Energy Savings and Industrial Competitiveness Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. President, I also wish to respond to my colleague from Louisiana because I appreciate his interest in addressing some of the concerns on health care that have come up. I would certainly like the opportunity to correct a lot of the misinformation that is out there. But, again, I think there are other opportunities to do that. We should not be doing that on an energy bill that has such bipartisan support.

The Senator is talking about wanting to get a vote on his legislation. Senator Portman and I have been waiting for 3 years to get a vote on this legislation. For something that has such overwhelming support, I hope my friend from Louisiana is going to be flexible and think about how he can address the concerns he has and yet let the debate on this bill go forward.

We have, as Senator Wyden said, 16 bipartisan amendments that have already been vetted by both sides on the committee, that are ready to go, that I think we could probably get a voice vote on, on all of those, because we have so much support on both sides.

This is legislation on which we have had a number of other amendments filed that we should debate, around energy, because we have not debated energy on the floor of the Senate since 2007. We have more than 260 groups and businesses that have endorsed this legislation. Everybody from Eastern Mountain Sports, which is a great New Hampshire business, to large companies such as General Electric and Raytheon, to small businesses such as--in New Hampshire we have a company called Warner Power, which makes the first innovation in transformers in over 100 years; they are supporting it.

One of the other businesses I thought was particularly interesting is Eileen Fisher, which makes women's clothes. They support the legislation. As everybody knows, anybody who is doing manufacturing in this country is using a lot of energy and they are looking for any way possible to reduce their energy use because they want to be competitive.

We have a number of manufacturing companies on this list that are interested in how they can reduce their energy use. Then we have a whole number of organizations, everything from the Christian Coalition to the Union for Reform Judaism. We have environmental groups such as the League of Conservation Voters and the Sierra Club. We have trade associations such as the American Chemistry Council. When is the last bill we have seen that has both the Sierra Club and the American Chemistry Council supporting the same legislation?

We have a whole list of industry groups that understand that energy efficiency is something they can support because it is something that is going to allow them to add jobs in their businesses. We have the League of Women Voters, the National Restaurant Association, the Oil Heat Council of New Hampshire--a small group that is concerned about making sure people in New Hampshire can heat their homes at a reasonable cost.

The North Carolina Chamber of Commerce, the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy--this is legislation that has support all over the country. The U.S. Council of Mayors as well as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, they are supporting it because they understand first how important energy is for the future of this country. If we are going to stay competitive, we have to be able to meet the energy demands that businesses have, that people who are trying to heat their homes and pay their electric bills have, that we have as a country, as the U.S. government, where we are the biggest user of energy in the country and part of our legislation deals with government's use of energy and tries to reduce that.

They understand it is in their interest to try to reduce their energy use. We are having a debate about how focused we are going to be on fossil fuels, whether we are going to put more support in for alternative sources of energy. But energy efficiency benefits everybody, regardless of whether one supports fossil fuels or new sources of energy. That is why this legislation makes so much sense.

We have heard just in the last couple weeks from the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy that if we can pass this legislation, by 2025 it will support the creation of 136,000 jobs. How many pieces of legislation have we seen on the floor of the Senate that for the costs we are talking about in this bill--no new authorization--that we can support the creation of 136,000 jobs?

Last year when they looked at the bill, they said it would also be the equivalent of taking 5 million cars off the road, saving consumers $4 billion. This is a win-win-win. At a time when we know our future energy opportunities are limited, to some extent, by what is happening in the Middle East, what is happening with foreign oil, this is something that makes sense. For us to be held up because there are people in the Chamber who want to debate health care or who want to debate what the EPA is doing or who want to debate any other myriad of issues--I understand. I am willing to have those debates. I am willing to take those votes. But right now we should be limiting our debate to energy because that is the legislation on the floor before us.

I urge that we try to address the concerns that people have but we do it in a way that will allow us to move forward on this Energy bill. I think it is in the best interests of the country. As Senator Wyden said so eloquently: People in this country want us to work together. They want us to work together to address the issues we are facing in America. Senator Portman and I have tried to do that. We have spent 3 years trying to do that. We want to move forward. We want to work together to address this issue. I certainly want to have the debate with my colleague from Louisiana about health care. But I don't want to have it right now because we cannot move forward on this legislation as long as that, his amendment, is holding this up.

I hope we can work out some way to do that in a way that we can both find agreeable and that allows us a path forward to address energy because, clearly, we have to come up with a comprehensive energy strategy for this country. I think energy efficiency is the first step, and that is what this legislation would do.

I yield the floor.

