receive 1.7% for each year of overseas service, prorated

on a monthly basis, after January 1, 1987 in the calculation

of your annuity. Our records show that since January 1, 1987,

you have acquired 6 years, 1 month and 29 days of overseas

service.

Following is a list of your federal service:

Dates of Service: CIA, CIA (LWOP), CIA

(P/T 40), from 11/9/1985 to 1/9/2006--total 20 years, 7 days.

Based on the above service and your resignation on January

9, 2006, your estimated deferred annuity is $21,541.00 per

year, or $1795 per month, beginning at age 56.

The above figures are estimates for your planning purposes.

The Office of Personnel Management, as the final adjudicator

of creditable service and annuity computations, determines

final annuity amounts. Please let me know if I can be of any

further assistance.

Sincerely,

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to express my support for H.R. 4, the Medicare Prescription Drug Price Negotiation Act.

I strongly believe Medicare should ensure seniors have access to the drugs and biologics they need. In the past, my reluctance to support this kind of legislation has stemmed from the hope that we might find an alternative solution to the fact that our citizens, including our seniors, are subsidizing the research and development for drugs and biologics for the rest of the developed world, which has traditionally not paid its fair share of these costs. It is with the recognition that such a remedy is not forthcoming that I cast my vote today in favor of

Mr. Speaker, we need a surge of congressional action to stop George Bush's disastrous policy in Iraq. The country needs and is desperate for a change in policy in Iraq, and tonight President George Bush will continue his policy of failure, of giving us just more of the same.

It is clear that we need to insist on a political solution in Iraq rather than to insist on Americans continuing to pour billions of dollars and thousands of lives into this political chaos in Iraq. The President has refused to listen to the bipartisan panel calling for a change in Iraq. He has refused to listen to the American people. But he cannot refuse to listen to a Congress that fulfills its obligation under the Constitution to exercise the power of the purse to stop this misguided escalation.

The U.S. House should vote in clear and no uncertain terms to fund the troops that are there and to cut off funding for any escalation. It is our constitutional obligation. It is a commonsense policy to insist on Iraqis standing up. That is the direction and the change we need in this country.

Madam Speaker, yesterday, January 4, 2007, marked a historic day for progress in the United States of America for two reasons. The House of Representatives grew by taking further steps to represent the full fabric of the American People. The American people have selected their first woman speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and their first Muslim member of Congress, Keith Ellison. I am proud that Americans have rejected the statements from some who alleged Americans of all faiths are not welcome in Congress. This is also the first time the American people are represented by a speaker with a clear goal to move the United States towards energy independence. These advances represent steps forward in America's continuing experiment in democracy in which Congress represents America's stripes.

Mr. Speaker, I come to the floor this evening on truly what is a historic day, the beginning of this Congress. Historic, I will mention two reasons: One, the first woman Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, something that certainly has caused a lot of joy here and across the country and it is something worthy of noting. But a second historic event arises from Speaker Pelosi's first address as Speaker of the House today that I think marks a pivotal moment in our future of the country when it comes to our energy policy.

Speaker Pelosi today, in some of her very first comments, made a commitment to the country that our Nation would start a titanic and historic shift from old technologies associated with fossil fuels that are now putting massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and towards the use of new technologies that can produce our mode of power for our cars and our planes and our buses and our homes and our computers, and even our hair dryers in a way that does not contribute to global warming. And this is her commitment and her very first comment, I think it was telling, that this House will pass a measure in very short order, in the next several weeks, that will shift a huge amount of our national resources away from work in these fossil fuels that are now contributing to global warming and put that money into a fund that will be dedicated to the use of new high-technological energy sources that can free us from Middle Eastern oil, create jobs in our country, and stop global warming.

This is certainly a three-fer. And the way that she has made a commitment that this House will do is that we basically will repeal some of the less prudent activities of the former Congress that gave $7 billion of taxpayer money to the oil and gas industry, a very imprudent move, an industry that is in tip-top form financially, making profits hand over fist, the most profitable corporation in American history, indeed, world history. And yet the last Congress saw fit to give billions of dollars of tax relief to these organizations.

And these organizations are good organizations. They have good people in them. But there was no reason to give that money away when it has higher purpose. And that higher purpose that Speaker Pelosi talked about today is

to take those billions of dollars, those tax goodies given away to these corporations, repeal those giveaways and shift that money, shift those public resources, into a pool of funds that will be used to develop new high-tech, clean energy sources that we can go forward to build energy independence and reduce our contributions of carbon dioxide and other gases that are contributing to global warming. And I think this is a fundamental shift in American history.

We have had a steam revolution starting with American ingenuity, with Fulton and others. We had an industrial revolution led by American inventors, Ford and others. We have had an IT revolution led by many people in the software business. Many of them in my district in North Seattle and Redmond, Washington.

And now we are heading into a fourth revolution in the industrial base of America, and that is an energy revolution, where we make a transition from dirty fuels to clean fuels, many of which we will talk about tonight, and we will do it in a smart, prudent, fiscally sound way of using funds that are being wasted essentially on these old dirty technologies and shift them over, starting today with Speaker Pelosi's wise comments, towards these new technologies.

And in doing so, we will use the most fundamental character of Americans, which is technological brilliance, innovation, creativity, tinkering. We are the greatest tinkerers and inventors, not speaking personally but our country, in human history. And now starting today, we are taking the first step what I call the road down to new Apollo. We had the first Apollo project with John F. Kennedy where we went to the moon.

Today, with Speaker Pelosi's comments, we took the first step on the road to a new Apollo clean energy future for this country to move these resources into a clean energy future. And I am very excited about it because it will build upon the scientific prowess of America.

I would like to yield now to one of the Members of Congress who is a leader in the scientific community, a physicist with a history at Princeton, who personifies what science can do for this country, who has been a leader on these clean energy issues, for some comments on this issue, Rush Holt of New Jersey.

We want to turn to the things that can be done, because one of the messages of the new Apollo Project is that we have a clear path to use technology to solve this problem. But before we launch into a discussion now, I just wanted to note three conversations on this issue about global warming I have had in the last two weeks, that I want to note about why this is so compelling to have new energy.

The first conversation I had last week was with a woman who was a leader in the first city in the United States that is being relocated as a result of global warming. That is the village of Shishmaref in Alaska; it is on the Arctic coast of Alaska. This woman told me that last week the city voted to move their city, I think it is about 13 miles off of a coastal barrier island, that is disappearing because sea levels are rising, the tundra is melting, and the ice that serves as a barrier protecting their village is melting, and their island is disappearing, right literally underneath them.

They are having to move their whole city at a cost of $150 million, onto an inland area, that is Shishmaref, Alaska. When we have to start moving cities in this country to start dealing with global warming, it is time to have a new energy policy.

Second, I had a conversation with the president of the Marshall Islands. It is an independent nation in the South Pacific of 60,000 people. The president of the Marshall Islands told me that they are in an emergency situation because of the rising seas and the increasing frequency of big storms which are literally overtopping their islands, which are just a few feet. They are built on coral reefs. Their coral reefs are dying because the oceans are becoming warmer and more acidic due to global warming. We have a whole country that may go under water as a result of global warming.

