The time has come to move back to this bill. I want to say to Senators it happens frequently, when things are going well, that nobody is very interested in moving along. So we have to push you along by making sure Senators, or their…
The time has come to move back to this bill. I want to say to Senators it happens frequently, when things are going well, that nobody is very interested in moving along. So we have to push you along by making sure Senators, or their staffs, understand this has to be a day where we get rid of three or four amendments, including a couple of very important ones that are here for the Senate to consider.
There is a pending amendment Senator Cantwell has before us. We are trying right now to work out a unanimous consent agreement whereby we will move off that amendment and have a time for a vote. Then we will move onto an amendment--we are thinking that will be an amendment by Senator Bingaman--with a time agreement, somewhere around 3 hours equally divided. We will share that with Senator Bingaman and others.
Then there is a third amendment from our side of the aisle which, for the sake of naming it, we will call the DeWine amendment. It is not necessarily the name, but he is one of the Senators. We know he has an amendment. We hope we can lock that in to follow after the Bingaman amendment. We will agree on the time. Then the DeWine amendment will have a certain amount of time after which it will be ready for a vote.
I am thinking with some degree of certainty we will have three votes. That will take us into the evening. We will have this pending amendment, the Bingaman amendment, that he considers very important on the mandate for renewables across the land, and then we will have a DeWine amendment that has to do with the oil cartel.
I am waiting for those who are putting these numbers together to come here because Senators have to be consulted.
If people wonder why this takes a little bit of time, let me explain. We are agreeing to something, but people in the Senate have to agree. So we are checking with them now. The only other way we could do it, you see, for those who wonder where they are, we could have all Senators down here and say, Do you agree with this or that? But we can't do that, so we have this little time interval where we ask the Senate be put into a quorum call and that is what I was going to ask right now.
I would ask the Senator, if he would, give me a little bit of time before he does that and let me see if we can have a unanimous consent agreement locked in so we have some idea how much time you will use, or others.
If you are so generous, I will listen and when I think I am tired of listening to you, I will put up my hand.
I have no objection.
We are grateful. We will have a unanimous consent to take care of today.
Let me just say briefly, if I were President of the United States-- which obviously is beyond the realm of possibility--I would be opposed to this amendment. It is not as if it does nothing to the President. It says, Mr. President, whoever you are--and it obviously will not be this one--tell us how, give us a plan, tell us how you will reduce America's consumption of crude oil by 40 percent by a year certain.
What President would like to do that? What President would think that is a worthwhile effort if he would have to send up some kind of plan at which the whole world would laugh? Our cars would have to be the size of golf carts or we would have to make a breakthrough in the next 10 years, which we have been working on for 40 or 50 years, and we have not made it yet.
The very ones talking about it do not want to even get the oil from ANWR. That is a million of what they are asking for, and it surely would be here by the time their resolution talks about it. What if the President, whoever it is, says: Let's go to ANWR and get a million. Guess what they would say: Destroying the world, getting rid of the environment. But a nice little resolution, nice little bill saying we have a solution to this. We will just be a John F. Kennedy and say our goal is to some way, somehow, cut America's consumption of crude oil from overseas by 40 percent, when it has been going up every year with everything we are trying to do.
In this bill, we are trying what is real. We are challenging all of the technocrats, the technologists, the scientists. We are telling them: Here are resources, find solutions. What superentity would we create in this country and say: Here you are. You are on top
of all this. You prepare this plan. You give it to the President so he can give it to the people. To what end? What would it do? A 40-percent reduction reduces our consumption by 7.2 million barrels. We cannot even get anyone to vote to let America produce 1 million barrels now. If that 1 million would come off 7.2 million barrels, we would still be a huge way away.
Do not misunderstand, this issue is an American issue of high consequence. America is doing everything it can. We did not used to. That is why it is so hard now. We let it get away from us. It will not come back under control with a gaudy, impossible resolution that will sound like somebody has a plan.
