Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2015
Floor Speech
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Ms. KAPTUR. Madam Chair, I would just like to thank the gentleman for offering his amendment.
Even though it is subject to a point of order, I think you are drawing attention to the importance of the U.S. maritime industry, and this burgeoning opportunity is extraordinarily important.
I just wanted to commend the gentleman for that, and I know how hard you fight for our ports and for our maritime community. Let's find a way to do this somehow.
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Ms. KAPTUR. Madam Chair, I thank the chairman of the full committee for yielding and rise to oppose the gentleman's amendment.
I find it extremely shortsighted because in this particular program we have so many successes. We have built 15 advanced vehicle manufacturing facilities, one of the largest wind farms in the world; constructed the first nuclear power plant in the country in more than 3 decades, the largest photovoltaic generation facility of its kind, the largest concentrated solar power plant in the world.
I can tell you this isn't just--this is new technology. This is like NASA at the beginning, where we have got private sector money involved but also public sector money.
There will be some errors made, that is true. And let me tell you, the Chinese undercut the market. I have seen it happen. I am from the solar valley of Ohio, and I saw what the Chinese did.
We still have First Solar, the best company in the country in terms of volume and so forth, and that was largely privately funded; but at the beginning it had some photovoltaic research dollars that came from the Department.
So we are talking about inventing the future. This isn't quite the same as going out for a car loan, because when you have predators like China come and literally buy your technology from under you in your startup company, it is a very slippery playing field.
I would say they have done a commendable job in embracing the future. I think the gentleman's amendment really is not constructive.
I thank the gentleman for yielding me the time. I oppose the amendment and ask my colleagues to do the same.
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Ms. KAPTUR. Madam Chairman, I rise to oppose the gentleman's amendment.
Number one, it is nongermane to our bill. In fact, the amendment is actually unnecessary because there are no funds related to this purpose in our bill at all. Perhaps the gentleman could present the amendment to another bill, but literally, it is extraneous. It has no relationship to the bill before us here in the House, and I would ask my colleagues to oppose it.
Madam Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.
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Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Chairman and Members, this amendment would prohibit funding for what is called the sustainable cities program, which is aimed at deploying U.S. technical expertise to urban energy planning for cities in places like India and China. So the gentleman and I look at this in a little bit of a different way.
Mr. Chairman, this effort is aimed at developing markets for U.S. products in places that are growing, and I think census figures show that India and China are absolutely growing, and their economies are growing.
In fact, in places like China, it is growing so fast that they are actually often stealing our technology and buying our companies out from underneath us, and we lose market edge.
Mr. Chairman, this particular program encompasses a variety of technical assistance activities to actually prime those markets for our clean technologies in places where there is population increase and a need for product and would help potentially to support the export of American clean energy technologies. That means jobs here at home; it means exports out of the United States, rather than imports in here in two major economies.
Working closely with U.S. companies, the Department of Commerce and other governments will focus on product testing and developing minimum standards, certifying that we can actually achieve the installation of these clean energy products. Here at home, obviously, we help our clean energy sector to develop.
Specific examples already underway include facilitating a memorandum of understanding that could lead to the first commercial-scale deployment of concentrated solar power deployment in China--a deal that could be valued at $350 million--with manufacturing of the key intellectual property here in the United States.
Another involves gaining access to the wind energy market in China--which is a growing market--coordination and exchanges between our department and private sector, our U.S. and Chinese cities, has led to increasing sales of U.S. clean energy goods in China already.
It is no secret that China has some challenges--and India has challenges--dealing with the enormity of their populations and the stress on their energy infrastructure.
We need to boost innovation here at home. This is one very modest program, but one, I think, that deserves attention. The last time I looked, we, as a country, had a gigantic trade deficit with China. That means more goods coming in here than our goods going out.
Mr. Chairman, this is one small step forward to try to penetrate those markets using some of the higher tech technologies that we have in the energy field, so I oppose the gentleman's amendment. I think he might look at the program in a different way than I do.
Mr. Chairman, I urge my colleagues to oppose it, as well, and I yield back the balance of my time.
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Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to the amendment.
I think the gentleman's amendment, including some vagueness of his language, will likely have many unintended consequences. For example, one of the projects, the Enbridge corporation, which constructed the Montana-Alberta power line, has already repaid our government $161 million of its borrowed authority--its loan--decades ahead of schedule, showing that transmission projects, when vetted properly, are sound investments.
Essentially, his proposal would repeal the Western Area Power Administration's borrowing authority for the construction of transmission lines that would bring renewable energy to market.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act provided $3.25 billion in borrowing authority for WAPA. This authority allowed for the construction of new transmission lines to deliver power from renewable energy sources.
