Energy Policy Modernization Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I rise to address several amendments that I hope we will have an opportunity to vote on before this bill is completed.

The first amendment is amendment No. 3131, research and development for secondary use and innovative recycling research of electric vehicle batteries.

Electric vehicles, as folks generally understand, run almost entirely on lithium ion batteries, which are commonly considered to have reached the end of their useful life when the capacity diminishes by 20 to 30 percent. The range of the vehicle diminishes in a corresponding fashion. At that point, it is time for a new set of batteries. But the battery still has a lot of useful life. It still has 70 to 80 percent of its original capacity. So it has the capacity to be utilized in many other potential roles, including, possibly, stationary electric storage.

This amendment instructs the Department of Energy to conduct research on possible uses of a vehicle battery after its use in a vehicle, to assess the potential for markets for those batteries, to develop an understanding of the barriers for the development of those markets, and to identify the full range of potential uses.

That would be very useful to diminish the flow of potential batteries into recycling, to get the most out of the investment we have made in them, and also to diminish the cost of batteries, because the residual use means that they have residual value, and the overall initial cost would reflect that. So that is an important research goal. It is clearly one of the strategies to enhance our activity from a fossil fuel industry to the utilization of more clean, renewable electricity.

Second, I want to turn to amendment No. 3178, the Federal fleet amendment. The General Services Administration currently procures about 70,000 vehicles a year for various agencies. The total inventory of the Federal fleet is now almost 700,000 vehicles. These Federal vehicles are used for a wide range of purposes, some of which may well be appropriate for electric vehicles and others that may not be.

But in order to consider the applied role, the General Services Administration needs data on vehicle reliability and maintenance costs to understand what would be a fair and appropriate use and to calculate the lease terms. So this amendment provides GSA with the authority to reach out to other agencies to collect the information on the vehicles the agencies use, to do an inventory of what uses may be suitable for different types of electric vehicles and the numbers that could possibly be deployed, and to use that information to develop a 10-year plan for GSA to submit a report back to Congress so that we can understand what the potential is and make sure that we well position our policies to exploit that opportunity.

The third amendment that I want to draw attention to is amendment No. 3191, sponsored by myself, Senator Schatz, and Senator Markey. This is a resolution of the sense of the Senate. It notes that global temperature increases will lead to more droughts, more intense storms, more intense wildfires, a rise in sea levels, more desertification, and more acidification of our oceans, and that these impacts will result in economic disruption to farming, fishing, forestry, and recreation, having a profound impact on rural America.

Now, we know this to be the case because we can already observe these impacts on the ground right now. In my home State of Oregon, we have a growing red zone caused by pine beetles--pine beetles that previously were killed off in colder winters that now survive in greater numbers and attack more trees. We have a longer forest fire season. It has grown by 60 days over 40 years. The amount or the acreage consumed by forest fires is increasing. We have a diminishing snowpack in the Cascades, which is resulting in smaller, warmer trout streams, as well as affecting our winter recreation industry. I know that anyone who loves to fish for trout does not want to have a smaller and warmer stream because of its adverse impact.

Over on our coast, we are having an impact on the baby oysters, which have difficulty forming their shells in the more acidic Pacific Ocean, an ocean that is now 30 percent more acidic than it was before the Industrial Revolution. This amendment simply points to the fact that already we see all of this. But as the temperature rises, disruptions increase. The impact on our farming, fishing, forestry, and recreation is greater, and it is doing a lot of damage to our rural economies and a lot of damage overall to the United States of America, and it is doing so throughout the world as well.

We must work together to transition to a clean energy economy. But there are important first steps in place. Our future President, whomever that might be, must work to build upon the foundation we have put in place with our Clean Power Plan, with increased mileage for our vehicles and increased mileage for freight transportation. Let's build upon those steps in order to work in partnership with the world to take on this major challenge.

So I hope these three amendments have a chance to be debated and voted on here on the floor. We are clearly in a situation where we are the first generation to see the impacts of our fossil fuel energy economy, see the destructive impacts on our forests, our fishing, our farming, and our winter recreation. Therefore, we have a responsibility to work together to take this on. Our children, our children's children, may they not look back and say: What happened? Why did our parents and grandparents fail to act in the face of such a massive and important global threat?

Our ``We the People'' Democracy

Mr. President, I am now shifting to my regular ``We the People'' speech, a series of speeches in which I try to raise issues that go to the heart of the framing of our Constitution and the vision of creating a republic that has a government responsive to the concerns of citizens throughout our Nation.

Our Founders started the Constitution with three powerful words, ``We the People.'' They wrote them in a font 10 times the size of the balance of the Constitution as if to say: This is what it is all about. This is our goal, as President Lincoln summarized, a ``government of the people, by the people, for the people.''