The third conversation I had last week was with a woman who was a climatologist, I may have butchered that word, meteorologist. She is an expert on the Arctic, basically. The University of Washington just published a study that said with a fairly high degree of probability the Arctic ice pack will have disappeared in months of September, disappeared with just marginal little bits of it hanging on to the coastline by the year 2050, with all of the changes that portends, including the disappearance of the polar bear, that even the current administration under George Bush agrees should be listed as a threatened species because the Arctic ice is going to disappear.

I just note these because since Mr. Holt and I last discussed this in the last Congress 2 months ago, these three changes have taken place. This is a dramatically rapidly changing climate we have that demands an answer to energy policy.

So I just want to set the urgency for taking steps, the first step.

That point of being able to sell American technology to the world, I want to mention two companies, their CEOs I have talked to in the last month. One I talked to this morning is called Greenpoint Energy. It is a company in Boston that has developed a way to take coal and to process it into natural gas, then burn the natural gas in a way that eliminates the mercury emissions that typically come out of a coal stack, eliminates the sulfur dioxide that comes out of a smokestack and most importantly reduces carbon dioxide, the global warming gas by 60 to 65 percent.

Now, when I asked this young entrepreneur, who formerly did very well in the software industry, and is now into energy, what he saw as the future of this, he said it is unlimited. The reason it is unlimited is that we can take this technology that we build here, we can build these plants and sell them to China.

China is building one dirty coal plant a week, a 500-megawatt coal plant a week in China, which is creating massive CO2 contributing to global warming gas. Here is a company right now, they have got 25 employees right now, and 20 subcontractors, they can have thousands at some point when we start selling this technology to the Chinese.

Another company called Nanosolar in Silicon Valley, California, they developed a way to make a solar cell using a thin cell material that can increase the efficiency, or at least decrease the cost at least by 40 to 50 percent of solar energy, using a thin cell that is about 5 percent of the current thickness of a silicone-based solar cell. They want to sell this technology when we develop it. We have the first 450- megawatt capacity plant they are building right now, as we speak tonight. They want to start selling these around the world.

So here is a tremendous opportunity for America to reverse our balance-of-payments problem and start selling things to the world rather than buying them.

You mentioned transportation. I just want to note what I consider to be a very exciting development in the last 7 days in this country in transportation. I want to yield to a real leader in there, Mr. Blumenauer.

But when it comes to cars, we have not improved the efficiency of our cars in 25 years. We get less mileage today in our cars than we did 25 years ago. But in the last 30 days something very dramatic happened in the auto industry.

General Motors announced that they were going to start developing a plug-in vehicle in the next 5 years where you can go home at night, plug in your car, charge your batteries off your electrical grid from one to two cents, effectively, a mile, you are now spending ten to fifteen. For one to two cents a mile off the grid, you can run your car for, we hope, for the first 20 miles. Then after you run out of juice, if you drive more than 20 miles, and 60 percent of our trips a day are less than 20 miles, but if you go more than 20 miles then you start burning either the gas or the ethanol that you got from corn and soybeans and rye grass. You have a flex-fuel vehicle, you plug it in at night, you are off to the races. That is the first thing.

The second thing is the Department of Energy last week issued a study which concluded that there is enough energy-generating capacity in the United States, excuse me, it was a Pacific Northwest laboratory out in Washington State, actually, an arm of the Department of Energy. They concluded there was enough electrical generating capacity today to fuel 85 percent of our cars and trucks using a plug-in battery system and not build a single new generating plant.

In other words, we could fuel 85 percent of all of our cars once we get a plug-in battery system developed without building a single new dirty plant coal or even a clean coal, for that matter, because you have all of this excess capacity at night that is sitting there that we don't use. We have all these plants that just sit there unused at night. We can use them to charge our cars. These are two very exciting developments using home-grown technology if Congress acts to move these subsidies away from the oil and gas industry, as Speaker Pelosi pledged to do today, and move them into support for these new businesses and consumers to get the new end higher energy.

I want to yield to Mr. Earl Blumenauer, who has been a real leader in trying to bring transportation, particularly public transit which is a very, very effective way of reducing our pollution and making our transportation more efficient.

Mr. Holt.

I would like to point out a shining example of what Mr. Holt is talking about, and that is in Portland, Oregon, in part, because of the leadership of Mr. Blumenauer, Portland, Oregon achieved two very significant milestones in the last year. First, it was the first city ever to essentially meet the Kyoto targets for reduction of carbon dioxide. This proves it can be done.

A smart transportation policy and a smart energy policy can be both good for your economy and meet these targets to reduce carbon dioxide. Portland, Oregon has achieved that, and one of the reasons is because of their second accomplishment, the first city in the last 30 years in America, has had less miles driven per individual in the last several decades. It is the first city that has ever accomplished that by developing a very sophisticated public transportation system and developing a living system that can reduce the need for some of our long commutes. And I want to point out Portland's success on this has been an enormous benefit to its economy, because Portland, Oregon's economy has been booming. The value of property has been booming as a result of these smart energy choices it has made, and people want to live there. And it is because of some of the smart choices that have been made in order to use energy more efficiently.

Yes.

If I can allude to a choice, another sort of choice, I think that is a very fundamental principle that we want to give people choices in their uses of energy. But I want to allude to a choice, if you do decide to drive a car, what kind of fuel you use. And it is a Democratic Party principle now under the leadership of Speaker Pelosi that Americans are going to have more choices about what fuel you use because as part of our effort to move money away from this giveaway to the oil and gas industry that have enslaved Americans, you are a slave to the oil and gas industry if you have got a car right now, to move it over to give more fuel choices to Americans. We intend to develop a vision for this country that you have the same freedom that Brazilians have, because in Brazil today when you pull up to the pump you are not a slave to the oil and gas industry, you are the boss because when you pull up to a pump in Brazil you decide whether you want gasoline or whether you want domestically manufactured ethanol made from sugar cane in Brazil and soon to be made through cellulosic ethanol, through corn and wheat and corn stovers and switch grass and who knows what kind of products we are going to develop so that consumers can decide what product they are going to put into the tank. And when we do that, we are going to create thousands of jobs across the country, particularly in the agricultural belt.

I got an e-mail just as I was walking over here tonight about a little article about a company in Wisconsin that are building sort of the foundations for wind turbines. They can't hire people fast enough. Right down the road, at the Chippewa Valley co-op they are brewing ethanol in Minnesota to give people a choice to put ethanol in their tank rather than gasoline, and they have created source of jobs in this little town in Minnesota that was sort of a declining town at the time. We want to give choices to people.

