Department of Defense, Military Construction and Veterans Affairs, and Full-Year Continuing Appropriations Act, 2013 - Resumed

Floor Speech

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Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, I chair the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and in that capacity, I want to take a couple of minutes to speak against the Toomey amendment. That is amendment No. 115 that would slash, in effect, the biofuels program at the Department of Defense.

Of course, we are going to hear that this will save money, that with the sequester and a very tough set of financial circumstances, which the Presiding Officer knows all too well, the argument will be we cannot afford to have this biofuels program in the Department of Defense.

My argument would be, we cannot afford not to have this program, and I am going to take a couple minutes to try to describe why that is the case.

Right now, the Department of Defense is the single largest user of energy in our country, with annual fuel expenditures in excess of $16 billion. So you have this massive need for energy at the Pentagon--really a thirst for energy at the Pentagon--and fluctuations in global energy prices have, in effect, enormous effects on defense spending. Every $10 increase in a barrel of oil costs the American military annually an extra $1.3 billion.

For some time there has been a recognition among military experts--and some are in the Presiding Officer's home State of Massachusetts, where they have spent a lot of time looking at these issues--there has been a recognition that the military, particularly the Pentagon, is exactly the place where we ought to be looking for fresh innovative approaches in order to cut energy use and find alternative sources.

For the life of me, I cannot figure out how somehow this effort by the Pentagon--let me repeat: by our country's military--has somehow been conflated into some kind of green plot, some kind of plot by those who are obsessed with green energy and are simply interested in promoting programs to satisfy their ideological interests.

I can tell you the reason this is being pursued at the Pentagon is not because this is somehow some sort of green plot, some sort of subversive green plot. This is being pursued at the Pentagon because they have made the judgment that these kinds of alternative fuels and supporting them is a vital national security matter. This is not about some kind of ideological green agenda. This is about national security. Their judgment is we need exactly this kind of effort.

DOD contracts are particularly crucial because they help promote research and development efforts. What we have seen repeatedly is a lot of the most exciting alternative fuels. The biofuels have enormous potential. The challenge is to keep driving down the costs and do it in a cost-effective kind of way. That is exactly what goes on now at the Department of Defense as relates to biofuels. It is exactly what would be undermined if the Toomey amendment, amendment No. 115, was passed and signed into law.

The last point I would make is that Bloomberg, which has a new energy finance unit, a special unit that looks at these issues, their analysts predict that some aviation biofuels are going to be cost competitive with standard jet fuel in just a few years. That will happen if we do not undermine current development rates in this area of biofuels at the Department of Defense.

That is why, colleagues, I feel so strongly about opposing the Toomey amendment on biofuels at the Pentagon. I hope my colleagues will agree.

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

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