Energy Policy

Floor Speech

Ms. MURKOWSKI. Madam President, last week I spoke on five of the steps we need to take to increase domestic oil production. Today I wish to take a few moments to speak more broadly about our Nation's energy policy as a whole, what the proper goals for such a policy should be, and the false choice between increased domestic production and reduced oil consumption.

Energy policy has repeatedly been brought up as an area where this Congress and this President can find common ground. Knowing something actually needs to be done, however, is no guarantee it will be done. The truth is most of us know we can improve in the area of energy. With oil prices at above $100 a barrel and the price at the pump heading toward $4 a gallon, we need to develop a coherent national energy policy to find that common ground, and that need has taken on even greater urgency.

So what makes for good energy policy and how can we ensure that agreement is finally reached on meaningful energy legislation? I think we should have essentially five goals, and those five goals are: an energy that is abundant, affordable, clean, diverse, and domestic. I realize these words, especially in combination with one another, don't lend themselves to a clever acronym or a catchy slogan, so maybe we need to rearrange them and figure out what word we can make. But if we follow these as our guiding principles and make sure our legislative efforts reflect each and every one, I believe genuine progress can be within our reach. So let's start with the concept of affordable energy, because that is certainly the most relevant topic right now.

Times such as these serve as a wakeup call as to how important energy--and particularly affordable domestic energy--is to our Nation. Energy provides the base of everything we do; not just heat and power and light and transportation, but the food we eat, the clothes we wear--everything. Whether for a server farm or for a soybean farm, abundant and affordable energy is the foundation for a robust economy. But, unfortunately, there seem to be those who feel the key to clean energy is to make energy scarce and expensive. We don't need an experiment or an act of Congress to know an economic recession reduces emissions, and a depression, of course, would even do that more so. The current price of oil is a stark reminder that while making energy scarce and expensive may, in fact, reduce our emissions, it is an even more effective way to crush an economic recovery. That is not good for us.

The President has proposed we should raise the taxes on oil companies, but in the middle of tough economic times, the American people are not open to those policies that will increase their energy costs. There is a better path that would do more to bolster our energy security, more to create jobs, more to generate government revenues and, equally, more to reduce our deficit. Instead of punishing one industry to promote another, let's use our tremendous reserves of conventional resources which account for more than 80 percent of our energy supply. Let's use these to fund the next generation of clean technologies. Let's prove up and produce our resources and then put these revenues toward--whether it is tax incentives, whether it is additional research, whether it is studies at our universities, you name it, but let's use these wisely.

Speaking specifically to the regulatory burdens on energy, I think we all recognize the Clean Air Act has made our air cleaner and certainly improved our health. Carbon monoxide, SO

X, NO

X, and a host of other pollutants have largely been removed from smokestack and tailpipe emissions. I think we recognize there is more we can do in terms of the regulation of HFCs and other greenhouse gases which, while they emit much lesser quantities, they certainly have potent greenhouse effects. But the Clean Air Act is not the proper legal framework for regulation of carbon dioxide, which is emitted in huge quantities by almost every human activity and whose effect cannot be confined to a nonattainment area, and which, in itself, is not harmful to health. All of us want a cleaner energy supply, but the approach taken over the last several years seems to have been one of all or nothing instead of the all-of-the-above approach, and I think it has been counterproductive. We need to seek out and accept policies that will lead to steady progress.

We don't yet know the best way to provide energy that is clean and abundant and affordable, but what we do know is there is a whole myriad of opportunities. We have oil and natural gas; we have wind; we have solar; we have hydro; we have geothermal. We have coal, biofuels, fission, fusion. Just naming the types of energy and the subcategories within energy is a whole floor speech in and of itself. Whether it turns out to be fireflies we collect in a bottle or something we simply haven't even imagined yet, we don't know what source or what combination of sources will actually turn out to be best for America. That should be cause for those of us here in Congress to be extraordinarily careful in trying to predetermine what sources should either win or lose. We are always talking around here about we need to steer clear of picking winners and losers, and yet it seems that is what we do all the time. A diversity of energy sources provides the best proving ground and insurance against overreliance on any one source, and a healthy economy provides the best demand for the cleanest sources available.

Winston Churchill once said:

On no one quality, on no one process, on no one country, on no one route, and on no one field must we be dependent. Safety and certainty in oil lie in variety and variety alone.

Winston Churchill was talking about oil, but his words are just as applicable to our need for diversity in all of our types of energy.

Finally, the need to make our energy domestic to the greatest degree possible is something we have all known--we all know we need to do this--but we have failed to do anything about it for decades. It shouldn't take an upheaval in North Africa to convince us that sending billions of dollars a day out of our economy to countries that are not our friends is a bad idea.

