Lamar Alexander

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. So the answer is no, to the Senator from New Mexico, and I think it is important to go back to when we first started talking about this matter. I think it might be useful to the people who are watching the Senate and wondering how we do things--maybe they have been watching C-SPAN and thinking: Well, these Senators sure know how to make a lot of fine speeches. And that is what we have been doing for the last 10 days, making speeches. But we haven't been doing anything more. But that isn't what we have wanted to do or what we do want to do now. What we want is a serious debate on legislation to lower gas prices that looks at ways to find more and use less. The Senator from New Mexico is exactly right. We understand high gasoline prices are the product of a law we learned in economics 101. I don't know how the Senator from New Mexico did in economics 101. I imagine pretty well because he is one of our most intelligent Senators. But economics 101 says the price of a commodity, such as oil--or it might be hay or wheat or anything else--is determined by the supply as well as the demand. So what we said in our Republican caucus was that we wanted a balanced approach; that we wanted to increase the supply-- ``find more''--and we wanted to reduce the demand--``use less.'' So if I may say just for a moment, we do talk a lot about finding more.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Because that has become the issue between the two sides, really. We want to do both, and many of them don't. They want to use less, and we want to use less. But it is hard getting many of our Democratic friends to agree that even in the next 30 or 40 years we will need to use significant amounts of new American energy if we want to keep our lights on and drive our cars and heat our houses and have good jobs. It is hard for them to agree with that. But let me be very precise about our using less. Our ``finding more'' idea was really offshore drilling and oil shale, and our ``using less'' was plug-in electric vehicles. T. Boone Pickens thinks he has a pretty good plan, and he has bought a lot of television time to advertise it, and it is pretty simple: natural gas and windmills. Ours is about as simple: offshore drilling, oil shale, and plug-in cars and trucks. But let's talk about the ``use less'' part. That will do more for us than the ``find more'' part will. That is the Republican proposal.

Mr. ALEXANDER. We import, I believe, Senator Domenici, about 12 or 13 million barrels of oil a day. We use about 20 million barrels a day, or a quarter of all the oil in the world. So if we could find a way to use less, as well as find more, we could affect the price. I had a visit just this afternoon from the utility manager in Austin, TX, and we talked about plug-in electric vehicles--our way of using less. What I am trying to do is make the point that there is not anybody over here on this side of the aisle who just wants to drill alone. We know we have to use less. Now, why do we say plug-in cars and trucks? When I first started talking about that, people thought I had been out in the sun too long. I was far from the first to talk about it. Senator Hatch has introduced legislation on this issue, and it has been supported by a number of Democratic Senators as well. The director of the Austin, TX, utility started talking about it with me earlier today, and here is what he says can happen. In Austin, TX, they have about 1 million cars and light trucks in his utility district. His judgment is that they can get up to about 10 percent of those cars--100,000--on electricity, where you just plug them in at night at home, within about 5 to 8 years without much trouble. He believes it is a reasonable goal in Austin, TX, to get half of those million cars and trucks on electricity in 10 to 15 years. Now, Senator Domenici, if we could help the United States take half of our 240 million cars and plug them in instead of filling them up with gas, we could cut our import of foreign oil by 4 million barrels a day and stop sending money overseas. And that is our way of using less. So we want to use less. We have other ways to do that as well. The problem is, we can't persuade our friends on the other side of the aisle to find more because when we say offshore drilling, they say: No, we can't. If we say oil shale, they say: No, we can't. Even if we say nuclear power for plugging in our cars and trucks with clean energy, they say: Sorry, not a proponent of that. So the answer to your question is, no, we are not just for more drilling--we are all for the demand side and using less. We know that makes a difference. We would just like to have a debate and a bill about both, and we are for both. Unfortunately, our friends on the other side are not. It seems to me they are kind of repealing the supply half of the law of supply and demand.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Then there is the other half of the cars and trucks that are presumably still running on gas.

Mr. ALEXANDER. The Senator from New Mexico is right, and you are not the only one who thinks that. I picked up the New York Times a couple of days ago, and in their editorial--and they do not always agree with the Republican side of the aisle, I will have to concede--but they basically said the speculation bill is not a solution to high gas prices. Warren Buffett, who is a pretty good observer of the American economy, has said it is not speculation, it is supply and demand. I know for people who may be watching the Senate, they may ask: What are you hung about up about in the Senate? Why don't you work across party lines and come up with some good ideas about supply and some good ideas about demand and put them in a piece of legislation and vote on it and go home and you will have taken a big step in the right direction? We have said that is what we want to do: oil shale, offshore drilling, and plug-in cars. The problem is, we haven't been able to do that because the Democratic leader, for some reason, is reluctant to do the supply part of supply and demand.

