Green Energy Education Act Of 2009

Floor Speech

Green Energy Education Act Of 2009

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Mr. McCAUL. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the gentleman from Florida for yielding.

I also want to thank the chairman of the Science and Technology Committee for his dedication and strong bipartisan leadership on this committee, which is so important, and for allowing my bill to go out of committee once again and come to the House floor. As the gentleman mentioned, it passed unanimously last Congress out of the House. I hope it does the same this Congress, and I hope the Senate will act on it this time.

Like many other Members of Congress, I am concerned about America's dependence on foreign sources of energy, and the National Academy's ``Rising above the Gathering Storm'' report has echoed the calls of many in the academic and business communities for a greater need to recruit and develop scientific and engineering talent to work on solving these problems. Increasing energy independence and decreasing the harmful effects of energy production and use are clearly areas of long-term national need. Our reliance on imported energy only serves to increase our vulnerability to external events and to the actions of regimes that are, in many cases, openly hostile to the United States.

One of the ways that we can reduce the need for energy imports is to use our energy more efficiently. Buildings consume more energy than any other sector of the economy, including industry and transportation. According to the United States Department of Energy, American buildings consume 39 percent of our Nation's primary energy and 70 percent of our electricity. However, energy-efficient building practices are still at the fringes of the building sector, in part, because of a lack of awareness about energy-efficient technologies and design practices among building professionals.

That is why I introduced the Green Energy Education Act. This legislation authorizes the Department of Energy to partner with the National Science Foundation to support graduate education and curriculum development to advance DOE's broad energy-technology development mission. Working through NSF, DOE will help develop the next generation of engineers and architects to produce buildings, incorporating the latest energy-efficient buildings and technologies.

In order to reduce the likelihood of duplicative and wasteful programs, this bill allows for the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation to combine their efforts to find workable solutions to the issues surrounding building efficiency that can be transferred to the marketplace. Specifically, H.R. 957 will authorize DOE's Office of Science and Applied Energy Technology Programs to contribute funds to NSF's successful graduate education and research program.

This bill also authorizes the DOE to contribute to NSF's curriculum development activities in order to improve the ability of engineers and architects to design and to construct more efficient and durable buildings.

So let me, once again, thank the chairman for allowing this to come forward to the House floor, and I urge my colleagues to support this important step towards increasing America's energy independence.

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