And we have another leader here tonight on those issues, Representative Kaptur from the great State of Ohio, that has been a leader in an effort to make a transition from just an oil and gas economy to one based on biofuels. And I have to tell you that I am very excited about this because I have been talking to scientists who tell me that we now have the possibility of having two to four times more bio fuels per acre than we even have today, and with our corn usage today that is certainly being successful with a consequent reduction of carbon dioxide that Representative Kaptur can tell us about. I would like to yield to Representative Kaptur.

We appreciate the gentlewoman from the State of Ohio. We know the State of Ohio is going to do some great work on energy under the leadership of the new governor, Ted Strickland, who is committed to this agenda. And he would have been here tonight, but he is serving as governor, or will be in about a week.

I want to make two comments on the transition to a biofuels economy in the United States. First off, some people have said, well, we should not use fiber or plants for fuel. We have to use it only for food. I want to point out the fallacy of that argument. Right now we

are exporting an enormous percentage of the foodstuffs we grow. We send it around the world and they send us the cash. What do we do? We take the cash and send it to Saudi Arabia.

Let us cut out the middleman. Let us grow our own. This is time to grow our own. We are sending it all over the world and then sending the cash to Ridya and Saudi Arabia. Let us keep it right here. Let us grow our own fuel.

By the way, this is no pie in the sky. The Department of Agriculture has concluded we could have 30 percent of our fuel easily in the next 20 years, easily, using very conservative efforts. This is a very achievable goal.

The second point I want to make is that this may happen eventually without Congress's help, but it will be too late. Brazil took 30 years to make this transition to an energy independent condition using their biofuels. They use sugar cane there. They took 30 years. We do not have 30 years to wait. We have a problem with al-Qaeda tonight, we have trouble with global climate change tonight, and we have trouble with a loss of a manufacturing base in America tonight. We do not have 30 years. So we need to act and we need to do some things that the past Congresses and the current administration have not done.

Let me just mention three of them. Number one, they have not given loan guarantee assistance to get some of these plants going. The first cellulosic plant in the world, commercial cellulosic plant in the world is a company called Iogen. They are ready to build a plant. They have contracts with 300 farmers to grow a plant using the leavings of wheat to use cellulosic ethanol in Idaho, but they can not get the loan guarantee to get the job done.

We want to get that job done and get that plant up and running in Idaho. And this is going to be three or four more times effective per acre with increasing profits to farmers as a consequence.

Second, to give Americans this freedom to choose what fuel to use, they have to have cars that burn both gasoline and ethanol and, frankly, the industry has not been willing to do that. So we need to have some requirement to make sure that they make cars that burn gasoline or ethanol. They make a car for less than $100 to burn either one, so it is basically nothing to the manufacturers. We need to require that to be done. Now, they say they are going to do more of them in years, but we do not have years.

Third, we need the pumps that pump either gasoline or ethanol made from midwestern corn or wheat or biodiesel. But the folks in Brazil will tell you that companies do not like putting those pumps in, because now you're competing with their gas and oil. They have a monopoly on gas and oil, and they are not crazy about putting in a pump that competes with them.

So we are going to need to require that Americans be given a choice in pumps. Maybe we start by saying 10 percent of the stations have to have an alternative pump of ethanol, if you have 25 stations. We do not want the moms and pops that have to do this, if they cannot afford it. But if you have a big chain, why not have 10 percent of your stations at least have one ethanol pump so Americans can have that choice.

We took the first step in this journey tonight when Speaker Pelosi said we are going to start making a shift from giveaways to oil and gas towards these new clean energy futures, and I am looking forward to making progress.

And I yield to Mr. Blumenauer.

I would like to note that when Mr. Blumenauer talks about leveling the playing field, I think that is very, very important. Because when you look at these entrepreneurs, small businessmen and women that maybe have 10, 15, or 20 employees who are working out of their garage or a little warehouse they have rented somewhere and they are developing some new way. For instance, there is a company called Fiber Forge in Colorado, and they are developing a new way to use composites to build the body of an automobile that can be four times stronger than steel and weigh 30 to 40 percent as much.

Now, the challenge in doing this, we are building a composite airplane, the first one ever, the Boeing 787, but the challenge is how do you do that quickly in mass manufacturing, because it takes a lot of hand labor right now. Well, here is a little company called Fiber Forge and they are developing a way to manufacture this using mass production methods that will decrease the cost so you can build cars someday, the body of a car, out of composites that are stronger and weighs about half as much. Do not hold me to that exact number, but significantly less. But they are not getting subsidies, tax breaks, or help, whereas the giant oil companies of the world are getting those huge tax write- offs given to them by Congress.

I want to mention two other subsidies the oil and gas companies have that these new competitor businesses do not have. Subsidy number one. Probably a third of our defense budget is dedicated to the protection of our oil lanes to protect the oil these companies get and then sell to us at $3 or $2.50 a gallon. That is a multibillion dollar subsidy to the oil and gas industry that solar, wind, biofuels, clean coal that we can dig up and hopefully someday burn cleanly, they do not get that subsidy at all. That is number one.

Subsidy number two. The solar people, the wind people, the clean coal people, the wave power people, the transit people, people who do not put carbon dioxide in the air, they are competing with a company that is using the atmosphere as a free dump. The oil and gas companies today, and those using dirty coal today, are using the atmosphere as a free dumping ground to put their carbon dioxide in and they are not paying a penny for it. These other business people do not have that subsidy.

We have to do something about that so that there is some cost associated with using the air we breathe as a private dumping facility. When you go to the garbage dump now it costs us 25 bucks to dump a bunch of stuff out of your pickup into the dump, but these industries can put it into our air for free.

Now, we fixed that with sulfur dioxide and we fixed that with nitrous oxide, we have a cap and trade system, but there is a giant loophole, a giant loophole that these companies use for carbon dioxide. It is the most serious pollutant in the world today, but there is a loophole in our laws that does not impose any cost associated with putting that pollutant into our atmosphere. That needs to get fixed as well.

Now, we are going to have a long discussion about the best way to do that, but we have to do it.

I would yield to Ms. Kaptur.

I just want to comment on that. I think basically a way to say this is that our current biofuels economy, which is very productive, and I believe is at least a small improvement on net CO2, is really a first generation of biofuels. We have a second and third generation that are very close to coming.

One of them is this cellulosic ethanol that I have talked about. There is a company called Logen, there are several other companies doing this, to use a cellulosic method in an enhanced way of breaking open the cell to get at the carbohydrates. When we do this, this second generation of biofuels is really going to kick in and make this competitive.

I want to mention one thing before I yield to Mr. Holt, and that is we have just Democrats participating in this discussion. But our fellow Republicans are also involved in this discussion. I, myself, and others are talking to some of our Republican colleagues, developing a bill to try to enhance this second generation of ethanol.

We do want to make this, and believe we can make this, a bipartisan effort now that we have new leadership that will free us from the chains of the oil and gas companies that have shackled the Congress to date. We are going to have some colleagues on the other side of the aisle work with us, too.

I yield to Mr. Holt.

I want to note too, as we do that, we want to do in a way that is fiscally responsible. One of the things we have done is to pay for these things by repealing some of these tax breaks that have gone to the oil and gas companies, and then shifting them over to these investments, to do this in a fiscally responsible way.

