Advanced Geothermal Innovation Leadership Act of 2019
Floor Speech
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Mr. KENNEDY. Madam President, I want to talk to the Senate for a few minutes about refrigerators and air conditioners. Thank the Lord for both of them. They make our lives so much better, especially in the Presiding Officer's home State of Mississippi and, certainly, in my home State of Louisiana.
Refrigerators and air conditioners and the like are able to keep people and things cold by using coolants or refrigerants, I think some people call them. I am going to call them coolants. Basically, I will not go into the chemistry and/or the physics, but when a coolant in liquid form is converted to a gas, it is called phase conversion. It absorbs heat. That is why you will hear people, including but not limited to repair women and repair men, talking about coolant for an air conditioner or coolant for a refrigerator. It is that coolant that keeps us and our food cool.
Years ago, we used to use a coolant called Freon. You probably have heard that term. It is seldom used today. There are some small occasions when it is used, but for the most part, we have decided Freon is not a good coolant, not because it doesn't work but because it is very, very harmful to our environment. So a number of years ago, people the world over, including the U.S. Government, said: OK, we are not going to use Freon anymore. We are going to use another coolant, which we generally refer to as hydrofluorocarbons. If you hear me use the expression HFC or the acronym HFC, that is what I mean.
So we went along and, instead of using Freon, we started using HFCs, hydrofluorocarbons. Then we discovered--and by ``we'' I mean that most of the scientists throughout the world came to realize that hydrofluorocarbons or HFCs are not very good for the environment either. The people who made this decision, many of whom were American scientists, decided we need to develop a third type of coolant other than Freon and other than HFCs to run our air conditioners and run our refrigerators and protect our environment at the same time.
A few years ago, most of the countries throughout the world made this decision. The representatives of these countries got together and said: OK, you remember we decided to stop using Freon, and now we have been using these HFCs. Yet we have discovered these HFCs are also harmful, so we are going to agree--all of these countries said--to develop a third type of coolant that is not as harmful to our environment.
That is the direction in which the world is headed. Within 5, 10, 15 years, not only will Freon be eliminated, but so will hydrofluorocarbons because the rest of the world is going to be using a third type of coolant, which has been developed and is being developed as we speak.
There is just one problem. The United States has not agreed with those other countries. That is OK. That is our right to do it our way. But that presents yet another problem because in 5 or 10 or 15 years, we are going to look up, and we are going to be the odd person out. The rest of the world is going to be using this new technology, and we are still going to be using hydrofluorocarbons. We are going to be isolated, and it is going to cost our business community a lot of business, and it is going to hurt us.
I and Senator Tom Carper--a fine American and a good man--have a bill. It is called the American Innovation and Manufacturing Act--the Senator and I call it the AIM Act--and we have a lot of support. At last count, we had 32 cosponsors--half Republican, half Democrat--and that number is rising as we speak. That is a third of the U.S. Senate. You can't get a third of the U.S. Senate to agree on much of anything except that they like ice cream, but for this august body, having 32 cosponsors is a big deal.
Let me also say that we have a lot of support from the business community. For example--and I will not read all of the groups that are supporting it--the Air Conditioning, Heating and Refrigeration Institute is supporting this bill. It is in charge of our refrigerators and air conditioners, and it is saying: Yes, we want to do this. The environmental community supports this bill. It is rare that we get both the environmental community and the business community on the same page, but mainly through Senator Carper's intellect and charm, we have been able to do that.
As you know, we are in the process of considering an energy bill, and that energy bill is really an amalgamation of a lot of other bills that deal with energy that are going to be put together in one bill, ably handled by Senator Murkowski. Senator Carper and I want to take our bill--the AIM Act, the American Innovation and Manufacturing Act, which is supported overwhelmingly by the business community and by the environmental community--and add it to Senator Murkowski's bill as an amendment, and that amendment has already been submitted. We have a lot of support for the amendment. The last time I looked, we had 28 cosponsors to the amendment, and once again, the business community and the environmental community are supporting it.
The Presiding Officer is probably thinking, OK, Kennedy. What is the problem? This is interesting, but what is the problem here?
How can I put this? The problem is the way we operate. One person in the Senate can stop the entire Senate from ever voting on something, as we all know, and I am not going to go into the details. In some cases, that is not necessarily a bad thing. Our Founders intended the Senate to move carefully and slowly, but it is a bad thing, in my judgment, when it is used routinely to keep the Senate from having an up-or-down vote on something that is important to the American people.
I mean, the logical approach would be, OK, you don't agree with the amendment. That is why God made rollcall votes. Let's vote. You can vote yea or you can vote nay or you can jump the rail, but everybody gets to weigh in. That is why I was sent up here. My people sent me up here to debate and decide. They didn't send me up here to participate and delay in stultification. So that is my message today: Let my people vote.
Once again, I understand there are rare occasions on which a Senator feels so strongly about something that he or she can and should exercise his or her right to prevent the whole body from considering something, but it has become a routine political weapon. That is one of the reasons, in my judgment, that we don't get more done in the Senate.
I am not criticizing anybody. I am part of this body. If I am criticizing this body, I am criticizing myself. But doing nothing is hard because you never know when you are finished. We can do a lot more in this body, and I think we all understand that, and I think we can all agree with that. I think one of the reasons the Senate polls right up there with skim milk among the American people is that we don't get more done, and one of the reasons we don't get more done is that we are not allowed to vote.
Once again, I am not telling anybody how to vote, for our votes are sacred, but you can vote yea on my ideas and Senator Carper's ideas, or you can vote nay, or you can not vote at all--you can jump the rail-- but please let us vote.
I am not criticizing anybody. I am really not. I know we are together a lot, as the Presiding Officer knows, and we all know each other, and I can honestly say I like and respect every one of my colleagues in this body. I truly do. I may not agree with them, but I like and respect them, so my criticism is not personal. Yet our process here is a problem, which is my plea today to my colleagues: Please don't object to this amendment. Please. It doesn't mean you have to vote for it--you can vote against it--but please let the entire body have a vote because that is what democracy is supposed to be all about.
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