I have attempted just to tell the Senate the truth. I have attempted to offer an amendment to this and just up the ante and say if we can do 7.2 million, why don't we do 8.2 or 9.2, and put it in there and say we will vote on a bigger one. Then I thought, maybe I ought to be what I have tried to be on this bill all along, honest and forthright, and as best I could explain to the Senate, we have to do everything we can, with imagination, with vigor, with certainty, with resources, but the kind of things we know we can do, that we know we put our shoulders to it and we work hard.
We are finally coming to the point where Americans do believe it is a big problem. I don't think they are blaming people anymore. It used to be we called the big oil companies up, swear them in under oath--I don't know if the Senator remembers the day we called them up here and had them swear. We said: You are the problem; you are why we are importing all this oil.
Remember those days? They told us everything they could. That hearing went away. What happened? The next year we imported more oil and more oil.
It isn't that the Senator doesn't think we should have an American plan. What we have in this bill is an American plan. Senator Bingaman and I and many others have worked hard to put it together. Some people say it does not do enough as it is. I heard some reporters yesterday commenting. I wondered what they were reading. They said: It doesn't do anything for nuclear. It is the most far-reaching pronuclear set of proposals we will have ever before us. The same commentators said it cost too much money. I don't know where they got the numbers. We have not even spent in this bill. We were given a $2-billion reserve fund. We have not spent all of that yet. I shouldn't have said that because everybody will be down here wanting to spend it, but they have to go through us before they can spend it.
The tax portion is about like the House portion. It is a pretty good bill. It is not a spending bill. When you authorize programs, incidentally, you are not saying we are going to buy them or pay for them. The distinguished occupant of the Chair knows in agriculture you authorize programs, but you do not expect the appropriations to do exactly what you say. You say: This is a program we would like you to think about. That is what this bill does in terms of authorization. Overall, it is a very good bill.
Is the proposed unanimous consent agreement satisfactory?
I ask unanimous consent the Cantwell amendment be temporarily set aside, Senator Bingaman be recognized in order to offer an amendment regarding RPS; provided further there be 3 hours of debate equally divided in the usual form and that following the use or yielding back of time, the Senate proceed to a vote in relation to the amendment and that no second-degree amendments be in order to the amendment prior to the vote.
I yield the floor.
Mr. President, I remind the Senate that we have an hour and a half on our side. I am in control of the time. I am going to yield control of the time to the junior Senator from Tennessee. He will start and use as much time as he wants. Then I will return and use some. I have put the word out, if anybody else would like to speak in opposition to the Bingaman amendment.
With that understanding, I yield the floor and thank the Senator from Tennessee.
Mr. President, I received notice that our Republican leader wishes to speak, he said, at 11:15.
I want to make an observation and see if the Senator from Tennessee will answer it.
The Senator from Tennessee went through all these other ways we could go about cleaning up our air and reducing the carbon emissions. What strikes me is, let's assume we are going to do all those things, because I think we are. I remind the Senator, however, that the $2 billion in there on nuclear--we should all understand, we can produce nuclear powerplants before that ever happens. That is fourth generation. That is getting ready for hydrogen. That is not charged to this, nor is it going to apply.
Nonetheless, take all the rest. Let's assume we are doing them. The interesting thing about this amendment is, if we were doing them and saving carbon emissions, we do not get any credit for that; am I right? We still are going to have this 10-percent mandate for renewables. So let's assume a State 4 or 5 years from now opens a nuclear powerplant. That is as clean as wind, is it not? It is terrific from the standpoint of emissions, but we still have to do the 10 percent, right, the way this approach is; is that correct?
And in every respect, a State will not get any credit for the fact they are doing all these things that move in the direction we want because here sits this mandate that says you do this anyway.
I think that is not right, as I look at it. That confounds me as to why that would be the case. We are urging they do the others, but in some cases, they are going to be mandated to spend this rather extraordinary amount. Once the credit is gone, incidentally, this kind of energy is going to be pretty expensive stuff.
The mandate does not go away. Somebody has to produce it and it has to be charged.
I yield the floor.
THE PRESIDING OFFICER. The majority leader is recognized.