We also want to do it in a way that helps businesses rather than hurts them. Some of the incentive programs that have been done in the past have been done in a way to ensure their failure.

For instance, some previous Congresses have been in the terrible habit when they do tax incentives that are intended to help businesses grow, they have done it for one year at a time or two years at a time; and venture capitalists, and I have talked to many of them, say we are not going to make multibillion dollar investments, realizing the rug can be pulled out from under us.

That has been done because Congress has tried to hide the deficit, so they have tried to make these things seem like they are short term.

We only have about two more minutes. I would just like to yield to anyone who has a closing comment.

We just have a few seconds. I would like to just make a closing comment.

First, I would thank my colleagues and say that I really do believe this is a historic moment for the industrial base and agricultural base of America, which is today's date, to start to move to a new base away from just a dirty fossil fuel-based system to a clean energy system. We are starting to do this starting today. We are going to join Republicans, hopefully, in finding a bipartisan way to do it.

We can tell people that the genius of Americans is in these new wind sources, wind turbines, solar cells, transit, flex-fuel vehicles, plug- in vehicles, cellulosic ethanol, wave power, geothermal, fuel efficient appliances, energy efficient homes; this job is going to get done by a new Congress and it is a bright day for the country.

Madam Speaker, I was absent from the House floor during today's vote on the previous question that would allow for floor consideration of a Minority Rules Package.

Had I been present, I would have voted to support the previous question.

Stated against:

Mr. Speaker, I rise today in support of H.R. 5946, a bill to reauthorize the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act. This bill is critically important as it will improve the management of our Nation's fisheries, providing a better future for tomorrow. Among other things, the bill ensures that the role of science in the fishery management decision-making process requires annual harvest limits at sustainable levels for virtually all U.S. fisheries and sets out a clear process for ending overfishing where it is occurring. These strict conservation measures are already in effect in the fisheries of the northwest--I am pleased that our management successes will now be replicated in all other regions.

Another key advancement for our Nation's fisheries in this bill is Congress' clarification that certain processes going through the Council process currently will not be negatively affected by the positive changes in current law. Specifically, the cap and trade systems will improve the economics of fishing and enhance the safety of our fishing fleets. Our existing cap and trade programs for sulfur dioxide--which have cut down on acid rain--are being replicated within our fisheries management systems. These programs have helped in curbing some of the effects of global warming, they will now improve fisheries conservation.

I am also pleased that the new legislation will not disrupt the ongoing efforts by the Pacific Fishery Management Council to enhance the management of its ground fish fisheries. The Pacific Council is working diligently to develop a cap and trade or ``rationalization'' program for its ground fish fisheries. This process has been underway for more than 3 years, and is nearing completion. While the bill requires the Pacific Council to implement an appropriate ground fish management program within 24 months from the date of enactment, and to meet other requirements in law, it does not require the Pacific Council to begin anew in developing that program.

Yet another important provision included in this legislation will create a study on the effects of ocean acidification within the National Research Council. Research into the impacts of high concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the oceans is in its infancy and needs to be developed rapidly. This study is a first step in understanding the problems our oceans will face.

The provisions included in this bill requiring the scientific and statistical committees to provide Councils with recommendations for allowable biological catch, preventing overfishing and achieving rebuilding targets are perhaps the most important. I will be closely following the performances of the regional fisheries councils, their decisions regarding harvest, and their operation and utilization of their respective scientific and statistical committees, as well as the council's use of their scientific and statistical committees' recommendations.

The oceans are absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere and this is causing chemical changes by making the oceans more acidic (that is, decreasing the pH of the oceans). In the past 200 years the oceans have absorbed approximately half of the CO2 produced by fossil fuel burning and cement production. Future generations will benefit greatly from the governments research into this subject.

Reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act is a positive step on the road to the healthy management of our ocean systems. I look forward to working with the Resources Committee in the 110th Congress on other positive steps to ensure that our oceans are safe and healthy for future generations.

Mr. Speaker, today we will be taking action so that America's shorelines do not suffer the same fate as Indonesia's on December 26, 2004. I am very pleased that this prolonged effort has arrived today where Congress is going to take measures to give Americans a warning and an ability to avoid damage from a tsunami before that big tsunami hits.

We are in danger and threatened on our coastlines in Washington. First, I will allude to the Pacific. Right off the coastline of Washington and Oregon in the Pacific is what is called the Cascadia subduction zone. This is an evil twin sister of the fault in Indonesia. It is almost identical to the fault off the coastline of Indonesia that caused that quake that cost hundreds of thousands of lives. We have similar subduction zones in the Alaskan-Aleutian zone. We are in the bull's-eye of a potential tsunami. In fact, one happened on February 26, 1700, off the coastline of Washington, and sent what could have been 50-foot waves onto the coastline. We need to do a better job, and this bill is a good start.

The good news is we have some great technology to deal with this issue. We have these detection buoys that use a product developed in Redmond, Washington, in my district, by a company called Paro Scientific. These buoys are anchored off the coastline and they have a little sensor that is on the bottom of the ocean that can measure the difference of depth of one-tenth of an inch over 2-mile deep water. It is an incredible technology. Then it radios changes in the average depth of the ocean to a satellite. In a matter of seconds, we have a system that can generate information along our coastlines. We have six of these buoys, we need at least 20 in the Pacific. For the first

time, this bill will put some buoys in the Atlantic as well.

This will be a first international tsunami warning system using what are called piezometers to measure the depth of the ocean.

The second thing the bill is going to do is the critical link in the chain of warning because buoys aren't enough. We have got to have a way to warn people, to educate people, to have systems in place so that they can evacuate along the coastlines. A little community called LaPush, Washington now has a system where they can move the whole city in about 12 to 15 minutes. We need to have those systems, and this bill is going to do that.

I want to say there is an additional benefit of this bill. False alarms happen as well. And when false alarms happen, we lose millions of dollars when we have false alarms. This whole system will reduce false alarms so that for the first time we can have a credible, meaningful, reliable tsunami detection and warning system in this country. It is overdue. I am glad we are going to have it happen. It is one of the crowning achievements of the great career of Chairman Sherwood Boehlert, who has done such great work for the environment and for science. We are all going to miss his great leadership.

I want to note a fellow who just left the Speaker's chair, Representative Charlie Bass, who hopefully will take credit for this as well for his great environmental stewardship. And it is a good day for America's shorelines to protect us from tsunamis.

Mr. Speaker, I come to the well of the House today to address America's predicament in Iraq and I do so with the thoughts of my neighbor's son who tonight is serving in Baghdad as many of our proud men and women, sons and daughters, husbands and wives are serving. I am going to have his future in mind during my comments today. I know my colleagues, both Republicans and Democrats, share these views. They have their own kin and neighbors.

