Global Warming

Floor Speech

GLOBAL WARMING -- (Senate - October 29, 2007)

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Ms. CANTWELL. Will the Senator yield?

Mrs. BOXER. I will yield to the Senator from Washington.

Ms. CANTWELL. First, I compliment the Senator for her very articulate understanding of the impact of greenhouse gases and where our country needs to go. So thank you for your leadership. We are so happy that you are chairing that committee and showing the fortitude to make sure this legislation starts moving through the Senate.

You mentioned California's experience. I wonder if you would just elaborate on that one more time because I think the point may have been--it sounds so simple but yet so complex. California's savings is what we are trying to do in the Energy bill. Here we have a 20-percent reduction of fuel consumption and a 20-percent reduction of greenhouse gases. That is why we need to pass the Energy bill. But you are talking about California's efficiency, and the efficiency that it achieved was monumental and significant. If you would, emphasize or explain how it is that we should be doing the same thing in the Senate in moving forward on efficiency.

Mrs. BOXER. I thank my dear friend, such a great leader on energy reform, for taking to the floor. I want to say to you, Senator Cantwell, in California we have kept our per capita energy use steady. In other words, each person's energy use over time has stayed steady for more than 30 years, while the per capita energy use in the rest of the Nation doubled.

Now, we have done it in ways that were very comfortable for people. You know, you look at the energy for appliances, you look at building codes, you look at all the things that we have done, simple things, things you are trying to do in the Energy bill.

Ms. CANTWELL. Madam Chair, did that cost California jobs?

Mrs. BOXER. It created jobs. We have been a leader in jobs. We are very prosperous. We believe our landmark legislation on global warming, the studies show, will create thousands and tens of thousands of green-collar jobs.

I think the point I would like to emphasize, and I know my friend from Missouri will be amazed at this, if every other State were just to emulate that, had emulated that, and we all did this as a national goal, not just one State's goal, we would have saved an amount of energy equivalent to all of the oil we import from the Middle East each year.

That is the amount of savings from the simple things that we can do, some of the things that my friend is trying so hard to get done in the Energy bill.

The fact is, when I look at the whole issue of global warming as a good news/bad news story, the bad news is we really have not tackled it here. The good news is there is so much we can do, so easily, with such benefits.

Certainly, energy efficiency is one.

Ms. CANTWELL. Madam Chair, I thank the Senator from California for answering that question and again for her great leadership on trying to push forward global warming and climate impact legislation in the Senate.

We do have to move forward. Her resiliency in saying the committee will address it, the committee will mark up legislation is the next step in what we need to do in following through. I applaud her for her dedication and for answering that question.

At $90 a barrel for oil, I certainly wish the rest of the Nation would have followed what California has done in that consumption reduction because it would have helped all of us on today's oil prices.

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