Lamar Alexander

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Thank you, Mr. President.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I say to the Senator from Alabama, I was just thinking last night, we could have been taking these amendments up since last Friday. The Democratic leader brought up his speculation bill, which is a perfectly appropriate energy bill to bring to the floor, and instead of having the Senator from Delaware come make a speech about nuclear power, he could have offered an amendment about nuclear power. So we could have already spent 1 whole week dealing with issues on the supply side and demand side that would help lower the price of gasoline and other expenses.

Mr. ALEXANDER. I ask unanimous consent to enter into a colloquy with my Republican colleagues for the 18\1/2\ minutes.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. I see the majority leader, who I think has some remarks to make. We would be glad to suspend the colloquy if he would like to do that now. Capitol Police Officers John Gibson and Jacob Chestnut

Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, our hope today is to show the Senate that we are ready for full debate on finding more American energy and using less. That is what we should be doing. We have our proposals and would welcome debate and amendment on others. I now ask unanimous consent that the Senate consider the pending energy speculation measure in the following manner: that the bill be subject to energy-related amendments only; provided further, that the amendments be considered in an alternating manner between the two sides of the aisle; I further ask consent that the bill remain the pending business to the exclusion of all other business, other than privileged matters or items that are agreed to jointly by the two leaders; I further ask consent that the first seven amendments to be offered on this side of the aisle by the Republican leader or his designee be the following: Outer Continental Shelf exploration plus conservation; oil shale plus conservation; Alaska energy production plus conservation; the Gas Price Reduction Act, which includes plug-in electric cars and trucks; clean nuclear energy; coal-to-liquid fuel plus conservation; and an amendment involving LIHEAP.

Mr. ALEXANDER. If I may let the Senator know, we have about 3 minutes remaining and I need 1 of those to make a unanimous consent request.

Mr. ALEXANDER. I thank the Senator from Wyoming for his leadership. As he speaks, it reminds me of how much I wish, instead of our being in a parliamentary position where all we can do is talk, the Democratic leader would put us in a parliamentary position where we can act. I mean, we are prepared to act. We have offered an amendment that has a series of suggestions about how to find more American energy and use less. We may not be right in every case. But I believe the American people expect us, expect us to take up these issues and debate them and use them, whether it is plug-in electric cars, to use less oil, or, for example, I see the Senator from Alaska is here, whether it is using more of Alaskan energy. Every time we talk about more American energy, we must think about Alaska because so much energy is there. I wonder if the Senator would not agree, that there is not one way, but a whole series of ways we might change the law to improve our country's security, improve our supply of oil and gas by using Alaskan energy?

Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, I thank the majority leader for his comments. The Republican Leader would want me to say, he speaks for all of us in expressing the respect for the families of the two fallen men and our appreciation to the service of all the Capitol police officers today. We will have an opportunity, within a few minutes, to honor the fallen men. Mr. Hatch was saying, the Senator from Utah, we have impressive ways to use less oil. But we also have important ways to find more oil. One of those ways would be to use technology to turn coal into aviation fuel; a proven technology which is available, which in the past has had some challenges, but there are some new techniques. One of the Senators who is a leading advocate of coal-to-liquid technology understands it well, the Senator from Wyoming. I ask the Senator from Wyoming: Would it not be important for our national security to at least take steps toward turning coal into liquid aviation fuel?

Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to enter into a colloquy with my Republican colleagues for the remaining 30 minutes of our time.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, is there time remaining?

Mr. ALEXANDER. I thank the Senator from Utah for his leadership. Before I answer his question, I wish to emphasize our point here. What we are hoping to do is to show that, on the Republican side--and we believe there are many Democrats who feel this way too--we believe the solution to high gasoline prices is finding more American energy and using less. We are willing to do both. The Democratic leader is not willing to find more, for some reason. But on Senator Hatch's point, the most promising opportunity I believe for using less oil in the near term is the plug-in hybrid car and truck by a confluence of two things: One is all the car companies you talked about who are about to produce the car. I can add to that Nissan, at the dedication of its new North American headquarters in Nashville this week, announced it intends to market a plug-in pure electric vehicle that will go 100 miles with a charge in 2010 for fleets and for individuals in 2012. One may say: Well, where are you going to get all this electricity? We have plenty of electricity at night. In our region in Tennessee, the Tennessee Valley Authority has the equivalent of seven or eight nuclear powerplants of unused electricity at night, which could be used for plug-in cars and trucks. So I think there will be a great many people in Tennessee and in Utah and across this country who very quickly will be plugging in at night in a wall socket and filling up, so to speak, for a dollar or two, instead of filing up for $80 at the gasoline pump.