It was not the plan of our Founders in writing the Constitution to have a government designed to serve the ruling elites. It was not the design of our Constitution to serve the titans of industry and commerce. It was not the intention of our Founders to build a government to serve the best off, the richest in our society--quite the contrary. So I am rising periodically to address issues related to this vision, this beautiful Revolution, the American Revolution, that sought to have a form of government that served the people, not the elite.

This week I am using my speech to recognize the anniversary of two Supreme Court decisions, two decisions which have driven a stake through the heart of our ``We the People'' democracy. One ruling, Buckley v. Valeo, marked its 40th anniversary last Saturday on January 30, and Citizens United marked its 6th anniversary on January 21. These two decisions have forever altered the vision of our government. They have turned our government on its head. They have changed it from ``We the People'' to ``We the Titans.'' It is my hope that visitors will rally together in this country, that Senators and House Members will rally together to defend the Constitution that they are sworn to uphold that was not a ``We the Titans'' Constitution, it was a ``We the People'' Constitution.

Central to the promise of ``We the People'' is the right to participate in an equal footing, to contribute one's opinions and insights on elections and on issues.

President Jefferson called this the mother principle. He summarized it as follows: ``For let it be agreed that a government is republican in proportion as every member composing it has his equal voice in the direction of its concerns . . . by representatives chosen by himself, and responsible to him.'' Let me emphasize again, ``republican in proportion as every member composing it has his equal voice in the direc- tion. . . . ''

The decisions of Buckley and Citizens United are a direct assault on this fundamental understanding that to have a ``We the People'' republic, you have to have citizens participate in a roughly equal footing.

These two decisions bulldozed the ``We the People'' pillar on which our government is founded.

President Lincoln echoed Jefferson's equal voice principle. He said: ``Allow all the governed an equal voice in the government, and that, and that only is self-government.''

Is there anyone in this Chamber who believes that today all the governed have an equal voice in the government? I am sure no one among our 100 Senators would contend that principle--so eloquently laid out by President Jefferson, so resoundingly echoed by President Lincoln, so deeply embedded in the founding words of our Constitution--is true today. It is not true because Buckley v. Valeo found that individuals could spend unlimited sums to influence issues and the outcomes of election. That decision and Citizens United destroyed the notion that all citizens get to participate on an equal footing. By green-lighting the spending amount of unlimited sums in combination with the high cost of participating in the modern town square--that is, to secure time on radio, time on television, time or space on the Web--these decisions give the wealthy and well-connected control of the town commons and the ability to drown out the voice of the people.

Certainly a situation where the top 10 percent can overwhelm, can drown out the 90 percent, is not ``We the People'' governance. Certainly a situation where the top 1 percent can drown out the 99 percent is not ``We the People'' governance. It is the opposite.

As President Obama said, ``Democracy breaks down when the average person feels that their voice doesn't matter.'' That is how people feel when they are drowned out by the few under the framework established by Buckley v. Valeo and Citizens United.

The most basic premise of our Constitution is that influence over elections means influence over governance. That is the whole point. Influence over elections is not limited just to being in the booth and pulling a lever. When you enhance the voices of the wealthy relative to everyone else, you fundamentally shift the outcome of legislative deliberations. Despite the arguments of the plaintiffs in Buckley v. Valeo, the wealthy do not have the same concerns about this Nation, about their lives that everyone else has. They don't have the same concerns about the cost of college. They don't have the same concerns about paid family leave. They don't have the same concerns about the solvency and adequacy of Social Security. They are not worried. They are not staying up nights about the health of their child and concern over the cost and quality of health care, and they are not disturbed over policies that shift our manufacturing jobs overseas and eviscerate the working middle class in America.

Yet here we have it. Buckley v. Valeo takes this small percentage of folks who do not have concerns that reflect the vast majority of Americans and gives them overwhelming power in elections and issues.

Let me ask you, is it any wonder that the middle class is doing poorly while the wealth of America has grown exponentially? Isn't that what one would expect in a system favoring the wealthy over the workers? Are we, can we be a government of, by, and for the people if individuals at the very top have vastly greater influence over elections and policy than others? Our Constitution says no. Our Founders said no, but Buckley v. Valeo and Citizens United said yes-- and they are wrong.

With a campaign finance system that gives the most affluent massive influence over elections with concomitant control over laws, we don't have a government that embodies President Jefferson's mother principle; that is, one that reflects and executes the will of the people.

So it is time to change this. It is time to recapture the genius of American governance, and it is time to restore the ``We the People'' principles so eloquently and powerfully embedded in the framing of our Constitution.

