Energy Policy Act of 2003-Conference Report-Continued

ENERGY POLICY ACT OF 2003-CONFERENCE REPORT-CONTINUED

Mr. SCHUMER. Thank you, Mr. President.

Mr. President, I appreciate that this debate is now coming to a close, and we will, evidently, vote on cloture tomorrow morning at about 10:30. It has been a long debate. It has been a good debate. I think it has been an elucidating debate. I think the longer we debate this bill, the more unfavorably it is looked upon by the American people.

I would like to make one general comment about the process before getting into the substance of the bill. I have tremendous respect for my friend from New Mexico, Senator Domenici. He is a fine man. We have worked together on legislation. I think he works hard. I think he is dedicated.

I have a very fond relationship with my former colleague from the House of Representatives, Congressman Tauzin, head of the House Energy Committee. We came into the Congress together in 1980.

But no matter who it is, you cannot negotiate a bill with only two people in the room. Our ranking member from New Mexico, Senator Bingaman, was excluded. The Democratic side in the House was excluded. But it was not just the Democrats who were excluded; too, too many of the Members were excluded.

Why is it that those of us in the Northeast, Democrats and Republicans, think this bill is so bad for our region and our communities? Well, maybe it is because when you have a Senator from New Mexico and a Congressman from Louisiana negotiating the whole bill, there is not enough input from other parts of the country.

The beauty of the system that the Founding Fathers created-and that we have carried forward in our own fashion 215 years later-is that it understood those things, and it understood that we should not have a major bill negotiated by two people behind closed doors.

The fact that this bill is teetering on the edge of survival right now, I think, in part, is because of the process by which it
was constructed. I hope we will not do it again.

If we should win our vote tomorrow, those of us who are arguing against cloture, I hope that the lesson will be learned. I hope we will have real debate and real conference committees.

I also hope that, even here, we do not make the same mistake of passing last year's bill and then just saying, "Let it go to
conference," which was a mistake, I think, made on our side as well.

The process works. It is long and slow and laborious, but it works.

Again, a bill that has so many goodies for so many people-that such a bill should be teetering on the edge of extinction, I think shows we ought to go back to the process, the open process, the process that has Members of various parts of the country represented, the process of debate and refinement, because that ends up making better legislation.

Now, I have a whole lot to say about this bill, but the hour is late. So I will just put my comments into two categories: one, what the bill contains; and, two, what the bill does not contain-neither of which makes me happy.

What the bill contains: There are some good provisions in this bill. I am not going to get up here and do a diatribe against these little narrow things that are there for everybody. There are a few in there for my State, too. I think those sometimes are the grease that makes good legislation move forward, but alone they are not enough to carry a bill, alone they are not enough to justify a bill.

Some of the bad things contained in this bill, as well as some of the things that are so missing from this bill, make a complete case against the bill.

To me, the two things that are in the bill that should not be, more than anything else, are the ethanol provisions and the MTBE provisions.

On the ethanol provisions, I would say this to my colleagues: We do have to find a substitute for MTBE. We do have to keep our air clean. And ethanol is a good way to do it. I am not against ethanol per se. What I am against is mandating ethanol for every region in the country whether it fits or not. Ethanol would be a good standard to meet the oxygenate requirements in areas where there is abundant corn and abundant ethanol manufacturing facilities. But in many regions of the country, particularly on the coasts, there is not. And there are better ways to meet the clean air standards.

Refiners in my area say that by changing the blend and changing the method of refining, they can do just that without ethanol. And they will do that to meet the oxygenate clean air standards. But this bill has the nerve-that is the only way you can put it-to require them to buy ethanol anyway or at least buy ethanol credits. I have never quite seen anything like it.

Ethanol is a very subsidized product with many different types of advantages. Corn growers get all sorts of subsidies. I am not against those subsidies. I think we need to have a farming community. And just as we need dairy farmers in New York, we need corn growers in the Midwest and other places. But I wouldn't dare require people in the Midwest to buy some kind of dairy product made in New York for some other purpose. I might subsidize the product and say: Go out in the free market and make it work. But I wouldn't force them to do it. This goes a step beyond anything we have ever done in this Chamber.

If we wanted to help the corn growers and we are not helping them enough through the Agriculture bill, then let the Government do it. But the ethanol bill says to the traveling salesmen in upstate New York: You are going to do it. It will raise the price of gasoline 4 to 10 cents a gallon in my area.