By repealing their authority, it is just another example of, unfortunately, the Republican Party's anti-renewable energy strategy.
The borrowing authority has already led to the financing of two much-needed transmission lines out West--not even in my own part of the country--the one that I mentioned, the Montana-Alberta transmission line, which brings wind power to markets in our country, and the Palo Verde Electrical District 5 in Arizona. The Tohono O'odham Nation is already looking to utilize the PV-ED5 line to bring solar power generated on to their reservation.
Mr. Chairman, if adopted, the amendment would have the following impacts: for the Palo Verde project, which is customer driven, it is 92 percent complete, and it could be brought to a halt.
It supports mostly rural customers and Native American tribes and is a model of public-private partnership for which this program was created.
It will also allow those customers--and potentially others--to add renewable energy to the grid, while strengthening the transmission system in an area which is seeking growth and actually has more
demand.
If that project is totally completed, something that is jeopardized by this amendment, the benefits of the project include providing customer access to the Palo Verde trading hub and also providing 300 megawatts of unconstrained transfer capability from ED5 to Palo Verde, to support and enhance the viability of renewable resources in development in southern Arizona.
Jobs and transmission investment capability would be negatively impacted, and it could impact how--on behalf of the ED5 project--how it reimburses staff for work in support of the project.
Now, I mentioned that there are projects already underway that this amendment would bring to a halt. What sense does that make? I mean, we have already got issues in our country.
We need jobs in this country. We need affordable energy in this country. We need diversified energy in this country. I really don't understand why the gentleman is offering this amendment, but I can tell you the attorneys who looked at this language continue to find there will be additional impacts due to the vagueness of the language you have proposed.
I would guess your amendment will likely have many other unintended consequences, such as impacts on the preference power customers.
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Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to the gentleman's amendment. It flies in the face of 97 percent of the world's scientists who agree that climate-warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activities and could impose significant human and economic costs on societies, including ours.
This amendment requires the Department of Energy to assume that carbon pollution isn't harmful and that climate change won't cost a thing. That is nothing but fantasy.
The Republicans, in general, don't seem to trust the scientists, and I would hope that they would listen to the economists and business leaders ringing alarm bells about the potential costs of unmitigated climate change.
Standard & Poor's rating services recently released a report warning that climate change will put downward pressure on the sovereign credit ratings of countries around the world. They wrote:
Climate change is likely to be one of the global megatrends impacting sovereign creditworthiness, in most cases, negatively.
For example, Standard & Poor's concludes that:
Extreme weather events, especially floods, can be expected to increasingly take a toll on a country's infrastructure and, thus, productivity.
Standard & Poor's also warned that fiscal performance will decline as government budgets come under increased stress from climate-induced emergency support and infrastructure reconstruction costs. We have had a little bit of that in our country already.
Last month, three former Secretaries of Treasury released a report on the economic costs of inaction on climate change. Henry M. Paulson, Treasury Secretary under President George Bush said:
Our economy is vulnerable to an overwhelming number of risks from climate change.
The report identifies numerous economic risks, including large-scale losses of coastal property and infrastructure, extreme heat across the Nation that threatens labor productivity, human health and energy systems, and shifting agricultural patterns and crop yields.
Secretary Paulson wrote that:
These risks include the potential for significant Federal budget liabilities, since many businesses and property owners turn to the Federal Government as the insurer of last resort.
The economic impacts of climate change will be felt globally, particularly by the poorest countries. Last year, the World Economic Forum released its annual global risks report, which was based on a survey of 1,000 experts from industry, government, academia, and nonprofits around the world on the global risks most likely to manifest over the next 10 years and those that could have the greatest impacts.
The report found that rising greenhouse gas emissions posed one of the biggest global risks in the coming decade and that failure to adapt to climate change could have a tremendous socioeconomic impact across the globe.
This is not just a looming threat. We are suffering, in our country, the cost of climate change today--the skyrocketing costs of fighting wildfires, for example; the mounting costs to farmers of losing their crops and their livestock to more frequent and severe droughts; the enormous costs of rebuilding infrastructure swept away by more intense storms or threatened by steadily rising seas. Ask the people in Louisiana or New Jersey or New York.
This amendment ignores everything that is already happening and all of the warnings that it is going to get a lot worse. This amendment denies economic reality and decrees that climate change imposes no costs at all. Of course, ignoring the costs won't make them go away.
In fact, all evidence shows that the longer we wait, the more we will allow the risks to compound and accumulate, the more costly it will be to solve the problem in the end. I urge my colleagues to oppose this amendment.
I yield back the balance of my time.