Mr. ALEXANDER. What if President Kennedy said we can't go to the Moon because it might take 10 years or Benjamin Franklin said we can't have a republic because it might take 50 years? And we also said--you just said it: From the day we pass legislation that includes oil shale, offshore drilling, plug-in cars and trucks--from the day we do that, then the buyers and sellers of oil say: It looks as if there is going to be a larger supply and less demand, and maybe we will pay a little less for oil.

Mr. ALEXANDER. I would say to the Senator from New Mexico, that is 1 million barrels a day using less. What we are saying, with plug-in cars and trucks, we can cut out another 4 million barrels a day over a few years. But if we use offshore drilling and oil shale, we can add 3 million. So we can reduce by one-third our imported oil and change the price of gasoline. And I would say to the Senator from New Mexico that some people say: Well, changing the price is way off in the future. I thought that today's price is based upon the expected supply.

Mr. ALEXANDER. And the expected demand. From the day the world thought that we might increase that by a few million barrels a day, or reduce that by a few million barrels a day, the prices started going down. Am I wrong about that?

Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, how much time do we have remaining?

Mr. ALEXANDER. It is the only source of large, dependable amounts of energy with no carbon, no sulphur, no mercury, no nitrogen. It is our cleanest. And as the price of coal goes up and natural gas goes up, it is the least expensive of our reliable forms of energy.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Not only do I agree with the Senator from Texas, but so does Jason from Friendsville, TN, and Gina from Elizabethton and William from Riceville and Tina from Nashville. Tennesseans want us focused on $4 gasoline. I think the Senator is being generous when he says our position is that the Senate should stay on $4 gasoline until we are finished. Our position is we wish to get on it. We have been talking about it. We have a right to talk, but until the majority leader creates an environment so we can begin to offer amendments we can then vote on and come to a result on, we cannot act as a Senate. To his credit, yesterday he made such a proposal. I understand he is talking about it with the Republican leader. But we could have been doing this ever since a week ago Friday. I say to the Senator from Texas, sometimes I hear people say, well, it won't do much good to drill offshore. The debate will probably be between some senators who will say let's do a little more drilling where we already allow ourselves to drill, in the 15 percent, and those of us who will say let's give States the option to drill 50 miles offshore in the 85 percent of the Outer Continental Shelf, where we can't drill today. By most conservative estimates, that will create over time about a million barrels of oil a day. Some say that is not very much in the whole world, but I think of it this way: Every million barrels of oil we produce here at $130 a barrel is 1 million times $130 we are not sending over there to somebody else. If the third largest producer, the United States, adds 1 million barrels a day to its supply, that is a significant addition on the supply side. So it seems to me that our contribution, in terms of offshore drilling, both would reduce our dependence upon foreign oil, keeping money in this country, and make a contribution to the supply side, which helps bring down the price in the world.

Mr. ALEXANDER. I think the Senator is exactly right. In the newspapers today and yesterday was the story of how in India they are introducing a new car which will be sold for $2,500. Now, there are more than a billion people in India. They have a middle class that is bigger than the whole population of the United States of America. When suddenly tens of millions of people in India begin to drive cars that are powered by gasoline, what happens to the demand for oil in that country? The demand goes up, and if the supply doesn't go up, too, the price goes up. We have the same thing in China. There is a story in the Washington Post today, which is part of a series, about how the Chinese, actually, for status purposes, like driving Hummers. They like big cars. Here we Americans are going to small cars and the Chinese are going to big cars and there are a lot of them as well. We know the demand for oil and gasoline is going up around the world, and we are in the world market. So for the foreseeable future, as we move to a different kind of economy--a different kind of energy picture--we are going to need at least as much oil as we have today. I say to the Senator, I think the question is: Are we going to be sending $600 billion or $700 billion overseas to buy it, or are we going to be paying ourselves to use it during the next 10, 20, 30 years while we are moving to a different type of energy environment?