Mr. ALEXANDER. I thank the Senator from Georgia for his leadership on nuclear power. If we care about global warming in any respect, there is no way to deal with that in a generation without nuclear power, which is free of carbon, free of mercury, free of nitrogen, and free of sulfur. It is the best way we have to move ahead with that, and we should, in this debate, be thinking of ways to make it possible for this country to be building five or six new nuclear plants a year, producing more American energy. The Senator from Georgia spoke about a plug-in electric car. I know when I first started speaking of that, some of my friends in Tennessee thought I had been out in the Sun too long. But I found out the Senator from Utah was way ahead of me. In fact, an important part of the Republican proposal--and I know on the Democratic side there are many who agree with this--is to make it commonplace in America for us to reduce the amount of oil we use by using electric cars and trucks that plug in. As I move to the Senator from Utah, I hasten to add--I sat here last night listening to the Democratic leader characterize the Republican proposal as only drilling. I know the Democratic leader has a lot of responsibilities, and he may not have had time to read our proposal carefully. An important part of our proposal is to make it commonplace for Americans to drive plug-in cars and trucks, thereby reducing the amount of oil we use. That is the demand side of the equation. The difference between us and the Democratic leader is we understand that the law of supply and demand has both supply and demand. I wonder if the Senator from Utah does not believe that plug-in electric cars and trucks are an important way to reduce our use of oil?

Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, if you have been watching television lately, you have seen Boone Pickens. In the Democratic caucus, you have seen Boone Pickens. In the Republican caucus, you have seen Boone Pickens. Boone Pickens has said a lot of things, but the thing he says that I think most of us agree with here is that we are in the midst of the greatest transfer of wealth in our country's history as we pay for foreign oil and that we do not need talk, we need action. In these next few minutes, what we hope to do on the Republican side of the aisle is make absolutely clear what we are trying to achieve over the weekend and during this week. What we see is that $4 gasoline prices are the single biggest problem facing our country. What we know is that what the people of this country want us to do is to take up this issue, give it our best ideas, vote on it, and come up with a substantial result that increases the supply of new energy and reduces the demand for energy, which is the way you change the price of energy. That should be simple enough to do, but the fact is that the Democratic leader has had us all tied up in parliamentary knots since last Friday. We could have been doing this every single day since last Friday. Just to give an idea of what we have in mind, we have a real solution in mind: conservation; deep-sea exploration; removing the moratorium on oil shale so that, in an environmentally safe way, we can proceed with that; Alaskan energy production; clean nuclear power; military coal-to- liquid transportation fuels; home heating oil assistance. That is just the beginning of the kind of debate we ought to be having. We could have been having it since Friday. I see my friend from Georgia in the Chamber. He has been a leader in nuclear power. I ask the Senator from Georgia, isn't clean nuclear power essential to any supply of new American energy?

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, if I may ask a second question of the Republican leader. Has the Republican leader not from the very beginning said that the solution to $4 gasoline is both supply and demand; that we want to find more and use less; that, yes, we want to drill offshore, but we also want to make it commonplace to have plug-in electric cars and trucks, as an example, and that the major difference between us is that we are willing to find more and use less and the other side is not?

Mr. ALEXANDER. Reserving the right to object, Senator Voinovich wishes to have 20 minutes and Senator Allard wishes to have 15 minutes.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, if I may ask a last question of the Republican leader. The Republican leader and I and many other Senators probably took economics 101. When I took it, the law of supply and demand had both supply and demand, finding more and using less. I wonder if the Republican leader knows of any movement in academic circles to repeal half of the law of supply and demand, and to say that the law of supply and demand does not anymore include supply?

Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, is it the intention of the Republican leader to cause the Senate to take up the issue of $4 gas prices and stay on it and debate it and amend it and come to a substantial result, including ways to increase supply and reduce demand, so we can say to the American people we have done our job?

Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, I wonder if the Republican leader would answer a question.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, will you let me know when I have consumed 9 minutes, please?

Mr. ALEXANDER. Thank you very much. Mr. President, I listened to the Democratic leader discuss the legislative calendar. With respect, I believe the Democratic leadership in the Senate is approaching the crisis of $4 gasoline with all the urgency of naming a post office. It seems their idea is to talk until there is one amendment over there and one amendment over here, both of which may fail, and then go on to the next thing. I have just come back from 4 days in Tennessee. I believe that if I walked down the street in Nashville or Maryville or Knoxville or wherever and talked to 100 people and said: What do you think we ought to be doing in the Senate? I would get the same answer. It would be this: We would like for you to go do something serious about $4 gasoline prices and we would like you to work across party lines to get it done. We are ready to do that, we on the Republican side, and I think many Democrats are as well. Yet what the Democratic leadership did was bring up a bill on Friday that addresses oil speculation and put us in a procedural situation where all we can do is talk and talk and talk. We could have started last Friday with amendments on finding more oil and using less oil. We have 25 or 30 on this side. I will bet there are that many on the other side--I will bet there are more than that. We could be on our fifth day of debating and voting on a substantial piece of legislation to increase the supply of American energy and reduce our use of oil, which is the way to lower gasoline prices. That is what we should do today. If we do not do it today, we should do it tomorrow. We should not stop until we get it done. That is why we are here. That is what the American people expect of us. The majority leader has brought up a bill about speculation. There is nothing wrong with that. It is his right to do that. We recognize that, because in the Republican bill we offered, we suggested we would find more oil by drilling offshore and giving States the option to do that on their shores, and by lifting the moratorium from oil shale final regulations--that would increase American production of oil by a third. That is substantial. We are the third largest producer of oil in the world. That may help affect prices. On the other side, we want to use less oil, and we would do that by making plug-in cars and trucks commonplace, cars and trucks powered by electricity, which would reduce our use of oil. If we did those three things on the find more and use less side, we could cut our use of imported oil in half over time, which would stop sending about $250 or $300 billion a year overseas to other countries, some of which are paying terrorists who are trying to kill us. But oil speculation has its limits. Oil speculation is a part of our bill. We believe we should put 100 cops on the block. We need more cops on the block who are commodities regulators. We need to find out more about these new financial instruments and the effect they might be having on the price of oil. But you cannot deal with oil speculation unless you deal with supply and demand. The Interagency Task Force on Commodity Markets has been studying this question for 5 years. They said today--I heard it on National Public Radio because I drove in early--their interim report on crude oil studied fundamental supply and demand factors and the roles of various market participants, and it found that ``the fundamental supply and demand factors provide the best explanation for the recent crude oil price increases.'' That is what the Government says. Here is what a private sector individual, who has been pretty successful, says--Warren Buffett: ``It is not speculation, it is supply and demand.'' We can deal with oil speculation. We have proposed doing that in the Gas Price Reduction Act. But saying that by passing a bill on oil speculation we deal with $4 gas would be like saying we are passing a bill