Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2016--Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I wish to join my colleagues from Massachusetts and Hawaii to talk about the tax credits for wind.

We have had a remarkably exciting new thing happen in Rhode Island this summer. From time to time, I am able to get out on Narragansett Bay and, over and over, whether driving on the bridges over Narragansett Bay or actually out on Narragansett Bay, we saw the sites of these enormous barges traveling down the bay, bringing these huge structures that were carried out, located off of Block Island, and sunk to the ocean floor to provide the platforms for the first steel-in-water offshore wind energy in the country.

Now, we can go over to Europe and see wind energy all over the place. We are behind them in developing it, but Rhode Island is the start. And whether we saw these enormous structures that were the legs--the frames for the pylon and the turbine--or whether we saw enormous pilings that get carried out there and in the same way that you drive a nail through the hole for a hanger and put it through wall, they take these enormous pilings that reach way up into the sky and drive them through the hollow legs of the framework and down to anchor them in the ocean floor.

So this is under construction right now. It is big. We see these barges coming by and they are enormous. The structures run hundreds of feet in the air. It is exciting to see this happening, and it is part of the wind revolution that Senator Markey and Senator Schatz talked about.

So there is a conflict in my mind between this exciting sight in Rhode Island--these big yellow structures coming down the bay in the bright light--and then coming to the darker Halls of Congress and moving from that exciting sight to the tedious fight that we have over and over to protect the wind production tax credit. Over and over we have to go through this fight. Why? I will tell my colleagues why. It is because opposition to the wind tax credit is one more little wriggling tentacle of the fossil fuel industry. They have huge tax subsidies, tax credits, and tax advantages baked permanently into the Tax Code, and they sit on those and they defend them and they are merciless about anybody who tries to take those away. But let a little wind come along and try to get a competing tax credit of its own, and they try to crush it, over and over and over.

Nobody runs for office to come to the Senate and says: The thing that drives me, the thing that motivates my candidacy is to make sure that our wind energy in the United States gets knocked down; let's take their little tax credit away. Nobody runs on that. In fact, if I recall correctly, the Presiding Officer ran for office with a picture of a wind turbine in Colorado. So it is not as if there aren't friends to wind in this Chamber.

But once someone gets here, the oil and fossil guys are very powerful. They are very remorseless. They have made immense threats to squash any action on climate change. And as a little sidebar, they always try to beat the little wind energy subsidy. They will never give up their own, and their own are much bigger. We have probably $50 billion over 10 years in cash tax benefits going to these companies, which are the most profitable companies in the history of the planet. They are the last companies that need any help.

If we look at people such as the International Monetary Fund--not exactly a liberal, green group--the International Monetary Fund estimates that if we put in all of the subsidies that fossil fuel gets around the world, it adds up to more than $5 trillion--trillion. I am from Rhode Island. I think $1 million is a lot of money. I am starting to get used to talking about billions of dollars being here. Trillions is what the fossil fuel subsidy, in effect, is around the world, and just in the U.S. it is $700 billion in a year. Yet, greedy, big corporations that sit and defend that benefit to the last trench also want to crush the poor little wind benefit. It is just not fair and it is just wrong.

But I think we are going to be able to prevail. We have seen some real progress here. Bloomberg just published an article that wind power is now the cheapest electricity to produce--cheaper than anything else--in both Germany and in the United Kingdom. It is a powerful industry in States such as Colorado and in Wyoming, where they have so much wind that they export wind energy to other States. Iowa is probably our leader. Iowa generates nearly 30 percent of its electricity from wind. TPI Composites is a Rhode Island company. It builds composite materials in Warren, RI. They have a facility in Iowa where they manufacture wind turbine blades and, in the last decade, they have manufactured 10,000--10,000--wind turbine blades. There had been a Maytag factory in a town called Newton, IA, and the Maytag factory went bust because, of course, we are offshoring jobs to China. But guess what. They came in and started building these wind turbines. They are really too big to ship from China, so it has been a boom industry. It has put little Newton back on its feet.

If we don't pass the wind production tax credit, then States such as Wyoming and Colorado and Iowa that depend on this are really going to be hurt. This is bipartisan in these States. I don't know why the fossil fuel industry primarily runs its mischief through the Republican Party here in Congress, but it doesn't work in Iowa. In Iowa, a year ago, the Iowa State Senate unanimously passed a resolution supporting extension of the production tax credit--unanimously.

So we have a really strong case to make that this is the technology of the future. We have a fairness case to make that the great big brutal fossil fuel lobbyist organization shouldn't be allowed to hold on to all of its subsidies--depending on how we measure, they are measuring into the hundreds of billions of dollars--and, at the same time, try to squash poor little wind when it wants to get some subsidies in order to compete with this massive and malevolent incumbent.

Then I think we have the practical politics of this, which is that in State after State after State, wind has become real enough that it is going to be very hard for some of our colleagues on the Republican side to go home and say to their home State industry: Sorry, we put you under the bus. We put you under the bus. We protected your competitors in oil and gas; we absolutely would never touch them. We protected them. They are sacrosanct on our side. But we put you under the bus. That is going to be a little hard to explain.

So I very much hope that as we come together and pull together the continuing resolution or the omnibus--that avoids, I pray, another shutdown and that puts our country on a sensible budgetary footing going forward--this tax credit is a part of it, because we need these jobs. People are working in Rhode Island, and I will tell my colleagues this: When you are building a giant, enormous, big frame offshore, you are paying good wages. You are paying good wages to the people who operate the barges. You are paying good wages to the ironworkers, the steelworkers, and the electrical workers. You are paying good wages to the stevedores who are helping to load it up. These are really strong economic businesses, and we want to support them.

With that, I yield the floor.

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