Energy Policy Act of 2005

ENERGY POLICY ACT OF 2005--CONFERENCE REPORT

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Ms. MURKOWSKI. Mr. President, I have waited my time in the queue this evening because I wanted to take a few minutes to speak not only about the importance of this Energy bill we are poised to vote on tomorrow, but to acknowledge those who did I think yeoman's work in getting us to where we are.

As my friend from Oregon has pointed out, this is not a perfect piece of legislation. He and I would disagree on certain areas of it. But I think when we look at the work product of what we do in the Senate, the day that we come to complete agreement--complete agreement--on all aspects of legislation we move forward, I think we will have all lost our collective senses. We will always find room to improve our legislation. We will always find room to make something better. We need to look at where we are at this point in time with the Energy bill we have before us.

As was pointed out earlier this evening, we have not had an energy policy updated or presented or worked through this Congress for 13 years. Thirteen years is a long time to be floating without a specific policy, a specific policy direction, particularly in an area that is as important as energy.

I had the opportunity yesterday to address a group of a couple hundred young people in a junior statesman-type forum. It was an opportunity for me to speak on the subject of my choosing. Since we have been so focused on energy these past couple weeks and we have been moving this bill through the conference process, I spent my time to talk about what we had been doing and the significance of energy to us as a nation, as a people, and particularly to these young people.

As Senator Alexander, the Senator from Tennessee, mentioned earlier, energy is not typically something we talk about at the dinner table. We need to understand as a country how important energy is to our daily world.

I have often described the way Americans think about energy--we have this kind of immaculate conception notion of energy: It just happens. You flip the switch and the lights go on; you adjust the thermostat and you are cooler or warmer, and it just happens. There is no connection between how we respond to the energy we have, whether it powers us, heats us, cools us, it moves us. We do not think about it. We do not connect the dots between what we are consuming and where from it comes.

As I explained to this group of young people, we get most of our energy from the ground. It comes from underneath, whether it is oil or whether it is natural gas that is extracted off our shores, say, in Louisiana, or whether it is from our coal resources that we mine. Sometimes that is not a particularly visually appealing thought, to think that we have to dig it out, we have to drill it out, we have to extract. But the fact of the matter is, we are energy consumers. We are a nation that is dependent on our energy for what we do, for who we are, for the strength of this Nation. If we couldn't move, if we couldn't communicate the way we do, we would not be the Nation we are.

So it is important for us as Americans to realize, to appreciate, to connect those dots and say, this is important to us. It is important to us to have an energy policy that is comprehensive, that is sound, that is balanced, that not only looks to the production from the traditional sources, such as oil, gas, and coal, but looks to the production from the sources for the future in the renewables, in the alternative sources of energy. That also has as a component of our energy policy the conservation aspects, the efficiencies. This must be part of the plan.

That is what this Energy bill we have before us is and does. It is comprehensive in those ways.

The point has been made tonight that we have done nothing in this Energy bill that is going to bring down the price of gasoline at the pump tomorrow. I am not going to stand before you tonight and say that if we pass this legislation tomorrow and if the President signs off on this in the next couple of weeks the American consumer is all of a sudden going to see the price of gasoline drop at the pump. I cannot make that promise, and I would be foolish to do so. We know that is not going to happen just because we enact this bill.

Here is the point: If we had done this 8 years, 10 years ago, 5 years ago when we had been working on energy policies over this period of time, perhaps we would not be at this point where we are paying $2.40 at the pump, as we are paying in my hometown of Anchorage right now. Perhaps we would not be at this point if we had enacted an energy policy some years prior to this. But we did not, and we are here now.

Now we have an opportunity to do something, to move forward with a policy that does make some sense. So we have to start somewhere. We have to put in place the procedures and the mechanisms that will work. We have to understand that we cannot expect an immediate fix. We did not get to $2.40 a gallon gasoline overnight. We are not going to remedy it overnight. So our expectations need to be realistic.

As the Senator from Tennessee said when he was talking about natural gas, one of the things we will see through what we are putting in place with this legislation is a stabilizing effect, hopefully, with our natural gas prices as we are able to provide for those incentives and encourage more LNG facilities around our coasts so we can get more of the natural gas into this country. Those things have to all start somewhere, but the recognition is let's be realistic in terms of when we are going to see the results.

People want to know, What does it mean to me today? We need to appreciate the fact that we have to look to what it is going to mean to us tomorrow. With the provisions we have put in place, hopefully we will not see the blackout we had a couple years back. We have enhanced the reliability standards of our electricity grids so that we are not going to see that.

Points have been made on the floor tonight that what will come out of this Energy bill is not a cleaner America. I challenge that absolutely. The provisions that have been put in place, the incentives that have been put in place, whether it is the clean coal gasification that will work to reduce those emissions, to reduce the carbon, to make our air more clean, our waters more clean--these are things we are putting in place through the incentives. My colleague called them subsidies. The fact is, when you are changing technology, when you are making things different to make them better, to make them cleaner, to make them more efficient, it is going to cost some money. Should we not help to make it cleaner, to make it more efficient? That is what the incentives are for. So let's work to make those happen.