on thirst without dealing with water. We have to move on to supply and demand. That is why we say we should be finding more and using less. In Tennessee yesterday, Nissan announced that it was entering into an agreement with the State of Tennessee and the Tennessee Valley Authority to make our State hospitable for a pure electric car that Nissan intends to have on the market for fleets by 2010 and for individuals by 2012. According in Nissan's plans, the car will go 100 miles without having to be recharged. Carlos Ghosn, the president of Nissan and Renault, wants a zero emissions or an emissions-free car on the market. He wants counties and mayors who want that to be able to have it in their fleets. That is part of the Gas Price Reduction Act proposal. We understand we have to reduce demand as well as increase supply. But the other side is stuck on using only half of the law of supply and demand. They have forgotten economics 101. We say offshore drilling. They say no, we can't. We say oil shale. They say no, we can't. We say five or six new nuclear powerplants a year so we can have clean electricity for our plug-in cars and trucks. They say no, we can't. We say bring up gas prices and put it on the Senate floor and let's stay here until we finish. I heard all this talk about the legislative calendar. The legislative calendar isn't more important than the family budget. The legislative calendar is not more important than the family budget, and what is breaking the family budget today is gasoline prices. Four-dollar gasoline is driving up the price for fueling our cars and trucks. It is driving up the cost of food because, as we know, energy is such an important part of agriculture. People are hurting. Every week, I am on the floor reading e-mails from Tennesseans who are canceling their vacations, losing their jobs, unable to go get medical treatment because they cannot afford the price of gasoline. What are we doing? We are talking when the Democratic leader could instantly put us into a situation where we could spend a week or 10 days considering two or three dozen good amendments, vote them up or down, and see if we could work across party lines to come to a result. Will we solve every problem in a week's debate in a bill we pass before August? No, of course not. We really should be on the path toward clean energy independence. I suggested in May that we need a new Manhattan Project, like the one we had in World War II for the atom bomb, where we have a crash program for 5 years on the things we don't know how to do, such as make solar power competitive with fossil fuels or reprocess nuclear waste so it can be stored more easily or make more new buildings green buildings or advanced research on biofuels--crops we don't eat. But there are some things we know how to do today. Mr. President, 85 percent of the Outer Continental Shelf, where we have the opportunity to produce oil and gas, is, by congressional action, off limits today. It was off limits according to the President's action too, but he changed the Presidential order last week. What happened? The price of oil went down. I don't know exactly to what extent the President's action had an effect on the price of oil, but I do know this: If we were to take action today on supply and demand, the price of gasoline today would stabilize and begin to go down because today's price is based upon the expected supply and demand 3 to 5 years from now. If we demonstrate in our proposal, as our proposal says, that the United States of America, which consumes 25 percent of all the energy in the world, is prepared to increase our production of oil by a third and reduce our use of oil by a sixth, that together would reduce the supply of imported oil; it would cut it in half. If we did that today, it would affect the price of oil today. Our solution is four words: Find more, use less.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Find more, use less. We believe in both parts of the supply and demand. The other side is dancing around. I think they have badly misjudged the American people and the urgency of this question. We need to do everything we can in the next week or so to fashion a bill that takes a substantial step toward increasing the supply and reducing demand for oil--not saying no, we can't; no, we can't; no, we can't. We can say yes, we can, to finding more and using less, and the American people expect us to do that. That is why we are here. We can start today.