We know it is a bad idea. Yet we continue year after year after year. We need to focus on two parallel tracks: increased domestic production and decreased consumption. We absolutely should reduce our dependence on oil. In our early days of the automobile, we saw a wide range of experiments as inventors and entrepreneurs strove to find the best approach. Again, I think we are on the verge of a renaissance in vehicle technologies where we explore electric vehicles, biofuels, fuel cells, efficient diesels, natural gas, propane, and other approaches. But for right now, today, we use 20 million barrels of oil a day, and for the vast majority of its uses there is no imminent substitute.

I said last week in my comments that for the sake of our national economy, for the sake of our Nation's security, and for the sake of the world's environment, we should produce at home the highest possible percentage of the oil we do consume.

Domestic production is currently being stifled by those who engage in what I guess you would call magical thinking--that if only we stop producing oil in the United States, then the world's need for oil is going to go away and Skittles are going to fall from the sky and unicorns will prance in the streets. It is just not real.

The harsh reality is our foreign oil dependence contributes to conflicts where young men and women die or come home without limbs, and we wreck our economy. There always will be future conflicts in the world, whether in the Middle East or elsewhere. As a nation, we will have to decide on our proper role in each. We can and should do everything possible, however, to eliminate foreign oil dependence as a strategic consideration.

Madam President, none of this is due to America running out of oil. In Alaska, my home State, we have estimated reserves in excess of 65 years' worth of Persian Gulf imports. So, again, in Alaska alone--one State--we have reserves in excess of 65 years of what we take from the Persian Gulf. There are also, of course, tremendous reserves in other States and, of course, offshore.

For decades, opponents of domestic production have argued that we should not produce more because we are not going to see this come online for years to come. If, 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago we had ignored those who had said ANWR was unacceptable because it would take a decade to develop, we would now, at this point in time, be enjoying another 1 million barrels of domestic production per day. But we said, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, it is going to take too long to bring that ANWR oil online, so we just ought not do it. Look where it puts us today.

Opponents also like to say that a policy of increased domestic production will have no immediate effect on oil prices. We don't even want to waste time arguing the folly of trying to dismiss good national energy policy because it is long term. I also note that using the Strategic Oil Reserve to mitigate high oil prices--to maybe push them back below $100 a barrel for a short term, a couple weeks--should be unacceptable to us. We need a viable long-term answer, not a short-term and shortsighted political alibi.

There is nothing that OPEC fears more than America committing to the twin tracks of increased domestic production and reduced consumption. Were we to do so, we would see OPEC doing everything in their power to drive down world oil prices to make us abandon our policies and, once again, hamstring ourselves and make us reliant upon them for our oil.

I want to offer an important perspective. Even if we cannot accept that America increasing production and decreasing consumption would affect global oil prices, remember, price is not the only reason to advance such a policy. Right now, the high price of oil works against America, and it works for every nation that deliberately produces its reserves. Production provides them with jobs, it provides them with revenue for their government, and it provides better trade balances and national security, but all at our country's expense.

We are the only country that has identified a huge resource base and then absolutely refused to produce it. So often we hear on this floor discussion about China eating our lunch in clean energy, about Japan and Germany outpacing us in wind and solar technology. But does anybody think if those countries had a Gulf of Mexico or an ANWR, they would not be drilling in those areas as we speak? Does anyone think those nations demagog nuclear power or refuse to permit coal plants? Their energy policies are on a better track than ours. They are not just looking at what is happening today; they are looking at tomorrow, at today--they have an energy policy that carries them out.

There is an article in the Wall Street Journal of yesterday by Nansen Saleri. He concludes his article with this statement:

The U.S. does not have an energy problem. It has an energy strategy problem.

Think about that. It is not lacking the resources; it is the strategy for how we develop our energy resources.

During his campaign, President Obama liked to quote Dr. Martin Luther King and talk about ``the fierce urgency of now.'' There are few issues more important or more fundamental to our Nation's long-term success than a viable energy policy. People are very correct when they say that parts of this will take time, and parts will take a longer period of time. But now is never more fiercely urgent than when we have such an important and long journey ahead of us. If we are ever going to take control of our energy future, now is the time to come together and support policies that promote abundant, affordable, clean, diverse, and domestic energy. It is critically important to us.

I look forward to these conversations that we will continue on the Senate floor as we talk about ways we not only work to reduce our budget, ways we not only work to create jobs in this country, but ways that we truly build a strategic energy policy for the long-term for this country.

With that, I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

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