My neighbor was one who is the young man I watched growing up playing peewee football in Bainbridge Island, Washington. He was called to service in Iraq. He went. He served proudly for a year. He was ready to return. He was literally on the plane to return when he was called back to go back into Baghdad in the President's effort to send more troops into Baghdad. He has suffered two IED explosions, just about lost his ear in one of them. He is now in continual firefights in Baghdad. And I think of his 1-year-old son who is being raised by his grandparents since the mother is also serving in the United States Army in Iraq at this time. Their lives are in my mind, and Iraq is not an abstraction nor a partisan issue, it is a very personal one for many of us. And those are what my thoughts will be and I would like them to infuse some of my comments tonight.

The reason I have come, of course, is we have had this Iraq Study Group report. It is an amazing document. I hope people who are interested in Iraq will take some time to look at it. It is both accurate in some places and woefully short in others, and I would like to address both places where it is stunningly accurate and amazingly candid and refreshingly real and the places where it falls short in what we really have to do to accomplish our true national interests in Iraq.

Before I do that, though, I think it is appropriate in talking about Iraq and our obligation to our soldiers there, like my neighbor's son, just for a moment to ask how we got in this current predicament in Iraq. We went into Iraq with two goals: One goal was to remove Saddam Hussein, a brutal dictator, from power, to give the Iraqi people the chance to restore some dignity and freedom to their country. That mission was accomplished through the incredible, efficient and courageous act of our military men and women in fairly short order. It was accomplished. It has been now accomplished for over 3 years. That is mission accomplished, truly.

The second reason we went into Iraq was to make sure that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Despite scouring Iraq with a fine-toothed comb and literally billions of dollars trying to find any scent, any hint, any fingerprint, any dust of WMDs, that has been eliminated as a threat because it did not exist in the first place. Our two national missions in Iraq have been complete now for some time.

We have had a third national mission in Iraq that comes not out of our self-interest as a Nation but out of our obligation as a fair country to lead the world in caring for our neighbors, and that is to give the Iraqis a fair opportunity to form a government and take control of their own destiny. We now have been at that mission for longer than we were fighting World War II. That mission is accomplished. We have given the Iraqi people every opportunity to form a meaningful government in Iraq at this time. Yet our sons and daughters are still there tonight with the administration still tonight committed to staying as long as the Iraqis decide we are going to stay.

The President has said that our people are going to stay there indefinitely unless conditions that are under control of the Iraqis will allow him to bring them home. I am here tonight to say we should not allow the Iraqis to control when our sons and daughters come home. That should be a decision of the United States of America. That position finds substantial support in the report I will allude to as well as our common sense as Americans.

Now, first I want to say I am glad this report has been issued. Before the election, we heard a President who was bound and determined to stay the course. He was bound and determined to never take off rose- colored glasses. He was bound and determined to stay with his Secretary of Defense, despite the fact that every living human being who had looked at Iraq has seen nothing but a continued evidence of failure of leadership in the civilian ranks in the Secretary of Defense. He was bound and determined to have his Vice President say that we were dealing with dead-enders and that this was just a matter of a short period of time to roll up the opposition in Iraq. Every single one of those statements by the President of the United States was flat wrong.

Then we had Tuesday, November 7 came along and the American people gave a very strong verdict to the President's stay-the-course position. We hope that has been a sobering influence on the White House. Secondly, we had this Iraqi Study Group report come out. We hope that the combination of those two events will knock the White House off its pedestal into a position where it will work with the U.S. Congress to get our troops home. It remains to be seen whether or not those two events have that desired effect.

I would like to allude to this report now. There are things in this report that I think have not been in the news that I have reviewed, that I think it is important to realize in substantial detail, and the reason is that this report is the most categorical, clear, objective, bipartisan and well-reasoned rejection of President George Bush's assessment of the conditions in Iraq that you will find. It was bipartisan, as people know. It had people, I don't think any of whom had been against the Iraq war when it started, I don't believe, wiser heads who had been around policy for many years in this country, and unanimously they rejected the hallucinations of the White House that things were going okay in Iraq. And it is long overdue to have had a pronouncement from Washington, D.C. to that effect.

So, if I can, let me allude to what their conclusions have been. Number one, and I will quote:

``The situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating. The government is not adequately advancing national reconciliation, providing basic security, or delivering essential services.''

Iraqis have no electricity, they have no functioning police, they have no employment, they have no means to run their army, they have no functioning control over their borders. They have no functioning government. This is a government in name only.

Number two: ``Iraqis have not been convinced that they must take responsibility for their own future. Iraq's neighbors and much of the international community have not been persuaded to play an active and constructive role.'' I want to just focus on that for a moment. Iraqis have not been convinced that they must take responsibility for their own future. Why is that? Why have the Iraqi politicians refused to make an agreement about disposition of oil? Why have they refused to make a disposition about employment practices in the Iraqi government? Why have they refused to make an agreement about how the ministries will be handled?

Well, there is one reason. President George Bush has told them that troops will stay indefinitely in Iraqi. They do not have a real-life incentive to form a true government in Iraq because we have given them a crutch to lean on forever, according to this President. We have got to change that message dramatically, immediately, and I think this report makes that clear.

Quoting: ``The United Nations estimates that 1.6 million Iraqis are displaced within Iraq, and up to 1.8 million Iraqis have fled the country.'' The Iraqis are voting with their feet.

``Iraqis may become so sobered by the prospect of an unfolding civil war and intervention by their regional neighbors that they take the steps necessary to avert catastrophe. But at the moment, such a scenario seems implausible because the Iraqi people and their leaders have been slow to demonstrate the capacity or will to act.''

We have not focused their intention on the necessity of reaching agreements to form a true national government in Iraq. We have given them a security blanket at the cost of over 2,800 lives, over 20,000 seriously injured Americans, over 400 billion American taxpayer dollars, and probably over $2 trillion in the long-term costs of this war with no end in sight, with no guarantee to the American people that this war is going to end, and with no requirement by the Iraqis that they act.

For some time I have been bothered by this. I have been bothered that the President has stood on the sidelines and allowed this situation to deteriorate, with rose-colored glasses on cruise control. I picked up the phone a few weeks ago to call one of the administration officials to talk to them about that. I said it was my perception that there is no Iraqi government essentially because there is no agreement about oil. The oil in Iraq is located under the Shiites' territory and the Kurds' territory. It is not located where most of the Sunnis live. And the Shiites to date have been insisting at least on the new oil fields remaining in the regional areas, meaning, bottom line, Shiites get the oil. Sunnis who have run the country for 75 years, if not more, are left out. Therefore, they have had continuing sectarian violence.

So I asked this official, is that assessment a fair assessment of this situation? And he said, yes. And it is interesting because his assessment is the same one as this report as we will talk to in depth.

I said, well, then, I hope to believe that the President has given an ultimatum, at least privately, to Mr. Maliki and all of the other Iraqi officials that we are leaving if they do not form an agreement about oil. And the answer stunned me. He said, no, we have not done that. We haven't put that pressure on the Iraqis. And I said, why not? He said, well, we don't think that's our place.