Mr. ALEXANDER

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

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. No objection.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I wish to say first that I had the chance to hear not only the Senator from North Dakota but the Senator from New Mexico, Mr. Bingaman, and what was going through my mind is that this is exactly what the Senate ought to be doing every day--every day--until we have a full and complete debate about all of the causes of the current high gasoline prices, all of the solutions that we can put in place today, until we consider all of the amendments that we need to bring up, and that we come to as a result. That is what the Senate is supposed to do. It is wonderful that we have 36 minutes to get up and present our sides, but our mode of business for the most difficult problem facing our country ought not to be back-and-forth arguments, or it ought not to be just to consider one bill brought up by the Democratic leader just because he is the majority leader and can do that and not consider all of the other ideas. I would like to hear all that Senator Bingaman has to say, for example, about why he doesn't like the idea of State options for offshore exploration. He is a thoughtful Senator and chairman of the energy committee. I would like to hear all that Senator Dorgan has to say about speculation. He is a thoughtful Senator and, as he said, has been willing to support more offshore exploration in some cases, and might do more. We need to have a full debate about the extent to which speculation is a problem. For example, Senator Dorgan cited speculation as one reason we have gas prices above $4 a gallon. Republicans believe speculation is part of the problem as well. The Gas Price Reduction Act we introduced, with 44 Republican Senators supporting it--and we hope it earns significant support on the other side--has as one of its four parts speculation and putting 100 more cops on the beat to deal with it. But we are also aware that Warren Buffett, who is invited to lunches on the other side of the aisle because he is a well-admired person who understands the market well enough to make a lot of money on it, Warren Buffett said in June: ``It is not speculation; it is supply and demand.'' The International Energy Agency, an energy policy organization with 27 member nations, says: Blaming speculation is an easy solution which avoids taking the necessary steps to improve supply side access and investment, or to implement measures to improve energy efficiency. So we need to consider a full debate on the extent to which speculation makes a difference. We believe--and we are not the first to have this idea--that the solution to $4 gasoline prices is to find more oil and to use less oil. I wasn't the best student in economics at Vanderbilt University years ago, but that is what I was taught in economics 101, that the reason gas prices are high is because we have had growing demand and diminishing supplies. Also--I will get back to this more--what we do today about future prices can make all the difference in today's prices. I am not the only one who believes that. Martin Feldstein, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Reagan, a Harvard professor and member of the Wall Street Journal's board of contributors said in an article a few days ago: Any steps that can be taken now to increase the future supply of oil--that is finding more--or reduce the future demand for oil in the United States or elsewhere--that is using less--can, therefore, lead to lower prices and increased consumption today. Not 10 years from now, not 5 years from now; what we plan for the future can make a difference in the prices today, and we need to be doing that. April is a single mother of two in Sevier County, TN, who took a job 40 miles away 2 years ago so she wouldn't have to live off welfare. With gas prices rising, she is spending about $160 a week on gas and can't afford to pay all the bills. She sent me that letter in the past couple of weeks. Dave from Murfreesboro was laid off from his job at a trucking company in Jackson because they had to declare bankruptcy. They couldn't afford the gas. The company just expanded the dispatch office and they bought new trucks when they ran out of money from rising fuel prices. He is now worried our middle class is disappearing. Robert in Elizabethton, TN, a retired police officer, worked his whole life so he could retire. But now with gas prices so high, he says he has to cut back on his trips to the doctor and the grocery store because it has gotten so expensive. Glenna from Lafayette is on social security and lives on a very fixed income. She can barely afford to leave home. Even the food at her local grocery store has gotten more expensive because they have to pay a gas fee for deliveries. David from Knoxville has had to cancel his family's vacation this year. He will be having a ``STAYcation,'' as he says. He just got a promotion and raise at work, but the increase in living costs with food and gas has left him with no net gain. Instead, he is struggling to pay his bills. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record these five letters and e-mails from Tennesseans who are Americans hurt by high gas prices.

