Home Star Energy Retrofit Act Of 2010
Floor Speech
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Mr. WELCH. Thank you, Chairman Markey, and thank you, Mr. Ehlers.
Madam Chair, a great nation does not shrink from its challenges. It faces them directly. We face serious challenges to create jobs in a tough economy, to move away from the dirty fuels of the 19th century into the cleaner fuels of the 21st, and using less fuel rather than more is a solid step that's going to help us accomplish that. We need to create manufacturing jobs in this country, where we're losing them by the day. Home Star does all three.
It's going to put our contractors back to work. There's a 25 percent unemployment rate. It's going to allow us to use less fuel rather than more. Vermonters are cheap. They like that. I think that's something that homeowners around the country will like. And it's going to be 90 percent produced--all the things used in Home Star, 90 percent are produced and manufactured in the United States of America.
So this is a partnership between the government, that will help a homeowner with the upfront cost with a point-of-sale rebate, and our retailers, our homebuilders, and our manufacturers. So we're going to be putting America back to work and addressing these challenges of creating jobs and clean energy.
If we're going to be successful in this challenge and others, we really should be doing them on a bipartisan basis. And this is a way of showing how it can be done. With the leadership of Mr. Ehlers, we have bipartisan support. But we have others.
Mr. Barton, in the committee, made very constructive suggestions on how we can improve this bill, and they were incorporated in it: A specific number about how much we're going to spend, not open-ended. A sunset, so we can kick the tires after a few years and see how the program is working. Former Michigan Governor, a Republican, John Engler, a strong endorser. Former Secretary of Energy in the Bush administration, Spencer Abraham, fully endorsing this. Why? Because it's practical. It's common sense. It's a partnership between the public and the private sector.
There's been a concern raised about spending, and rightly so. This bill must be paid for. All of us who support this legislation acknowledge that. And we will have to vote on how exactly we're going to have this paid for. And we will. But let's keep in mind that there is a difference between a wise investment and wasteful spending.
When you have a bill that's going to put our 25 percent unemployment rate folks back to work and it's going to allow homeowners to save money, not just this year but next year and the year after and the year after that, that's a wise expenditure of money, where we have our homeowners putting some of their money down and getting some taxpayer help to get the job done. Home Star is that solid investment that is going to achieve that hat trick of energy savings for the homeowner, of moving towards a cleaner environment, and of creating jobs here at home.
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Mr. WELCH. I thank the gentleman.
Two things: one, the concern about weatherization versus this program. This is different. It is a direct engagement by the homeowner. They make the decision, and then they go to the existing infrastructure of retailers and contractors. So there is not layers of government. This is something that Governor Engler of Michigan said made this program very practical and user friendly.
Second, I want to remind folks of the broad basis of support from unusual allies--the National Association of Manufacturers, a key vote; U.S. Chamber of Commerce, key vote; National Lumber and Building Material Dealers Association--that's 6,000 retail businesses; National Association of Home Builders, 175,000 members; the Alliance to Save Energy; the Home Star Coalition; Efficiency First; and the Retail Industry Leaders Association. This has broad support because it's practical and addresses a real-world problem by creating jobs and letting folks save money on their energy bills.
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Mr. Welch has just gone down the litany of organizations, from the National Association of Manufacturers, to the Chamber of Commerce, the steelworkers, the communications workers, utility workers, American Federation of Teachers. The list goes on and on on both sides. This is the kind of program that the United States should be thinking about at the point at which night after night we see this oil spill down in the gulf because it once again reminds us that the United States only has 2 percent of the oil reserves of the world.
What we do in this legislation is create a program that provides the rebates to homeowners to jump-start the manufacturing, the retail, the construction industry, focusing upon using technologies, manufactured in America, with high standards of efficiency. And by doing so, we say to our country that we are going to turn to our own people, that when America has a plan, America wins.
This is part of a plan. And it is a part of a plan to end dependence upon imported oil. We just can't have half of our trade deficit coming from the purchase of oil from countries that we should not be purchasing it from. We need a plan. This bill is part of that plan. This bill is part of the plan that says that we are going to end business as usual. And what are the companies that we are going to use? We are going to use companies like Whirlpool, and we are going to use companies all across our country that manufacture these items that are 20 percent, 30 percent, 40 percent more efficient than anything that people have in their homes who are going to become a part of this program.
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