Let me ask, Senator Clinton, are you on some kind of time-sensitive schedule? If you are, I will let you go. How long does the Senator wish to speak?
Mr. President, how much time remains on each side?
I want the Senate to know on our side we do not intend to use as much time as we have, unless other Senators want to speak. Senator Alexander certainly wants some additional time.
Senator Bingaman, I don't know if your side needs the whole amount. We are trying to get a unanimous consent agreement shortly.
As the Senator from New York leaves the floor, let me say right at the offset, the Bingaman amendment is not a goal. If it were a goal, that would be something different. It is a mandate. There is a very big difference between a goal and a mandate. This says exactly what each State is compelled to do with reference to the kinds of energies that are described. When you boil it all down, it means ``wind'' for the time being. It means each State has to have it. And if they do not, they have to pay money to the Secretary of Energy or they have to buy wind-generated electricity from some other State.
While I am on that subject, I would like to put up one little chart. I would like to show this to the Senate. If you look at this map, you can see the white area, in particular the white area down here in the Southeast. The interesting thing is that the white area does not have any source of wind to meet this standard.
It is nice if you are not one of those States. But if you are one of them, it is not very nice because you are sort of wind poor. The other States are wind rich. Under this bill, the States that do not have that have to pay money, either to the States that do produce it for their wind energy or they have to pay money to the Secretary of Energy who uses that for research and technology development in the area of renewables and the like.
We have been on the floor many times when we spoke about issues on coal. I remember when I was a very young Senator, we had a big debate in the Senate about mandating a certain kind of coal be used. The Senate got very excited and hot about it because we were sort of drawing a line between the States and creating a terrible kind of chasm between the States, saying these States are going to be the ``have'' States, these States are going to be the ``have not'' States.
I admit that was a very serious problem, for the clean coal was not going to be used, in spite of it being clean, and the dirty coal was going to be used because we were mandating it. So it was in some ways similar, but it would have been billions upon billions of dollars in the development of resources, so it truly would have divided the country.
This divides us in another way, in a way that I think is not necessary. Let me say from the outset, for those who do not think the Bingaman amendment is the right way to go, they are not coming to the floor in harmony, en masse, saying we do not like wind energy.
Some may, but there are many who think wind energy ought to be developed and we ought to push the frontiers of technology. But no one should think that if we do not adopt the Bingaman amendment, we have a bill that is not going to push the development of renewables. The bill is laden with incentives to produce renewable energy.
As a matter of fact, the tax-writing committee that will bring their bill here shortly, I understand almost all of their allocation of tax reductions, the loss of tax revenues by way of credits or the like, almost all of it will be renewable. As a matter of fact, the very major tax credit that, I might say, is the principal reason wind is being developed at all is extended for 2 years at a very large cost to the taxpayers--maybe $3 billion or thereabouts.
We are pursuing the development of renewable energy led by wind, which at this point is the principal one unless we consider hydro, and I don't think we are considering hydro in any of this debate. It exists, and it has nothing to do with what we are talking about.
What I am suggesting, if the amendment does not pass, we have not abandoned an American approach to pursuing the technology called renewables led by wind in these United States. What we are trying to say is that one shoe should not fit every State. States that can't do this because of the unfortunate situation of nature--they do not have the wherewithal to produce it, or if they had to produce it, they would produce it in places they would not want to produce it because it would not be consistent with another use of that land that is paramount and has a priority to the development of windmills, such as right down the middle of a national park.
Having said that, another point was made by my distinguished friend from New Mexico, Senator Bingaman, who has been a tremendous partner in this bill. He knows on this issue we do not agree, but he understands that on 99 percent of this bill, we will fight for it and win and have an energy bill for the first time that has a lot of good, solid things for the country. My good friend Senator Bingaman said that other States already have these goals. They set their own requirements--not goals, their own requirements. He used the word that they have done so ``aggressively.''
I remind the Senator, and I think I am correct, that those States do not use the same formula for what will make up their portfolio of renewables. I submit, if the Senator would like to amend his amendment and allow the myriad kinds of energy production used in other States to meet their current goals or current mandates, that would be a good bill.
