National Defense Authorization Act For Fiscal Year 2014 -- Continued

Floor Speech

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I thank the Senator from Oklahoma.

This final couple of days that we are going to be in session are very important because they are the days preceding the expiration of the wind energy tax break. It expires on December 31. There are energy efficiency tax breaks that expire on December 31.

This is unfortunate, because these are industries that are rapidly growing. But let's take note here. If you are the oil industry or other older fossil fuel industries, your tax breaks are not expiring on December 31. For the wind industry, for the renewable energy industry, we have to come back out here every year and try to get those tax breaks renewed. Each year as we reach this December 31 date, we talk about a Congress adjourning without completing it, sending total corporate unpredictability out into the marketplace, knowing that we need to have a robust, competitive marketplace.

Honestly, Adam Smith is spinning in his grave as he watches a Senate adjourn without continuing the tax breaks for wind, as the tax breaks for all of its competitive industries continue on year after year. They are permanent tax breaks. Actually, Adam Smith is spinning in his grave so rapidly that he would qualify for a permanent tax break, because he would be generating so much energy, wondering how can you have such inconsistency? How can you have one source of energy have to come in almost like a mendicant each year begging, and then having the year expire, after having added 13,000 megawatts of new electricity to the grid last year, knowing that the entire nuclear industry only added 100,000 in 60 years?

Here we are again. Those tax breaks are going to expire. We are going to leave here. We could not get unanimous consent in order to take them up here today to extend those tax breaks. Once again, the energy sources of the future, the innovative new energy sources, pay the price. They are not allowed to be given permanent status or, as we leave here, any status at all as of the end of this year.

Young people in our country, the green energy generation, looked and they asked: Well, why can't we have our era's energy technologies given permanent tax breaks or at least year to year before you go home? Why can't you have that kind of a debate out there? Why is there a debate at all, to be honest with you, given the fact that there is $7 billion a year that is going to be given to the oil industry, a permanent tax break?

We are not looking for that for wind. We are looking at much smaller amounts of tax benefits. So from my perspective, I look at the warming planet, I look at the Chinese and others who are targeting wind sources. I was in China in 2009. We rode by a wind factory with wind turbines, hundreds of them. They were all, in a lot of ways, pointing right at the American economy, in the same way that those Cuban missiles were pointing at our country in 1962--pointing right at us, a threat to us. But in the 21st century, it is a threat to our economy because we are not investing in these new technologies in the way we continue to invest in the old.

The least it could be and should be is a level playing field. Let's see who wins. Let's let capitalism work. Let's have this true Darwinian paranoia-inducing capitalism that allows for winners to be selected based upon the same kind of tax breaks for everyone. If that is the case, I think everyone would be happy. But that is not the way it is going to be this year. That is not the way it is most years.

Permanent tax breaks for the older technologies, and the kind of halting, questioning, capitalism-killing, corporate-questioning tax breaks for the nascent but growing and vibrant new technologies that the Chinese and the Germans and the Danes and others see as their job-creating sectors in their economy.

I thank the Senator from Oklahoma for this opportunity.

I yield the floor.

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