So while our sons and daughters are dying tonight, and my neighbor's son is in Baghdad when he should be home with his 1-year-old son, the White House doesn't think it is its place to put pressure on the Iraqis to reach an agreement about oil so that they can form a government and we can get our troops home. This is the most callously indifferent, negligent attitude of this administration and it is costing our country dearly and it is wrong. And this report on a bipartisan basis has said it is wrong. It has said very clearly that we need to make a statement.

It goes on to say, ``There is no action the American military can take that by itself can bring about success in Iraq.'' This requires a political resolution. Yet our President has not insisted on a political resolution. He has essentially told the politicians they can diddle, they can squabble, they can bicker, they can disagree, they can create these little deals where the Shiite radicals, al-Sadr gets three ministries and maybe the Sunnis get half a one, and the sectarian violence goes out of control and our kids get killed, with no threat whatsoever that we are bringing our troops home.

That is one of the reasons that we are in the pickle we are in. The report goes on to say, ``The United States must not make an open-ended commitment to keep large numbers of American troops deployed in Iraq.''

That is exactly what the President has done. He has made a commitment to keep these troops there indefinitely. As long as we have been in Japan or Germany, and apparently people still think that this is like World War II, when the Vice President and Mr. Wolfowitz and the whole group of them essentially said we would be welcomed like we were in the streets of Paris in World War II. They still have that image of what this is all about in Iraq.

As a result, our policy is failing, because they still are essentially saying, we are going to stay there for 50 years like we have in Europe, and that is a policy inconsistent with our national security goals.

Next statement, ``While it is clear that the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq is moderating the violence, there is little evidence that the long-term deployment of U.S. troops by itself has led or will lead to fundamental improvements in the security situation.''

Now, that is a profound statement. We believe, because we are truly the greatest Nation on Earth, and we are, we have done remarkable things. We have the most efficient, most capable, most dedicated military force the world has ever seen. We have the best soldiers, Air Force and sailors the world has ever seen. They are great people. I know I visited two of them in a military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, two young men from Bremerton, Washington, on my return trip from Iraq about a year and a half ago.

These two young men had very, very serious leg injuries, and I went and saw them in their hospital beds and they had their legs propped up and tubes and pins and everything in their legs, and they had only been out of Iraq 2 or 3 days. I asked them how they were doing, and both of them said, sir, I just want to get back to my unit as fast as I can, sir.

That was a pretty impressive moment for me that these young men who had such bad injuries, the first thing they could say is they wanted to get back to their unit. Anyone who has dealt with the people, Americans serving in Iraq, you would be so proud of their service and what they are doing. We have incredible talent and dedication there. They have been amazingly dedicated through a very difficult 3 years, many of them serving on their second, third, fourth rotation throughout Iraq, without complaint. It is really pretty amazing.

So we have got the best people, we have got the best equipment, but we do not have the best policy, and a policy that essentially allows the Iraqi government to dawdle and not form an agreement is one doomed for failure. That is the policy of the President tonight unless something changes, and we are calling for strong changes in that regard. There is a real clear reality in Iraq. No deal on oil, no peace. No deal on petroleum, no way for us out, and we have got to insist on that, and that has not happened.

The report goes on to say, the composition of the Iraqi government is basically sectarian, and key players within the government too often act in their sectarian interest.

Now, we are all thrilled when there was voting going on in Iraq. We would like to think that they, in Iraq, were as committed to their government when they voted as we are to ours. We know how government works. We have had a peaceful transition of power here in the United States Congress. The people were dissatisfied with the course of the Nation this November 7, and they spoke, and I think they spoke very clearly that they wanted a change of course in Iraq.

But the fact of the matter is, this is more like sort of a gangs dealing up turf in Iraq than it is a working government. Right now three of the ministries are controlled by Mr. al-Sadr, who runs this brigade of perhaps 60,000 people in a personal militia, and those three ministries of the government we are supposed to be helping and allied with, will not even work with Americans. Three of the major ministries, might be 40 percent of the government in Iraq, won't even talk to us, and these are the people we are trying to help.

This is not a working situation. And have we basically said to the Iraqis, to Mr. Maliki, you must disarm that Sadr militia? You must get access to those agencies of the government? No, we haven't said that. We haven't said that at all. We have said we will just stay there forever if it takes that long. You

can just play whatever difficult games you have in the sectarian tensions in Iraq, and we will stay forever. That is the wrong message to Iraq.

We have got to tell them they are going to stand on their own feet very quickly, or they will fall, and only the Iraqis can make that decision ultimately, and we have made a decision, a commitment, and I know a lot of people who are against this war, myself among them.

I was very vocally opposed to this war when we started. I thought that we did not receive proper intelligence. I thought the intelligence was cherry picked. I thought that the threat was vastly overstated. Even though it was popular to be for the war at the time and the war drums were beating, I and 164 other Members of the House voted against the war.

Many of my constituents felt the same way I did. But even though they were very, very strongly against the war, they felt there was some national obligation on our part to give the Iraqis some reasonable chance to form a government. We had destroyed a government, we had some obligation to give them a chance to reestablish security and a government in Iraq.

But that cannot be a never-ending responsibility of the United States, and we have now spent longer in and given the Iraqis longer than the greatest generation took to win World War II. We have to realize that even though that period of time has gone on, the situation according to this bipartisan report isn't getting better, it is getting worse, and we have to recognize that reality. We have to have a major change in Iraq.

It goes on to say the security situation cannot improve unless leaders act in support of national reconciliation. Shiite leaders must make the decision to demobilize militias. Sunni Arabs must make the decision to seek their aims through a peaceful political process, not through violent revolt. The Iraqi government and Sunni Arab tribes must aggressively pursue al Qaeda. None of those things are happening, and we have not insisted on any of those things happening. We have been the patsy while this sectarian conflict has gone on, and we have not insisted that it stop, or we are removing our troops tomorrow.

As a result, these folks have refused to make the very difficult compromises it takes to form a government. I have got to tell you, I know how difficult it is. It is difficult enough around here in peace time, and I know it is difficult for leaders in Iraq. But American sons and daughters cannot be expected to be sent to the streets of Baghdad when Iraqis will not go.

You know what happened when we decided to pull troops out of Al Anbar Province where the insurgency is essentially taking over to send into Baghdad, and we called for six groups to come of the Iraqi forces? Only two of them showed up. We still don't have the troops the plan called for months ago to get security into Baghdad. Why didn't they show up? They didn't show up because they don't have a government to stand up for yet, because the politicians will not make the compromises necessary to do so, because we haven't required it. We have got to have a tough position in Iraq, and the tough position is one of tough love. Tough love is you tell the Iraqis they have got to fish or cut bait, because our ability to sustain this is not unlimited.

This goes on to say the problems of the Iraqi police and the criminal justice system are profound. Significant questions remain about the ethnic composition of some Iraqi units. Specifically they will carry out missions on behalf of sectarian goals instead of agenda. Units lack leadership, equipment, personnel, logistics and support.