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, as I mentioned earlier, the Senate could have, since the week before last, been bringing up amendments from the Democratic side and the Republican side with proposals for dealing with $4 gasoline. Hopefully, the majority leader and the Republican leader are coming to a conclusion today which will permit us to start doing that. We don't expect every amendment we offer to be adopted, but we do represent millions of people who want us to try to solve the problem. We have before this Senate a very specific proposal for bringing down the price of gasoline. It is based upon the law of supply and demand: finding more and using less. Now, on this side of the aisle, we usually instinctively talk about finding more; that is, offshore drilling and oil shale, but it is also important to emphasize that part of our plan is using less. The United States of America uses 25 percent of all the oil in the world. The fastest way for us to bring down the price of $4 gasoline, if it depends upon finding more--supply--and using less--demand--is to use less. What is the most promising way to reduce, by a large amount, the amount of oil we use? Give Big Oil some competition. We believe it is plug-in electric cars and trucks. There are a great many Democrats who believe the same thing. That is part of our plan. That is what we would like to have had on this floor for the last 10 days to discuss. The bottom line is this: major auto companies--Ford, General Motors, Nissan, Toyota--have told us that in 2010, they will begin selling to us cars and trucks that can be plugged into our wall sockets at home and filled for 60 cents or so instead of filled with gasoline for $80 or so. Now, most of these cars and trucks will be hybrids; in other words, they will have a gasoline engine and they will have an electric engine. Because there are new, more powerful batteries, these cars will be able to go, in effect, about 100 miles per gallon. These are not being produced by the Government; these are being produced by the car people, so they are coming. In addition to that, we have plenty of electricity. We see a lot on television from Mr. Boone Pickens, who has a plan, and it would require building a lot of new, large wind turbines for electricity, which might be a good plan. Our plan doesn't require building anything for electricity because we already have it. About half our electricity at night is idle. We are not using it for anything. We are asleep. Our lights are off. Computers are down. We are not using a lot of our electricity, so we can plug in our cars at night--the electricity would be cheap--run our cars on electricity instead of oil, and here would be the result: We would be trading, car by car, foreign oil for unused electric capacity. Ninety-eight percent of our transportation is oil. Two percent of our electricity is oil. Half our electricity at night is not being used. So we could begin, year by year, gradually converting cars and trucks to electricity, instead of gasoline made from oil. If we converted the whole fleet of cars and light trucks, that would take many years and probably we would never convert them all, but if we did, we would get rid of 10 million of the 13 million barrels of imported oil we have today. Or, if we converted half the fleet--which is a realistic assumption over a number of years--we would reduce by 40 percent our imported oil and cut by 25 percent our total oil consumption. So plug-in cars, which the car companies are making and which we would like to create the environment to support, are coming, and we have the electricity. In other words, the cars are coming, we have the electricity; all we need is the cord, and that is the most promising way to reduce oil. I see the Senator from Texas is here. The use less part is something that both sides of the aisle probably can agree on, although I don't know why we haven't been fashioning a program over the last 10 days to do that. We could have been debating whether to have tax credits, whether to have advanced battery research, but we haven't. Where we get stuck is over whether we need more supply. Our formula is pretty simple: Offshore drilling, oil shale, and plug- in cars and trucks. I say to the Senator from Texas, it seems that whenever we get to the question of needing more American energy, that is where we have a difference of opinion with the other side of the aisle.

Mr. ALEXANDER. If supply and demand is the major way to deal with speculation, I believe the Republican legislation, the Gas Price Reduction Act, has in it a couple of legislative suggestions for how we might appropriately deal with speculation, without interfering with supply and demand. The Senator from Texas helped to author that piece of legislation.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, $4 gasoline is the subject before the Senate. It has been the subject before the Senate since the week before last. I am very encouraged that yesterday the majority leader indicated we might be able to move from talking to acting; in other words, to begin to offer amendments, debate on those amendments, and come to a result which would help lower gasoline prices. Each week, for the last several weeks, I have been reading to the Senate e-mails and letters I have received from Tennesseans who have been hurt by the high price of gasoline. For example, Jason from Friendsville, TN, which is a Quaker town near where I live, is a firefighter with the Blount County Fire Department. He says that currently five of their stations have only one person in them. They rely on volunteers for the rest of their support, but since gasoline is so high, response from volunteers has been very small, and they have to allow other jurisdictions to respond. He is not sure how he is going to be able to keep driving across town to help other people when he can barely help himself. Gina from Elizabethton is a single mother who is spending about $65 each week to drive to and from work. She can barely afford groceries because everything is so expensive. She says they have been living on noodles to get by. She is very concerned that Congress and the President are doing a lot of talking but not doing anything about the problem, and she says, ``This country is in such a mess.'' William of Riceville is on disability and his wife is unable to work due to health problems. Rising gas prices have made them choose between driving to the doctor or paying for their medicine. Tina from Nashville is a single mother struggling to support her daughter. They can't even afford to go out to the movies on the weekend, she says, because gas and food prices have risen so much. She says that right now she is spending about $200 each month on gas and prices keep going up, but her paycheck isn't going up at all. Judy from Joelton is a 61-year-old grandmother struggling to support her daughter and granddaughter who live with her. The gas to take her granddaughter to kindergarten is costing $115 each month, and they are struggling to keep her in school. Judy says she is scared for her family. She has never seen it this difficult to get by. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that following my remarks, these letters and e-mails from constituents in Tennessee be printed in the Record.