For instance, the State of Pennsylvania has a very aggressive plan. If you think ``aggressive'' means they have a very aggressive wind program that would meet the mandates of this amendment, that is not true. They are using other technologies consistent with their resources, many of which are related to products related to coal. Whatever remains after they use coal is reused, and they produce a clean source of energy that counts toward their goal.
We think nuclear powerplants will be built in the future. It seems it would be appropriate that a State might be given credit for that. We believe there will be very formidable advances in converting coal not only into clean coal but into coal that has the carbon removed that will, indeed, qualify for being as good for cleaning up with reference to the gases we are worried about in global warming as solar. It may end up, and from what I understand, even though it is new technology, it might be cheaper than what we think wind energy will be. It seems to me that is a more sensible approach. Provide a variety, a mix that would make up this 10 percent.
But we should not be causing certain States to pay a very big tax because they cannot produce solar energy. No one calls it a tax, but when someone takes funds out of their consumers' pockets and gives them to some other State, to some other utility in another State, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is a duck. It seems to me that the easiest way to talk about this is that it is a tax. I don't think, when we look at all of that, this is the best way to do it.
I don't say this in any way to belittle those who have pursued this with vigor, who think it is a very good approach. Senator Bingaman makes valid arguments. The Senator from Tennessee, particularly in his way of getting to the bottom of things and articulating eloquently about what he has learned, has contributed immensely to learning just what this is all about. As a consequence, I am not at all sure as many people as thought this is a wonderful idea 6 months ago,
if they listen and understand, I am not so sure they would think this particular way to get renewables, led by a renewable called wind, would be the best way to go. I compliment him for that. I am not at all sure enough people are listening if we judge by the attendance in the Senate--and I don't think the people in America should do that. Senators are listening even though they are not here. If we judge on that, of course we will not change any minds.
As I see it, there is good reason to say: Look, we are doing enough right now with this enormous credit. Frankly, I will add to the credit, I will say something that is beyond dispute. We have asked those who gauge and judge, How much wind energy can you produce? What is the maximum that the fabricators of these products, these things you describe, Senator, that someone is building, that we will pay for-- someone is making a lot of money on them right now because of the subsidy. How much could we produce per year for the next 2 or 3 years? The answer has come: You can't produce any more than the tax credit will cause you to produce.
Let me put it another way: This mandate has nothing to do with maximizing the production of wind so long as there is a credit. The credit is going to produce it. In a sense, why do you need both? One would say because of the long-term nature of a mandate versus we have 2 years, maybe 3 years of credits. But in America, the way we ought to look at this, you subsidize the technology so everyone involved can get with it and apply this ingenuity called America and do it better. This very large subsidy ought to surely get us in position where we can produce this wind--if that is what we want to do--that we can produce it cheaper, so the incentive is relevant to the next 8 or 10 years in that respect.
We ought to do better. To some extent, having the 10 percent out there and having the credit out there is a disincentive to maximizing innovation. What is the urgency? How are we sensitizing the marketplace to produce more efficient wind? When you give a tax credit and put a mandate on it, it seems to me whoever is doing it can sit around and say: We have a nice thing going, we do not need to change, just keep on.
I thought the idea was to move technology. It could be you are moving other technology besides wind. But there is a long way to go before you get some of that solar onboard. I don't think this will make that move in the next 10 years unless there is a big breakthrough that I don't believe will be caused by this mandate.
I have some other issues I was going to discuss. I will make a point about States that are already doing something. I call to mind Pennsylvania. One would not think of Pennsylvania as being a State with a lot of wind, producing wind energy, yet they are in red on my chart. That means they have to borrow from my friend, Senator Bingaman, an aggressive policy on renewables. But it is not predicated upon the same requirements of this bill. It is not a huge 10-percent wind component. It is made up of other things.
If we look at each of these States in red and ask which States are meeting this goal in an aggressive manner, and then come to the Senate floor and say how each State is doing it, and then say, Why don't we let any State that wants to do it in all of these ways and meet it--all we have said is if the State is doing it, they get credit. That is what the sponsor says. But we have not said if they do it differently than this in the future, they get credit, as I understand it.