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Mr. President, I appreciate the consent agreements are usually worked out by the leadership of both the majority and the minority. I know Senator Vitter understands that too. Would the Senator from Louisiana be willing to withdraw his objection to moving forward to amendments on the bill if he and I went--in good faith--to the majority and minority leaders to see if we can get some agreement on when we can address Senator Vitter's issue?

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Would the Senator from Louisiana not agree there are other bills that will be coming to the Senate in the next couple of weeks, and so if we cannot come to an agreement, there will be another opportunity before the deadline when the Senator could also have this debate he is looking for?

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Mr. President, before the Senator from New Mexico leaves, I just want to also commend him for his work. I have not seen the amendment he would like to offer. Like him, I am so disappointed he is not able to offer it right now, that it is being held up on an unrelated issue. But as the Senator pointed out, there is a clear nexus between water and energy use.

I remember visiting the wastewater treatment plant in North Conway, NH, and being told that 4 percent of our energy use in the country is with wastewater treatment. I have seen that at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, where they do such great work on Los Angeles class and Virginia class submarines. As they have cut back their energy use, they have also been able to cut back their use of water in a way that has provided for tens of thousands of gallons in savings in water, as well as tremendous savings in energy use. So this is a connection we all ought to be making as we look at our energy use in the future.

I truly appreciate the Senator working on this amendment, his interest in offering it, and I certainly hope we are going to get to the point where we can actually debate the amendments people are bringing to the floor because we have so much bipartisan support for not only the bill but for so many amendments.

I appreciate my colleague from Ohio, Senator Portman, his partnership in working on this legislation. This is a win-win-win, and we need to move this forward.

Thank you.

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Madam President, I thank Chairman Wyden for making the clarification that we are here on the floor not to talk about health care or other unrelated issues, but we are here to talk about energy.

As the Senator pointed out yesterday, as Senator Murkowski, Senator Portman, and I have pointed out, this is the first energy bill to come to the floor since 2007. On an issue that is so critical to the future of our country, it is nice to finally be having a debate. It is nice to finally be able to listen to people on both sides of the aisle talking about why energy is so important, and talking about their amendments and the difference those amendments will make for people across this country.

We were interrupted by health care after Senator Wyden and Senator Sanders talked about the amendment on residential energy efficiency, but I wanted to applaud both for that effort. Senator Sanders talked about the challenges faced by people in his home State of Vermont. My neighboring State of New Hampshire, the Presiding Officer's State of Massachusetts, the State of Oregon are all States that are cold weather States. In New Hampshire we have an inordinate number of people who heat with home heating oil which is very expensive, and we have a lot of old buildings. Because New Hampshire is one of the first States in the original Thirteen Colonies, we have a lot of buildings in the State that are old that need to be upgraded to be more energy efficient so people can afford their heating bills. This amendment that Senators would like to introduce--if we can ever get on the bill and get to some of these bipartisan amendments--would help address the challenges that people in the Northeast, the upper West, and the upper Midwest all face with the high costs of heating their homes in the wintertime.

I would also point out that it is not just important to us in the North to have more energy-efficient homes, even though in the northeast we have more older homes. In the South it is equally important because air conditioning is very expensive as well. So people who can have their homes be more efficient when they are trying to cool them in the summer also benefit.

This is an amendment that is a win-win. As Senator Wyden pointed out for the last 1 1/2 days, this legislation is a win-win for everybody. It is a win on job creation, it is a win on helping to prevent pollution in our environment, it is a win on reducing the threat from dependence on foreign oil. So the connection to national security is there. And it is a win in terms of saving consumers the cost of energy.

In New Hampshire we have the sixth highest energy costs in the country, so we need to be able to save on energy costs because it is good for our businesses, it is good for our residents to not have to pay those high costs. I hope we can find some way to move forward on this bill and move forward on these bipartisan amendments, because this is a place where we can come to some agreement, we can work together, and we can get this done. The people of this country are expecting us to do that.

I thank Senator Wyden for his leadership, and Senator Murkowski. Hopefully we are going to stay here, we will hopefully keep having people come to the floor to talk about their amendments and what we can do, once we can get on this bill, to make a difference.

The bottom line here is that in addition to all the other good things it would do with the amendments that are being offered with the underlying bill, this will help create jobs, and it will do it in a way that doesn't cost a lot of money in terms of subsidizing those jobs. It is the private sector working in conjunction with public policy in a way that will encourage that job creation.

I continue to be hopeful we can come to some agreement and move this legislation in a way that I know the people of this country are expecting.

Madam President, I yield the floor.

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