How can anyone in this Chamber ask those of us from the Northeast and the West to impose that kind of gas tax on our constituents? It is just unfair. It is just wrong. I, for one, resent it. Again, if you want to subsidize the corn growers, do it. But not in this inefficient, unfair, regionally slanted way. Therefore, I very much oppose the ethanol provision.

My folks can't afford another 4 to 10 cents a gallon, likely to be 7 or 8 cents a gallon. Gasoline is high enough. We should be doing things to lower the price of gasoline. In that one fell swoop, all the good in terms of trying to produce alternative fuels will be undone.

Probably even worse in terms of its egregiousness, in terms of its arrogance, in terms of its nerve, its gall, is the MTBE provision. Parenthetically, I say to my friend from Ohio who said it doesn't stop lawsuits, it certainly does. It doesn't stop lawsuits if the little gas station on the corner was negligent. But if you have lost your home to MTBEs, you are not going to get anything out of that little gas station.

We know the only way that homeowners are going to get recompense here. It is through the oil companies, the producers of MTBEs. And those suits are prohibited.

So it is small comfort to the thousands of citizens in Fort Montgomery or in Hyde Park or in Plainview, NY, different communities in different parts of our State who have lost use of water in their home.

This is not just some environmental fetish. I have visited these homes. I feel for these people. Every time your child wants a bath or shower, you have to get in the car and drive a mile. You must use bottled water. For most of the people I know-these are middle class people, not rich people-the value of their home has been it. All they have been able to do is save for their home, and it is gone.

Now you say: Well, we are just going after the oil companies because they have deep pockets. Bunk. The bottom line is, the oil companies knew, the producers knew this was harmful. And here is the rub: They didn't tell a soul. It is not simply that they didn't produce it, but they didn't tell a soul. When they sold the gasoline with MTBE to the gas station down the street, they didn't say: Be careful. They didn't say: If you sit on top of an aquifer or a well, maybe you shouldn't use it.

They didn't say: Make sure your tanks don't have leaks because this is dangerous stuff if it leaks into the water. They didn't say any of that.

Had the oil companies, the MTBE producers, come clean and let people know that this might be harmful and that they
ought to take remediation the minute there is a spill and deal with prevention so there wouldn't be spills, we would not be asking that they be sued.

The analogy is to the cigarette industry in the sense not that the product was harmful, not even that people might have known it was harmful-that is probably true in each case-but, rather, that it was kept secret. It was concealed. People didn't have the ability, the choice, to prevent the harm from occurring.

The suits have been successful. My friend from Ohio just mentioned the suit in Santa Monica. Hundreds and hundreds of suits like that will be stopped if we pass this legislation.

I wish every one of my colleagues had come with me to Fort Montgomery, a little community in the hills overlooking the Hudson, a few miles south of West Point. The people there are mostly retired soldiers, not generals, rather, they are captains and majors and sergeants. It is a modest community. They worked hard for their country and they served their country. All they have is these little homes. And look at their faces. They all gathered one fall afternoon on someone's front lawn and talked to me. They are lovely people. They said: We don't want any money; we are not suing for money.

This isn't one of these lawsuits where they say, "Give us millions of dollars," and claim some alleged damage. I don't like those lawsuits. In fact, right now we are trying to put together a class action bill that would make the lawsuits fairer. But the lawsuits were their recourse. The oil companies were beginning to negotiate with them, either to put filters on their water or to help build a new system.

If this bill passes, these people will have two terrible choices: Sell their home at maybe the half the value it was a few years back before MTBE leached into their water supply, or spend thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars each year, each taxpayer, to build a whole water system.

Who is more to blame? The company that produced the MTBE and didn't tell people it was harmful, although they knew it, or these majors and sergeants and captains who served their country for years and have lost just about everything they have had?

That story can be repeated in many parts of New York and many parts of California and many parts of New Hampshire and many parts of Iowa and many parts of America. We should not allow it to happen.

As I said, I am not the leading advocate on our side of the aisle of lawsuits as a solution to everything. I would much rather see government regulation than lawsuits. But if there was ever a situation where lawsuits are justified, it is here.

What is infuriating is we are giving the MTBE industry $2 billion for closing. My friend talked about the money for LIHEAP. It is good that it is in the bill, but it is an authorization. Every time we do the appropriations bill, we don't come close to the authorization level. That is not real money. Put that $2 billion into LIHEAP, real money. But here we are, instead, giving it to the MTBE producers for closing down.