Think about these processes. We have provisions in place for enhanced oil recovery, and in my State of Alaska, we have some aging oilfields out in the Cook Inlet. They have been producing and doing a darn fine job for a couple decades, but these fields are declining. With the technology and the processes now available, we can, through enhanced oil recovery, through injection of the carbon dioxide, inject into these aging wells, enhance the oil so that we get more oil from these aging wells while we are sequestering the carbon. We have a win-win situation. It is an environmentally more sophisticated and more helpful process, and we are getting more of the energy source we are seeking. It is through these types of technologies that we benefit, that we proceed to win in so many different ways.

Again, I want to reinforce that what we will have an opportunity to accept tomorrow is a comprehensive policy, a policy that has balance to it, that is not totally loaded to the production side.

I come from a State where, quite honestly, we want to see additional production coming out of the State of Alaska because we have the resource there and we want to be able to help meet the Nation's energy needs. But we know--I know--that is not necessarily the energy for the long-term future of this country; that the direction we take is in the area of renewables and the alternatives. We have to start. We are making a start with this legislation.

It is not just a focus on production, it is the renewables, the biomass, the geothermal, the solar, the wind, ocean currents; we have ocean energy for the first time. Think about the possibility of harnessing the currents in our oceans, the temperature differentials in the ocean waters. There is so much potential out there.

Again, when we are talking about new technology and new processes, it takes a little bit of money, it takes a little bit of help, and this is where we can step in to provide that.

Senator Bingaman made a comment at the conclusion of his initial remarks that we do not want to wait another 13 years to take up an energy policy again. It is probably premature to be talking about the next energy policy when we have not even concluded this one, but I think we need to recognize that what is happening in this country now and as we collaborate with other nations in clean energy research, the technology changes so quickly--or we hope we can encourage the technology to change so quickly--that we have to keep on top of this. We have to have an energy policy that is current, that does look toward tomorrow. So we want to make sure this is not the end of the conversation, that once we conclude with the Energy bill, we close the books and don't start looking at it for another 10 years. I am not willing to do that, and I think most of my colleagues would be joining me in saying we need to be constantly on top of and involved with this.

I want to comment before I conclude that there have been several of my colleagues on the other side who have mentioned there is absolutely nothing in this Energy bill that reduces our reliance on foreign sources of oil, that, in fact, we become more dependent on foreign oil. I do have to tell my colleagues, as one of the Senators from Alaska who has been very focused on ANWR and opening ANWR, I am sitting back in my chair here listening to this, scratching my head--scratching my head--because they are saying to me we are not doing anything to reduce our reliance on foreign sources of oil, we must do more domestically.

We have been saying we have a portion of the answer. Opening ANWR is not going to make us not rely on foreign sources of oil. We know that. But it can help us. Should we not be doing all that we can domestically to help us?

I know the critics and that we are going to go into this argument in September all over again so I do not need to take the body's time tonight to dwell on these facts, but for those who say there is not enough there to make a difference, the mean estimate coming out of ANWR will be what we have been getting from the State of Texas for the past 75 years. The mean estimate coming out of ANWR is what we have received from Saudi Arabia for 25 years. That is not insignificant amounts of oil. This can help us.

ANWR is not contained in this Energy bill, much to my dismay. The House included it on their side. We know that in the Senate ANWR, when it was tried to be placed in the Energy bill, was subject to a filibuster. It was subject to a filibuster by some of the same individuals who tonight have stood and said this Energy bill does not provide for any lessening of foreign dependence on oil. Well, I would like to suggest that this energy policy that we are about to vote on tomorrow is one piece of what we need to look to as a Nation. The piece tomorrow will be the piece that includes the focus on conservation, the focus on renewables, alternatives, the focus on efficiencies.

Last year we were successful in moving forward the Natural Gas Act that provided incentives for construction of the natural gas pipeline coming out of Alaska, where we hope we will be able to provide to this Nation a good source of domestic natural gas. That is a huge piece for us. I would also like to think that before the end of the year we would also be able to put into place the rest of the comprehensive energy policy that would include oil coming out of a tiny sliver of the Coastal Plain of Alaska's North Slope.

I publicly thank Chairman Domenici and the ranking member, Senator Bingaman, of the Energy Committee. Both Senators did an incredible task shepherding this legislation through the floor. Their staffs were excellent. There was a great deal of hard work. It was a pleasure to sit in my first conference and see the manner in which it was conducted. It was a very open, very respectful deliberation of some very difficult issues conducted by the Members on our side as well as Chairman Barton from the House side. It was a pleasure to be a part of it. I am proud of the product that has come out of this body, and I urge the Members' support.

I yield the floor.

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