Mr. ALEXANDER. We should work across party lines to find more American energy, use less, and that would bring down prices. I thank the Senators from Arizona and Texas who yielded. Exhibit 1 To: Alexander, Senator (Alexander) Subject: Gas Prices Hello My Name is Jason from Friendsville, TN. I am a Firefighter with the Blount County Fire Department. If you dont know we only have 1 man at 5 of our stations we have 7 stations and the rest of the time we depend on volunteers to respond to our emergency and help us, and for the full timers that is a great chunk of our yearly income is running calls on our day off. Because of gas prices our response to some of the emergencies has been very small we have been calling on other departments for help and that ties up their resources should they have an emergency in their jurisdiction. I know they say supply and demand but it is almost like a monopoly they can charge whatever and we have to pay. Someone has to go help put the fire out how much profit do you need to make to live comfortably. I am not sure but just because you say oil is up is no reason for you to raise prices to keep your income the same while ours greatly decreases. I heard our president say we have to stop our dependency on oil and then ! he gets on a jet a jumbo jet with some guide planes and flies all over the place to accomplish nothing but say they have us over a barrel and it is our fault, and then gets on that same jet and flies home to Texas for a day or two to help relieve the stress. I am not saying he has done a horrible job I just think he is failing us greatly in this regard. The gas prices are killng a family of 5 who lives off of a fireman's income and a wife's who does medical billing I am not sure how long I can drive across town to help someone when I can't help myself. The emergency would have to be in my back yard if this keeps up.

Mr. ALEXANDER. I thank the Senator from Arizona. That is a fair characterization. Unless we include new American sources of energy, our electric prices are going up, gasoline prices are going up, and our jobs are going overseas. We need both--to find more and use less--and we need to do it now. The $4 gasoline price we are suffering from today is the first recognition that in addition to losing less we have to use more new American energy. For us, that includes offshore drilling, oil shale, as well as plug-in cars and trucks.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Yes.

Mr. ALEXANDER. The answer is yes. I appreciate the Senator's question very much. His figure of about 3 million barrels a day is realistic. He mentioned ANWR, the area in Alaska, which is actually the most readily available to us. The history on that is going back to 1980, when President Carter agreed that 17 million or so acres would be put in the Arctic Refuge and off limits to any sort of drilling, but that 1\1/2\ million could be drilled. When they were finished drilling, they would go into the refuge. So that has been in place for a long time. There is a pipeline there. Also, one well is there. So that oil would be coming quickly. There is infrastructure around many of the areas where we would do offshore drilling in the United States. But the answer is yes to the Senator's question. If the United States added 3 million barrels to our production, that would be more than a third of an increase in the production capacity of the third largest producer in the world. What if we heard that Saudi Arabia was going to increase production by a third? The effect on buyers and sellers of oil would be immediate. Martin Feldstein, a former chairman of President Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers, pointed out that today's price of oil depends upon the expected supply and demand of oil. So if we elect, as the U.S. Government, to say we are going to significantly increase our supply by a third, and we are going to reduce our use of oil by about a third, over time, from the day we announced that new energy policy, I believe it begins to stabilize and drive down the price of oil. I see the Senator from Arizona here. The issue often comes up about what role speculation has in all of this. Of course, that is what buyers and sellers of oil do. They are guessing: Will the price go up or go down? My view always has been that the way you deal with speculation is increase the supply or reduce the demand, because the expected future price, supply, and future demand affects today's price. The Senator from Arizona is an expert on taxation and financial matters. I wonder what his view is on the effect of speculation on today's oil prices.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, how much time do we have remaining?

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that my colleagues and I be allowed to speak in a colloquy in the 30 minutes we have been allocated.

Mr. ALEXANDER. I thank the Presiding Officer.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Why would it not be in order?

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask the Senator, what about the amendment by Senator Domenici to make it easier to build five or six nuclear plants a year, so we could have more clean energy; would that be in order?

Mr. ALEXANDER. I thank the Presiding Officer. Mr. President, I thank my colleagues.