Do we give money to the little drycleaner shop that has to close down even though the blood and sweat and tears of the person who ran it are real? Do we give money to other businesses that have closed down, the thousands in my State, because maybe our country has not done enough to defend them from unfair trade practices? No. But not only do we give this industry $2 billion as recompense for closing down, but then we protect them from liability. This bill chooses those companies over tens of thousands of innocent homeowners. It is an egregious decision, and it shall not pass-if we have anything to do with it.

Those two provisions are at the top of my list as the most egregious in the bill. I will tell you what bothers me just about as much. It is not just what is in the bill, it is what is not in the bill. As everybody who has come to the floor to speak has said, we need an energy policy in America. This bill is a hodgepodge of little things, without much of an energy policy. It is a stitching together of a coalition of individual ideas. I like the tax deductions for the renewables. The reliability provisions don't go far enough, as far as I am concerned, but at least there is a step forward there. But there is no real energy policy.

Mr. President, 9/11 showed us many things, and one thing it showed us is that we have to be independent of Middle Eastern oil. The best and quickest way to do that is by some measure of conservation, and it is MIA in this bill. When China can pass CAFE standards more significant, more stringent than our own, this country is headed for a fall. If we cannot tighten our belts now, before there is a crisis, then something is wrong with the way our country is governing itself. Yet there is virtually nothing in terms of oil independence and conservation. Even the rather modest provisions that the Senator from Louisiana put in the Senate bill are gone. Again, on issue after issue, that occurred-issue after issue after issue.

There is no real conservation measures, at a time when we cry out. If you ask experts what is most needed in terms of our energy policy, it is conservation. We can increase production, and we can try to do experiments with coal or nuclear or hydrogen or whatever you want, but those are 10, 15 years down the road. We can talk about the timetables. I disagree with my friend from Ohio on that. The quickest way to do it is by conservation. We are not doing it.

Then we have the blackout in the Northeast. It cried out for a national grid to make our electricity system like our highway system, where the Government has direct and fairly strict oversight of the means of transportation-in one case of cars, and in another of electricity. And we do the most modest of steps-after we got a huge warning.

The report yesterday showed how little oversight there is, how little coordination there is. One energy company in Ohio and one voluntary organization in part of Ohio dropped the ball. My view is simple. This ought to all be done not by the electricity companies, which have a dramatic interest against spending the money to make the transmission wires work because that is not where they want to make money. It is not a cost that brings them a big rate of return. We should turn that over to FERC and let them set the standards and require the companies to meet it.

This bill doesn't come close to that. Once again, a shot across the bow, so close to us, and we do virtually nothing. The special interests-the Southeast doesn't want to be part of a national grid. Fine. They don't want to give up any rights or be governed by rules that might be good for the common good. Fine. The grid provisions here, better than much of the bill, leave so much to be desired and are emblematic of this bill. The special interests say jump and the bill says, How high? No energy policy. And the same with the problems we have had with deregulation and the sale of electricity out in California and in the West. I am not an expert on that, but my colleagues from California and Washington State have talked about that. We are MIA.

So instead of a coherent energy policy, which the times cry out for, we have a mishmash of goodies, of nods in the direction of the best parts of the bill, and away from some very bad things that hurt many parts of our country.

It is no wonder, Mr. President, that editorial pages across the country have condemned this bill in a way we have not seen in a long time. There is virtually no division. Frankly, I have not seen one article, one editorial-I have probably missed it-that defends this bill. The New York Times-probably the leading liberal editorial page-and the Wall Street Journal-the leading conservative editorial page-I think on the same day said, "Don't vote for this bill." And they are joined by about everybody in between. That is not just the media ranting and raving and not understanding the realities, or being too much in their ivory tower, or on their high horse, which I will be the first to admit happens all the time. That is because there is something wrong with this bill.

So it is my view that we are better off going back to the drawing board, open up the process, include the ranking member from New Mexico of the committee, and include the members of the committee, debate the bill even if it takes a few weeks. I guarantee you that we will get a much better bill.

This bill is an overall negative for what it contains and for what it doesn't. We can and must do a lot better. If we defeat cloture tomorrow, we will.

I yield the floor and I suggest the absence of a quorum.