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Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Chair, I thank the gentleman for yielding and would merely echo his comments and say that Mrs. Blackburn's amendment is well-intentioned.
I think we have already met the goal in our subcommittee. We are $50 million--million--below last year. It is important to keep your eye on the context. The context is, in the last 10 years--well, a little more than that. Since 2003, our country has spent $2.3 trillion on paying for imported petroleum--$2.3 trillion.
When you look at the budget deficit, ask yourself why this country has lost economic muscle inside our borders. Our meager $34 billion tries to compensate for that $2.3 trillion of loss. With oil at $100 a barrel now, we could lose, probably in the next 20 years, close to $10 trillion of economic activity related to the import of very expensive petroleum.
So what we try to do is to fund critical projects in this bill to help us crawl our way back to energy independence in this country, all the while cutting all our accounts. I think you can't cut the future off. You have to recognize the context in which you are operating.
So I think you are well-intentioned, but I think you are misfocused and I think you are missing the bigger--excuse the analogy--elephant in the room here, which is that we are losing wealth and losing strength economically because of these incredible imports that have just catapulted over the years.
In 1998, we began importing over half of what we consumed in petroleum. It is simply unsustainable. We have to reinvent our way forward in order to grow this economy at home and create the kind of robust middle class jobs and middle class incomes that the American people are asking us for.
I thank the chairman for yielding to me.
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Ms. KAPTUR. I thank the chairman for yielding, and I commend Representative Kelly for offering this important effort in highlighting the importance of the Great Lakes.
I feel that you may be the last speaker this evening--I don't know--but we would say ``last, but not least,'' especially for those of us from the Great Lakes, and we love the attention because we most often don't get it.
We had conversations today about oceans and about other parts of the country, and it is just so great to have someone with your commitment to the Great Lakes.
Mr. Chairman, we know it is the largest body of freshwater on the face of the Earth and that commerce moving through the seaways is the shortest distance between the United States, Europe, and ports even on the western side of Africa, if you look at the way the globe actually works.
So to have this kind of work by yourself, by the chairman of our subcommittee--Mr. Simpson--by Candice Miller, by Congressman Visclosky, and by so many others who work on Great Lakes issues is wonderful and to have this team put together and to see that we have done a better job for our Great Lakes in this bill than in past bills.
By the way, I might say that the lake on which the communities I represent are situated, Lake Erie, is the most drawn upon of the lakes and the most fragile, and we share her with Canada, so it even gets a little more complex, as we move forward.
I just wanted to commend the gentleman, and I thank the chairman for giving me the time. I know the people who are listening from the Great Lakes region greatly appreciate the attention and what we do in this bill to make sure that those lakes are maintained.
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Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Chairman, I would like to rise in opposition to the gentleman's well-intentioned amendment, and it is obvious he pays attention to the math.
What is important about the math of our deficit is
that we haven't been growing fast enough to meet the needs of this country. We have a demand problem among vast numbers of the American people who aren't consuming as fast as they used to because they have lost their jobs, they have lost their equity because of the housing crisis, and because, if they have gone back to work, they aren't earning as much as they used to earn. The middle class is shrinking, as you well know, and the ranks of the poor are growing. So we have a demand problem in this society.
The energy question, and the reason I am opposing your amendment is because our budget, our allocation is about $34 billion. If you look just at this year, we will have over $200 billion in imported energy that sucks the wealth out of this country and sends it somewhere else. The portion of our bill that deals with energy is not $34 billion, but maybe a third of that. So you have got maybe 10, 12 billion, $15 billion at the most in our bill that deals directly with energy versus over $200 billion in terms of energy imports. So we are way out of balance as a society.
The portion of the investment that we make here to invent a new energy future is moving us in the right direction but too slowly.
So do I feel we are going to meet the needs that we need to for the future? I fear our generation is failing the next, as hard as we try here. If I look at the progress we have made, in 1998, that was the first year where America imported over half its energy. The decade before that it had been about 40 percent. Before that, the last 30 years we have hemorrhaged in bringing all this stuff in. This year, about 40 percent of what we consume will be imported. So we have moved from 1998, importing 50 percent of what we used, to 40 percent.
I think President Obama has made a difference. Some of my colleagues may not agree with that. But with drilling, opening up drilling on lands across this country, we have begun to close the gap.
Drilling our way out of this is not a total solution. We need new energy technologies. This bill moves us in that direction.
Don't allow your amendment to stop us from increasing our ability to become energy independent again and create the kind of demand inside this economy that will create the jobs that we need for the future to heal our middle class and move people out the ranks of poverty. So you are well-intentioned, but I think you are out of focus in terms of where the real challenge lies.
Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.
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