I want to take a moment, if I can, to talk about what this administration has not done in the pursuit of its own policy. You know, for 3 years now, the President has said we will stand down as the Iraqi military stands up. But this administration has always wanted to fight this war on the cheap. It has never been willing to commit the resources to what a successful pursuit of this mission would require, and a successful pursuit of this mission, for the last 3 years, would be to equip, arm and train an Iraqi military as rapidly as possible, and we haven't done 40 percent of that effort.

The reason I know that--I went to Iraq, and I talked to the Iraqi forces, and they say we don't have any equipment, we don't have any communications, we don't have any payroll system, we don't have any recruitment system, we don't have any logistics system, we don't have any medical evacuation system, we don't have any communication system with the public. We are some people with AK-47s in pickup trucks who have been given a very short training period by the United States Government.

As a consequence, a difficult situation where you had extremely low motivation anyway to stand up for the government has been made worse. In fact, it was so bad that a year and a half ago, my friends the Republicans limited the amount we were going to spend training the Iraqi army. They wanted to reduce it. I said if the way out of Iraq is to stand up an Iraqi army, it seems to me we should do this as quickly as possible.

So I offered an amendment to the military appropriations bill that was accepted that at least didn't cut the training for the Iraqi army, but the fact of the matter is, any military assessment of the Iraqi army is they can't fight. They don't have the wherewithal to fight. We go into battle with armor, communications, Medevac, howitzers, gunships, F-16s.

We tell the Iraqis to go out with some pickups and AK-47s and no communications equipment. Why is that? Well, it is because the administration has never been willing to ask the sacrifices that are necessary of the American people to complete this mission successfully. It has tried to fight the war on the cheap, and the people paid dearly with both our losses of 2,800 people, 20,000 people who are seriously injured, and goodness knows how many Iraqis who have lost their lives.

You know, maybe we would have a different attitude if we had a chief executive who was committed to this commission enough to ask for sacrifices of the American people, but we don't have that. We have a situation where for 3 years this has been essentially a half-hearted effort, an unwillingness to get tough with the Iraqis and an unwillingness to commit the resources necessary to do the job, and a debacle has unfolded. Probably the largest foreign policy debacle has unfolded in the last of America's history.

So this is a stunningly disturbing report, and I note that it contains many of criticisms that I and my colleagues and what's called the Iraq Watch have been making on the floor of the House now for 2 years. We have come to the floor of the House in the evening. Many, if not all of these criticisms we have espoused. I think they have more reliabilities now that a bipartisan group has essentially been saying what we have been saying about the failure of this administration policy in Iraq. So the question now becomes what should be the change?

Well, the first thing is there has to be a change in the Iraqi government. I will quote this report, the composition of the Iraqi government is basically sectarian, and key players within the government too often act in their sectarian interest. The security situation cannot improve unless leaders act in support of national reconciliation. Shiite leaders must make the decision to demobilize militias. Sunni Arabs must make the decision to seek their aims through a peaceful political process, not through violent revolt. We must insist on this. We must require. We must compel it. Today we have not done so.

Now, what conclusions has this report drawn? It gets a little bit murky reading the report. It is not entirely clear what this group actually said. It is a committee of individuals who signed a report, and most people know the old saying that a camel is a horse designed by a committee, and what this group really recommends is a little bit ambiguous in part. But I would suggest there is one thing that is important and one thing that has a little lacking in this report.

The first thing is it demands a change in our policy, it demands a realistic assessment of our policy, and it demands that we get tough with the Iraqis to demand a political solution in Iraq, because that is a central prerequisite to any progress being made in Iraq. And that is a very import offering of this report, that we have to do that.

Now, the question then becomes, what do we do as far as troop levels and our military mission in Iraq? Their report is a bit of weak tea in that regard. It essentially alludes, and you will hear news reports that this calls for essentially removing our major combat missions by the end of next year, by 2008, by the first quarter of 2008.

The report isn't quite that clear. It says that by the first quarter of 2008, subject to unexpected developments in the security situation on the ground, all combat brigades not necessary for force protection could be out of Iraq. ``Could be.''

At the time U.S. combat forces in Iraq could be deployed only in units embedded with Iraqi forces in rapid reaction and special operations teams and search and rescue. ``Could.''

``Could'' is not a strong enough word for what this situation demands of American leadership. The word ``must'' must be in our response from Congress about Iraq. It is time to talk turkey with the Iraqi government. We cannot shade it. We can use polite language, but we cannot use language that is susceptible to multiple interpretations.

We must tell the Iraqi government that their training wheels have to come off, they have to strike the political deals on oil that have to be made, because our troops are coming home at a date, if not certain, that is at least within certain parameters. There is no reason that that process should not start now in a way that is militarily defensible. We have to send that strong message to the Iraqis, and only our actions will do so.

Frankly, language like ``could be'' I don't think is going to register on the streets of Baghdad, where 100 to 200 bodies are being found every couple of days. We need to send a stronger message.

The question is, how do we do that? I would like to think the President of the United States would have an epiphany reading this report. I would like to think that he will shed those rose-colored glasses that he has worn for 3 years. I would like to think that he will decide not to heed the advice of his vice president, who has been wrong on virtually every single thing in Iraq policy.

I would like to think that he will then come to the U.S. Congress and say, ``I am totally changing my statement on Iraq. I now believe we have to start bringing our troops home, because nothing less will result in the Iraqi government having an incentive to form a real government.''

If those things happen, Congress will be able in short order to reach an agreement to end this war in Iraq and give the Iraqis what they need, which is an incentive for action on the political front.

I am not all that hopeful that will happen. The President since the election has said some gracious things. The day after the election he said that he wanted to work on a bipartisan basis, and those words were greeted happily by us and we would like to believe that was the case.

Two weeks later, the President sent up six judges that he knew would be rejected by the U.S. Senate because of their entirely right-wing beliefs. Last week he appointed an individual to take care of the contraceptive program of the United States, to give women control over their destiny, and he appointed a person who thinks contraception somehow should be illegal, or at least inappropriate.

So the signs have not been entirely favorable that the President received the message from the American people given him on November 7. Some of my colleagues have. In the earlier discussion here, we had some of my colleagues, Republicans, quite a number of them, doing a valedictorian speech tonight who had come out on the short end in the election. I think they received the message. Many of them I consider friends, and they are good people, and they are credible people and hard-working people, and I know the taste of defeat, so I have some empathy for them.

But the American people have spoken, and we need the President to listen to them, and we need the President to listen to this report, and we need the President to listen to his troops, and those messages are we need a radical rethinking of Iraq policy.

Now, I have a message I would hope my colleagues will also consider tonight, and that is if the President does not heed that message of the American people, we here in the House of House of Representatives have a responsibility to act. We cannot just be folks who give speeches about Iraq, all though that is what I am doing here tonight. We cannot be people who just issue press releases about Iraq. We cannot be Congressmen and women who simply send letters to the White House.

If the President of the United States refuses to change course in Iraq in a meaningful way, this Congress has to use the ability granted to it by the United States Constitution to assure that there will be a change in Iraq, and we have an opportunity to do so through the appropriations process.