If we have another red State added up here--and I don't think the red and the blue of the last election has anything to do with this map; we don't have blue up there; we have red and white--but if we added more reds before we had this bill, it would not be all wind or renewables as prescribed by this bill. It would be whatever they find meets their test of renewable energy. It seems to me that kind of flexibility would be much better.
What we have is an attempt to saddle the industry and consumers with a hefty price tag to support a limited set of renewable resources.
According to the Department of Energy, only 2.2 percent of total U.S. electricity generation in 2003 was comprised of non-hydro renewable energy sources such as geothermal, photovoltaic, solar thermal, biomass, municipal solid waste and wind plants. This is so despite years of government subsidies and programs to encourage renewable energy.
Of this 2.2 percent total, 44 percent came from biomass generation (mostly at industrial facilities), 26 percent came from municipal solid waste, 16 percent from geothermal waste, 13 percent from wind, and 1 percent from solar technologies.
The RPS focuses on that 2.2 percent of our generation, mandates an increase to 10 percent and essentially imposes a 1.5 cent per kilowatt hour tax on an increasing percentage of each year's retail sales of electricity.
If electric utilities do not build new renewable facilities and have to purchase all their credits from the federal government to meet the RPS mandate, the total cost of the inflation-adjusted RPS proposal is an estimated $190.8 billion in nominal dollars.
That is a worst case scenario estimation, but we must consider that risk when we are deciding whether this gamble on renewable resource mandate is the right thing to do. This proposal is a gamble not worth taking.
Mandating a Federal Renewable Portfolio Standard is an ill advised means of achieving increased renewable resource use.
Any effort to legislate on renewable generation requires realistic targets and due deference to States' rights to make decisions suited to best serve their citizens' needs.
The proposed Federal Renewable Portfolio Standard fails to recognize these principles.
States should definitely encourage their electric utilities to offer retail customers electricity from green energy to the extent it is available and encourage investment in renewable development. Most importantly, States should be afforded the right to develop their own RPS approaches without Federal interference.
States are best able to determine appropriate fuel types, societal costs, consumer protections, and requirements to meet Federal and State environmental regulations.
Today, 19 States and the District of Columbia have their own RPS programs. Others should be afforded the same right to develop an RPS without Federal interference.
The proposed RPS amendment penalizes those States that have already acted to establish a renewable program by requiring them to replace their State program with a new Federal program.
This amendment rewards certain regions at the expense of others. Solar has limited application east of the Mississippi, wind almost no application in the southeast, and virtually all geothermal is located in the West.
We cannot ignore the reality that utilities in some regions cannot meet a renewable mandate because they are not blessed with ample renewable resources.
To ignore this would be to require these to buy credits, forcing many consumers to pay for power they never receive, and would result in massive interregional cash transfers.
Utilities that do not have access to new renewable assets will wind up paying 1.5 cents per kilowatt hour and receive no power--their customers will pay a tax with no benefit and this could have significant costs to establishing competitive markets and to low income consumers where such markets do not exist.
Each State should decide for itself and its own residents the optimal mix of renewable and alternative energy sources.
I certainly advocate state policy makers coordinating choices to maximize regional efficiencies, but I do not support instituting a one- size-fits-all national plan.
States have historically had control over the fuel choices and resource development decisions. Past federal endeavors to meddle in fuel choice mandates have resulted in disasters.
Any effort to legislate on Renewable Portfolio Standards requires due deference to States' rights to make decisions suited to best serve their citizens' needs. This amendment fails to provide that deference.
Another problem with this RPS amendment is that it mandates an arbitrary quota for some renewable energy resources without any justification as to why only a limited set of renewable resources are included as eligible.
At a hearing held by the Energy Committee in March 2005, Dr. Nogee with the Union of Concerne Scientists was asked a Question about the effect an RPM on production from wind power. He explained that \2/3\ of the RPS requirements would likely be met by new wind generation. Mandating mostly wind power when wind power is not mostly available around the country is poor public policy.
