Real Security Plan for America
REAL SECURITY PLAN FOR AMERICA -- (House of Representatives - July 20, 2006)
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Mr. VAN HOLLEN. I thank my colleague, Mr. Schiff from California, again, for his leadership. And I think we have covered a lot of territory in this hour. I think we will have a continuing conversation here in the Congress, and I am sure we will have a continuing conversation throughout the country about this very important issue.
And, again, it goes to the question about whether we take our words seriously in terms of moving the policy of this country forward. And you can't have a situation where you have the President say this is a national priority, on the one hand, and then have a budget that comes down the next day that sends a very, very different message because, if you do that, number one, you lose credibility with the American people; and, number two, you obviously can't achieve your objective if you don't harness some of our national resources to this very important, very important effort.
So I want to thank my colleague for his leadership on this issue. And I hope that in the days ahead, this Congress will move from a position of rhetoric on these issues to actually doing something meaningful and taking this country in a new direction when it comes to energy policy, which, as we have discussed tonight, is such an important component of our national security policy as well. So I thank the gentleman for his leadership on this issue.
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Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague, Mr. Schiff from California, for his leadership in bringing us together to discuss these very important national security issues. We are very pleased to be joined today by Congresswoman Kaptur, as well, who is very well versed in the issue of energy security and energy policy. It is wonderful to have her with us on the floor today.
Mr. Speaker, I think America understands that energy security is a very important part of our national security. But if we are going to address energy security in a meaningful way going forward, we need to do it in a new manner. We cannot just be doing the same old thing.
Now, I think many of us were pleased back in January when the President delivered his State of the Union address, and from the podium right behind Mr. Schiff, he said to the Congress assembled and to the American people that the United States was addicted to oil.
In fact, his exact words were: The United States is addicted to oil which is often imported from unstable parts of the world.
I am pleased that the President finally acknowledged that. That was kind of the headline in the newspapers the next day.
The confusing thing, I thought, was that most of America already knew that we were overly reliant on oil, especially on foreign oil. But it was news that this administration had begun to at least acknowledge that problem.
The question is, having acknowledged the problem, whether we are serious as a Nation about doing something about it. Unfortunately, if you look at the record to date from the Bush administration, despite the rhetoric he gave at the time he addressed the United States Congress, we have not seen the follow-through in terms of a new plan. And we need a new direction in energy policy.
For example, that night he talked about the fact that we need to do more in the area of renewable energy, which we do; as you, Mr. Schiff, have said, that many of us have been pushing for for many, many years. But I think we all remember that it was not long after the President gave his State of the Union address that he flew off to the National Renewable Energy Lab out in Colorado, part of NOAA, and discovered that in fact the budget that he was submitting the day after the State of the Union address actually cut about 40 employees who were working on renewable energy at that lab.
And so the difference is really the one between actually doing something about an issue or just talking about an issue.
Because when you submit a budget the day after your State of the Union address, in which you say that the country is addicted to oil, and we have got to do something about it, and you submit a budget that cuts individuals' pay at one of the greatest national labs on that issue, in fact, the one that the President chose for his photo op on this issue, you know there is some kind of miscommunication between the guys who write the speeches and the guys that actually are putting the budget together which reflect the priorities of our Nation.
Clearly, the priority in that budget wasn't to follow through in a new direction on energy policy. In fact, unfortunately, what we have seen is the same old, same old. We have an energy policy bill that some people say will help wean us off our dependence on oil, but a major feature of that bill is to provide more taxpayer subsidies to the oil and gas industry.
Now, I have got to believe that the American people are scratching their heads and saying, what's wrong with this picture? I just went to fill up my car with gasoline. We have record prices at the pump. The oil and gas industry is making record profits, and yet you, the United States Congress, under this Republican leadership, you are taking some more of my taxpayer money and saying to the oil and gas industry, gee, even though you are making record profits and gas prices are through the roof, we are going to give you some of our constituents' taxpayer money as additional incentive for you to go out and explore and drill for oil and gas.
What happened to the free market? What happened to the notion that here we want to make sure that the market works? In fact, we are taking money from our taxpayers to subsidize an industry that needs absolutely no subsidy. They are making record profits. In fact, the President announced that we have to break that addiction. If you want to break an addiction, the first thing you need to do is acknowledge you got a problem. Then you got to do something about it.