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Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I am delighted to join the two Senators from Maine--Senator Collins and Senator Angus King--in this dialogue, as well as Senator Klobuchar. I believe a few other Senators may join us.

Senator Collins has been a great leader in advancing the debate or the conversation recognizing the carbon benefits of biomass. Her State and of course Senator King's State is so much like Oregon. If you fold the map of the United States in the middle and put east and west on top of each other, Oregon and Maine end up closely associated. We have similar coastlines. We have shellfish industries. We have timber industries. We have salmon runs. We having similar initiative systems and our largest cities are named Portland.

I know that when I had the pleasure to visit Maine--and I went there with my wife and children to visit friends from many walks of our two lives, my wife's life and my life--we went from town to town visiting these friends who moved to Maine. We picked up a newspaper, and we felt like we were right at home in Oregon. The same initiatives were being done at that time in the State as we had on the front page back home.

This issue of biomass is close to our hearts in the forests of the Northeast and in the forests of the Northwest. When I first came to the Senate and the conversation was going forward about renewable energy, Senator Dorgan from North Dakota--now retired--said that his home State was the Saudi Arabia of wind energy. I heard Senator Reid from Nevada say Nevada is the Saudi Arabia of solar power. There was a county commissioner from Douglas County--the county I was born in--which has the largest concentration of Douglas fir trees, its enormous biomass area--who referred to how Douglas County can be the Saudi Arabia of biomass energy. I thought, with all these Saudi Arabians in the United States, why are we still importing oil from Saudi Arabia? But indeed these efforts to develop an alternative to pivot from fossil fuels to a clean energy economy should include solar, should include wind, and should include biomass.

When I came to the Senate, I undertook the project of helping the Environmental Protection Agency recognize that you have to look at the life cycle. You can't simply look at the moment of combustion. You can't compare coal being burned in a coal furnace or oil in an oil furnace and say that is equivalent to wood being burned in a biomass furnace because, indeed, as you take that biomass, that wood, you are engaged in a life cycle that doesn't involve bringing more carbon out of the Earth and adding it to the cycle of ground. Our colleague, Angus King from Maine, was referring to that difference earlier in his comments.

It has been an effort to make sure our government takes account of this significant contribution of forest biomass. In the Northwest, the biomass is the potential for a win-win as a renewable source and improving forest health, and Senator Collins was referring to the goals of responsible forest management and conservation.

Indeed, if you drive along the roads in our national forests in my home State, you will see slash piles. These piles are there because as we go through for forest health, we thin the trees. If they are good saw logs, we take them off to the mill, but the debris remains, and we put them into piles. The goal is to remove those piles, but often there is no economical way to remove those piles, and then you have to burn them in the forest.

A couple of months ago I was in the forest in Southern Oregon with a torch, lighting fire to these piles. In this case it was an area where there is often a temperature inversion and you get smog from the smoke. They only can be burned a couple days a year. It is a big challenge. Isn't it so much better to be able to take those piles of biomass and put them to work instead of burning them in the forest? Burn them in a situation that produces heat and electricity. That is a win-win outcome.

So when you hear people in the Northwest talk about forest biomass, there is a lot of excitement about how to grow this market, a market that has the means of improving the health of our forests while providing renewable energy. On private lands a growing domestic biomass market also has the potential to create a new value stream for our forest landowners. By adding another value stream for forest landowners, biomass can create incentives to keep forestland as forests and avoid conversion to a nonforest use.

The modification made to Senator Collins' amendment reflects this dynamic, that one of the contributions to emissions in the forest sector is actually the conversion of forestland and nonforest use because trees are no longer there to sequester carbon. So if we can help prevent this, that is a beneficial side effect of this overall effort on biomass, to amplify the role of the forest, not to remove them.

The most important example that has been brought up as a concern that doesn't fit this model of conservation or burning the byproducts is whether entire forests might be ground up and used to create pellets and so forth. I believe--and I certainly will be corrected if I am wrong--that certainly is not the framework in which this amendment is crafted with the dedication to enhancing the health of our forests and energy and forest conservation.

I think this amendment sends a clear signal to EPA that in many cases forest biomass is carbon neutral and should be treated as such. It reinforces the conversation we have been having since I came here over the last 7 years and earlier with Senator Collins' hard work.

When EPA takes regulatory action, it should reflect the opportunities where biomass is carbon neutral. In fact, policies like the Clean Power Plan should provide an incentive for forest biomass that is carbon neutral.

I look forward to continuing to work with my colleagues on this topic because this is a very significant win-win opportunity for energy, for the environment, and those are the type of opportunities we should seize.

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