Some claim that an RPS would help address emission problems. I don't think that the goal of this RPS amendment is to help lower emissions at all.
If the RPS was truly a device to help lower emissions, why shouldn't companies receive credits for environmental improvement expenditures, like pollution control equipment. The proposed amendment does not include such credit.
If cleaner energy was truly the goal of the RPS amendment, why isn't coal gasification technology or nuclear power credited?
The Energy Information Administration has noted that an RPS will ``have little impact on sulfur dioxide, SO2 or nitrogen oxide, NO2, emission levels.''
If the goal of the RPS was to lower emissions, then a broader array of our renewable technologies--particularly clean coal and nuclear-- should have been included in the category of resources.
For similar reasons, I don't think that the RPS can be legitimately justified as a means to help diversify our fuel needs or reduce dependence on foreign resources. If that were the case, a greater diversity of renewable resources should been included in the category of resources.
More effective and efficient solutions to this problem are available. In response to concerns with over dependence on foreign resources, we should focus our efforts on:
Nuclear power--which is one of our cleanest fuel resources;
Oil and natural gas from Alaska and other regions of the United States;
Coal of which we have abundant reserves; and
New hydroelectric generation--which have zero emissions.
If renewable resources are to become a greater contributor to our power sector, then competitive market forces should be allowed to operate. In order to facilitate the necessary competition, transmission must be available.
One of the barriers to entry for renewable development is the lack of transmission capacity to transmit electricity generated from remote areas long distances.
Before mandating fuel choice, we need to address the real need for improved transmission capacity. A number of the electricity title's provisions are directed at accomplishing this goal.
Renewable energy should be encouraged in a reasonable, effective manner. To that end, there are already extensive Federal and State subsidies in place as well as tax credits that I support.
We all support renewables--what we should not support is Federal command and control of the market in the disguise of help for renewables. Would Senator Craig desire to speak on this issue before we vote?
I yield to Senator Craig to manage time, and then when he leaves, he will give that to the Senator from Tennessee.
Yes. This has been cleared with both sides.
I ask unanimous consent that at 2:15 today, the Senate proceed to a vote in relation to the Cantwell amendment, which will be modified with the changes that are at the desk, which we have seen. I further ask that following that vote, the Senate proceed to a vote in relation to the Bingaman amendment; provided further, that no second-degree amendments be in order to either amendment prior to the votes; and finally, prior to the vote on the Cantwell amendment, there be 30 minutes of debate equally divided in the usual form.
Before the Chair rules, I note that there is no provision for wrap-up debate on the Bingaman amendment.
I ask that that be added to the unanimous consent agreement.
I yield the floor.
I move to reconsider the vote.
Parliamentary inquiry: What is the regular order?
Parliamentary inquiry, Mr. President. Are we, under regular order, scheduled to move on to another amendment?
Mr. President, I understand the distinguished Senator from Georgia would like to engage in a colloquy with the Senator from New Mexico. For that purpose, I yield to the distinguished Senator.
Mr. President, might I respond by saying to the distinguished Senator from Georgia and the distinguished Senator from Oregon that I would be delighted to work with them and, obviously, with other members of the conference in an effort to do what I can to ensure that each State is treated fairly and that none are penalized by an overly rigid mandate.
I am fully aware of the disparity between States, and I say to the Senator from Georgia and the Senator from Oregon that their States were on the map showing they are the have-not States in terms of wind. They have a lot of other items with which they can meet a standard. Renewable is going to be the test here, and it is going to be difficult.
The Senate has spoken--close vote. We will do what we can in conference. The Senator understands there is no such provision in the House bill. We will do our best to see what we can do to recognize the Senator's position and yet recognize the closeness of the vote and the very severe repercussions on some States.
I yield the floor.
Mr. President, on behalf of myself and Senator Bingaman, I send a managers' amendment to the desk. It has been agreed to on both sides, is predominantly technical, and
has been agreed to by anyone who has any interest.