Providing a greater subsidy or additional subsidies to the oil and gas industry, when you have acknowledged, as the President said, that we are addicted to oil, does exactly the opposite.
Mr. SCHIFF. This sounds a little bit about the equivalent, if you are dealing with someone with a substance abuse addiction, to give them a subsidy to buy the contraband that is the subject of their addiction.
Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Well, that is exactly right. Let us say you had an alcoholic. The last thing you want to do to help that person kick the habit is to provide a subsidy, for example, to the alcohol industry to make more alcohol at different prices. So we have got a real contradiction here between what we now acknowledge should be our national priority, a national priority, and what we are actually doing about it.
That is why I think it is very important that we are here today to talk about a new direction, because I do believe that if we want to really help break that addiction and reduce our reliance on oil, we need a large national effort. That is why many of us have joined together to introduce the new Apollo Energy Act, which says we need to harness the great potential of this Nation, the grant entrepreneurial spirit, and make sure that we commit ourselves to this real national effort, in addition to the fact that we need to encourage, not just more renewable energy, but in the immediate short-term we can also encourage greater energy efficiency.
We waste an awful lot of energy as a Nation through inefficient use of energy. So the Federal Government has tried and gave us a push to try to encourage States and local jurisdictions, the American people, to find ways to improve energy efficiency. But if you look at the President's budget with respect to energy efficiency efforts, you see dramatic reductions in the budget that he submitted for that purpose.
In fact, Diane Shea, who is the executive director of the National Association of State Energy Officials, has said that the assistance that the States received from the Department of Energy is not going to be available this year as it was in the past. This year, the year after the President stood at this podium right here in this Chamber and said this is a national problem, we have got a national addiction, we have got to do something about it.
Yet he reduced the efforts that we had put in place and were trying to develop to try to help people with energy
efficiency, because we know that if we can use energy more efficiently, obviously, then we need less to produce the same output and the same quality of life.
So if you look at all of these different areas, you just find a growing gap between what the Bush administration says it wants to do and what it is actually doing. It is a credibility gap that is growing. I think the American people recognize that fact, and they are looking for an alternative that is real.
That is why we have developed what we call a real security plan, not a fake one, not one where you say one thing and do another, but a real plan, which really makes the national commitment to this effort in many, many different areas.
The new Apollo Energy Project is part of that. A project to provide greater efforts in the area of ethanol is part of that. A whole series of concrete steps that are in a proposal that is put together through a consensus by many experts is part of that. We need to act on that proposal, and we need to start acting today if we really want to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, improve our national security situation, and improve our environmental situation and address the issue of global climate change, which we necessarily need to address as well.
I would be happy to yield to our colleague, Ms. MARCY KAPTUR, and thank her for her leadership on this issue.
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Mr. VAN HOLLEN. I think despite the fact there are 3,000 miles between the area you represent and the area I represent, that is certainly one of the things that brings our constituents together. I think what they are all looking for, regardless of where they live in this great country of ours, is some real leadership on this very important issue.
This House just a few weeks ago had another opportunity to send a statement on the fact that we wanted a forward-looking energy plan with a new direction or whether we just wanted to go the same old, same old.
Our colleague, Congressman Markey of Massachusetts, offered an amendment. It said let us put an end to another subsidy to provide for deepwater drilling for oil and gas. In other words, and I just want to make this clear, in other words, taking funds from our constituents and providing it to the oil and gas companies effectively in the form of a subsidy so that they can drill for oil and gas.
Now, even this administration said they were against this particular subsidy, but not the leadership in this House, not the Republican leadership in this House. It went right out of this House because, unfortunately, the Republican leadership is still in the old frame of mind that we can just keep doing what we used to be doing rather than moving in a very new direction.
I would like to pick up briefly on our point that our colleague here, Ms. Kaptur, made with respect to the issue of the Federal Government leading by example.
It is hard for all of us to ask people around this country to do things in the area of energy efficiency when the Federal Government itself has been such a deadbeat on this. The Federal Government, after all, is the largest single consumer of energy in the United States and yet, again, after the President gave his State of the Union address, he submitted the fiscal year 2007 budget, and that was the lowest request ever for Federal Government energy efficiency efforts. In fact, that was lower, despite the fact in 2004 the Federal Government consumed more energy than at any other time in the last 10 years.