This war cannot be fought and the President cannot continue to put these troops in harm's way without funding. The geniuses in Philadelphia established the People's House and gave as its first obligation responsibility for the fiscal condition of the Nation.

No President can continue a war without funding. If the funding stops for the Iraq war, our troops will come home, and this Congress has to have the gumption to take such action if the President does not heed the will of the American people.

Now, people say, oh, isn't that fraught with political risk? You know, it might be. And that is why people in Vietnam waited 3 to 4 years after it became obvious that our policy was wrong, of not removing our sons and daughters at that time, and my friends at that time and my colleagues at that time, from harm's way in Vietnam.

Iraq is not Vietnam. It is dangerous to draw comparisons between Vietnam and Iraq. They are manifestly different in many, many ways, including our national interests and the nature of the threat and the extent of the losses that we have suffered.

But it is similar in this way: If we follow the failure of the Congresses in the early 1970s who refused to stand up to a chief executive to demand a change in course, we will have fallen victim to what they did during the Vietnam years. We have at least 15,000 names on the Vietnam Memorial wall as a result of Congress' refusal to be willing to use the appropriation mechanism to bring our troops home.

That is not a failure of will or courage or backbone that we should suffer. We have an obligation to these kids and not-so-kids in Baghdad tonight, and we should know, we should be willing to do so, and we should say we should be willing to do so, so that the President of the United States knows that we are serious in our discussions.

I am hopeful that is not necessary. I am hopeful we can forge a bipartisan agreement with the President to heed the recommendations of this report and the will of the American people from November 7. But we have to be prepared to do our duty here, and I think that is important for us to say early in this discussion, so that we can move forward.

I want to, if I can, say another thing that I think would be important for the President to do. He can do this tomorrow and he hasn't done it. He can have a statement to the people of Iraq that the United States of America does not intend to have permanent military bases in Iraq. This is a statement that the Iraqi people need to hear.

In polls, 75 percent of the Iraqi people believe we are not a positive influence in Iraq. Sixty percent of the Iraqi people in a poll believe it is appropriate to attack Americans in Iraq. Think about this. These are people that the war was started out, at least in its later chapters, to try to give Iraqis a chance at democracy. We have spent $400 billion, 2,000 lives, 20,000 injured, the honor of the Nation to help Iraqis, and 60 percent of them believe it is okay to attack Americans.

This is not a situation where we are capable of helping them militarily. Our presence there is a reason, at least one of the reasons, for violence in that country. And we lost 10 of our best yesterday and 24 in the last 2 days. It is a recognition that we have to come to grips with.

One of the reasons for that antipathy is a conviction, as much as we don't share it, that the Bush administration wants to have permanent bases in Iraq. But because of stubbornness and willfulness and refusal to show any flexibility to reality, this administration has refused to say that. That would be

helpful. That would be a first start, and we hope that that happens.

So we now have an obligation to follow one conclusion of this, and the first phase of this report, if I can in conclusion read, ``Current U.S. policy is not working.'' That is the most powerful statement in the whole report. And we need radical changes, the ``radical changes'' is my language, not the report.

Quoting the report, ``Current U.S. policy is not working as the level of violence in Iraq is rising and the government is not advancing reconciliation. Making no changes in policy would simply delay the day of reckoning at a high cost. Nearly 100 Americans are dying every month. The United States is spending $2 billion a week. Our ability to respond to other international crises is constrained. The majority of the American people are soured on the war. The level of expense is not sustainable over an extended period, especially when progress is not being made. The longer the United States remains in Iraq without progress, the resentment will grow among Iraqis who believe they are subjects of a repressive American occupation.''

We need a change, and we need it now, and we cannot dither or dally or wait or have debates amongst ourselves. We have to take action now. And I hope my colleagues will join me in a willingness to do that.

That will be difficult. While we have troops in the field, it is always difficult to talk about the mission. But I am here tonight, proud of my neighbor's son who is tonight in Baghdad. I am proud of the mission he has done and is doing, and I am caring about he and his 1- year-old son.

I believe the U.S. Congress owes an obligation to him and his own to insist that this President come to grips with the reality of Iraq, send a message that our troops are coming home; that this is something the Iraqis have to deal with quickly because they are going to be on their own. We can no longer keep training wheels forever on Iraq at the expense of our sons and daughters.

That statement, I believe, in the long run will be best, with the least possible damage to all concerned. And I don't offer a panacea. I don't offer a silver wand in Iraq. But I can say that the current situation is not acceptable, and we will change it one way or another, and the sooner the better.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 10 o'clock and 59 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, December 7, 2006, at 10 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, it is difficult to understand my friends on the Republican side of the aisle's efforts to stick this burden on the taxpayers and allow developers to do the equivalent of developer's gerrymandering to increase their profits. Why should the taxpayers have to succumb to developers doing to the taxpayers what politicians have done to the voters?

Politicians, what they have done to the voters is carved out these little districts to try to keep their seats safe. If this bill were to become law, which it will not, it will allow developers to carve up their little development, fancy little lines to extract the maximum amount of money from the taxpayers.

Where is the reason to allow developers to decide their own rules, to write their own paycheck from the taxpayers? We have laws on the books enforced by supreme courts that say that, if you have your property taken as a whole, you get compensation. But this bill will game the system, will create this arbitrary system where the developer decides, not the courts, and that is a massive gambit to allow the guy who wants to build a strip club or a gambling spot or a strip mall in your neighborhood to make it impossible for your local community to have meaningful zoning to protect your neighborhood.

And it is done for one single reason, to put money in developers pockets in a way that is not fair. And, by the way, this is not about grandma out in her backyard. It is about people wanting to break up large chunks for a subdivision, and decide that they are going to take a wetlands. Right now, if there is a wetlands, and we have lost humungous amounts of wetlands in the last couple hundred years; whether there is a taking depends on the whole property.

Do not allow this gambit to take place. It is not fair. It is not Constitutional, and it is not going to pass.

Mr. Speaker, there is a lot of anger about eminent domain law right now because of the Kelo decision, and I am one of the people who disagrees with that decision. I do not believe it is wise to allow eminent domain to be used for private purposes, and I think it was a poorly decided decision.

But I want to make sure that the Members understand. This bill does nothing to fix that problem. If you are angry about Kelo, this bill is not medicine. It does nothing to change the standards for when eminent domain can be used by Federal or municipal governments.

So this does not solve the problem, and I want to yield to Mr. Chabot, if I could, for a moment. I just want to make sure that we are on the same page on this. I have looked diligently through this and can find nothing that changes the eminent domain standard that would overturn the Kelo decision.

Do you agree with me on that assessment?

I yield to the gentleman from Ohio.

Mr. Speaker, I want to make clear it is not the impression in people's minds that counts in Congress. It is what is in people's bills, and in this bill is nothing to solve the Kelo problem.

We should not let anger about Kelo allow developers to game taxpayers. This bill should be rejected.