So, again, I get back to the point, you got to say what you mean and you got to follow through.
Here was another example. This is the day of the State of the Union address, the budget came down, and yet the budget came down, the President, head of the executive branch, submitted a budget that reduced funds for energy efficiency programs in the Federal Government. That is not leading by example.
Part of our new directions program is we say we will ensure that the Federal Government will be part of the solution, not part of the problem.
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Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Well, the gentleman is right, and I think the statistics on this are clear, that even if you took all the oil you could possibly drill out of Alaska, with all the costs and the environmental damage, it would deal with only a very short period of 1 year, less than 1 year, a couple weeks to months in terms of our total energy use.
So if you are trying to break an addiction, you do not keep feeding that addiction. What you need to do is have a different approach in general.
As Ms. Kaptur has said, it is not just one different thing, it is many different technologies and different ideas that you need to work on. But what you don't do if you want to kick a habit is keep encouraging that habit to remain. And yet that is what we have been using so much of our natural resources to do. We should not be using taxpayer money to do the oil and gas subsidies. Rather, we should be using our efforts to encourage these other ideas that are in our national interest.
The President has said we have a problem. That is not the issue, apparently. But the issue is what are we doing about it. That is why I think this discussion is important.
I really do believe it is a terrible thing when so many of the others around the world are ahead of us in so many areas where we should be leading the way. We have a great entrepreneurial spirit. We have the resources and talents to do this. There is no reason why other countries should be beating us in the area of renewable energy development and energy efficiency technologies. And yet they are. I think that is because of a lack of national leadership. Other countries have made this a priority. In this country we have made it a priority for sound bites, but we have not made it a priority for policy.
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Mr. VAN HOLLEN. If the gentleman would yield, I understand your confusion, and I share that. I think it has been so shortsighted that we as a Nation didn't take the steps that we needed to take many years ago in this regard in terms of updating in a significant way the CAFE standard, the corporate average fuel economy standards in this country.
When gas prices started going up over the last many months, all of a sudden you saw people running around with their heads cut off, trying to think of quick-fix solutions.
You had the majority leader of the Senate, Senator Frist, he floated this idea of a $100 rebate to every American, as if that was somehow going to solve the problem. Quick fixes are not going to solve the problem. We need serious solutions.
One of the things that should have been done years and years ago was updating the CAFE standardS. It is interesting to hear Members of Congress who have been here for a long time, I listened to Senator Lott and others on the other side talking about this. They said, Gee, you know, if we had known what we were going to see today in terms of gas prices, we would have supported an increase in the CAFE standards back then. Well, you know, we don't all have crystal balls, but we have to exercise our best judgment.
And the fact of the matter is that is a long overdue measure. And it is not a quick fix because it takes time for the fleet of cars to turn over. You can't just change the corporate average fuel economy standards today and, presto, have a result. It requires some forward thinking.
The fact that we didn't do it before was a big mistake, and I think people should hold people accountable for their mistakes. On the other hand, it is better late than never. We need to get moving on that, and we need to get moving on the whole menu of other options that we have been discussing today. There is no silver bullet to this. You need an array of options. You need a number of efforts going on at the same time.
But in order to get all of those things going, you need one essential ingredient, and that is some leadership and a commitment to this issue and a commitment to have a new direction and not just rely on the failed policies of the past that continue to get us into the mess we are in.
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Mr. VAN HOLLEN. I thank my colleague, Mr. Schiff from California, again, for his leadership. And I think we have covered a lot of territory in this hour. I think we will have a continuing conversation here in the Congress, and I am sure we will have a continuing conversation throughout the country about this very important issue.
And, again, it goes to the question about whether we take our words seriously in terms of moving the policy of this country forward. And you can't have a situation where you have the President say this is a national priority, on the one hand, and then have a budget that comes down the next day that sends a very, very different message because, if you do that, number one, you lose credibility with the American people; and, number two, you obviously can't achieve your objective if you don't harness some of our national resources to this very important, very important effort.
So I want to thank my colleague for his leadership on this issue. And I hope that in the days ahead, this Congress will move from a position of rhetoric on these issues to actually doing something meaningful and taking this country in a new direction when it comes to energy policy, which, as we have discussed tonight, is such an important component of our national security policy as well. So I thank the gentleman for his leadership on this issue.
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