Mr. ALEXANDER. The writers of these letters may say: All right, you are United States Senators. You are in charge of the Congress. Do something. Well, we say find more, use less. We have a bill, 44 Senators cosponsored the bill, and we asked to bring it up. Senator Vitter of Louisiana brought it up the other day, and on behalf of the Democratic side, it was objected to. Now, I can understand that. Maybe it wasn't convenient to bring it up that day, but it is not convenient for the letter writers who wrote to me to wait another 2 days for us to seriously deal with the issue of gasoline prices either. So my suggestion is that the Democratic leader--and the whole Nation should understand this. The Democratic leader may not have much of a majority, but he has control of the agenda. If he wants to put gasoline legislation on the floor of the Senate, he can do it the next hour. He can do it before noon. When he does it, I would respectfully ask that the American people expect us to have a full discussion and full debate about how we can fix this problem, and that means what can we do about finding more, what can we do about using less. We just heard two of the most prominent Democratic Senators who understand energy and who say we do need to do a variety of things. They say that. We had a second bipartisan breakfast yesterday morning on gas prices. Fifteen Senators attended-- eight Democrats, seven Republicans--or maybe it was the reverse. I wasn't there because I was in Chattanooga for Volkswagen's announcement of a new plant in Chattanooga, for which we are grateful. But we had a good discussion the week before, and we had a good one yesterday. We should be having that discussion on the Senate floor. Our plan, the Republican plan, which we hope earns Democratic support, is very simple. It would increase American production by one- third over time--by one-third, one, by giving States the option to explore offshore for oil and gas and keep 37\1/2\ percent of the revenues. If I were the Governor, as I once was--we don't have a coast in Tennessee, but I would have been delighted to have that money. I would have put it in the bank and built the best higher education system in America, kept taxes down, and done some other things. That is what the four States in the South do. Virginia might decide to do it, North Carolina, Florida might. The oil market would get the oil and our prices would begin to stabilize. That would be 1 million barrels a day the Department of Interior estimates. Remember, 85 percent of the area on the Outer Continental Shelf in which we could drill is now off limits. We are going to have to deal with that issue. We should be dealing with it on the Senate floor. Two, we could go to three Western States and lift the moratorium on oil shale development. We should proceed with that in environmentally sound ways. That should produce, according to the Department of the Interior, 2 million barrels a day. What do those numbers mean? It means we could increase our production by one-third--increase American energy by one-third. Now, we only produce maybe 10 percent of the world's oil, but we are the third largest producer. Many on the other side have said: Well, let's sue OPEC, the Middle Eastern countries, and make them produce more oil. By analogy, we should be suing ourselves for not allowing the U.S. to produce more oil. We produce about as much oil as Saudi Arabia. We are the third largest producer. We should make our contribution to finding more American energy by producing more oil, and there are many Republicans and some Democrats who are ready to do that. So why are we not debating that and acting on that and voting on that on the Senate floor? That is what the Senate is expected to do. Then, use less. We are willing to do both. We understand both parts of the equation of supply and demand. Our suggestion and our legislation--and I believe, personally, the most promising way for our country to rapidly reduce our reliance on foreign oil--is to use plug- in electric cars and trucks. Now, when I first began talking about this, some people thought I had been out in the sun too long. But Nissan, Toyota, Ford, General Motors, are all going to be making and selling to us within a year or two or three electric hybrid cars, or in Nissan's case an electric car that you simply plug in at night. Where do we get the electricity to do that? We have plenty of electricity at night when we are asleep. In the TVA region, for example, where I am from, the Tennessee Valley Authority, we produce about 3 percent of all of the electricity in America. We have the equivalent of 6 or 7 nuclear powerplants worth of electricity available at night which is unused. So TVA can bring me a smart meter and say: Mr. Alexander, you can fill up with electricity at night and drive your car 30 miles a day without using any gas. When I am here in the Senate, that is about all I drive. Three-quarters of Americans drive less than 40 miles a day. Over time, the Brookings experts believe we could electrify half our cars and trucks, and do it without building any more new powerplants because we already have unused electricity at night. So we are willing to do more and use less. We hear too much coming from the other side of the aisle to avoid the finding more part. They are dancing around the issue. We say: More offshore exploration with some exceptions. We hear: No, we can't. We say lift the moratorium on oil shale, with some exceptions. They say, no, we can't. We say more nuclear power, which is clean and we can use it for electricity and to plug in our cars and trucks. They say, no, we can't. We need to be finding ways that we can say, yes, we can, to finding more and using less. My last comment is this: I hope not to hear anybody else ever say on the floor of the Senate that we cannot do something because it will take 10 years. Did President Kennedy say we could not go to the Moon because it would take 10 years? Did President Roosevelt say we could not build a bomb to win World War II because it might take 3 years? Did our Founding Fathers say we cannot have a Republic or a democracy because it might take 20, 30, or 40 years? Our greatest leaders have said this is the way we go in America. This is what we should be like in 5 or 10 years. We should have a new ``Manhattan Project'' for clean energy independence, to put us on a path toward that independence with 5 or 10 years. From the day we take those actions, the price of oil and gasoline stabilizes and begins to go down. That is what was so eloquently said in the Wall Street Journal article by Mr. Feldstein. Let me conclude with the very words he said 2 days ago: Now here is the good news. Any policy that causes the expected future oil price to fall can cause the current price to fall, or to rise less than it would otherwise do. In other words, it is possible to bring down today's price of oil with policies that will have their physical impact on oil demand or supply only in the future. The United States and this world are waiting for us to enact a plan that will find more American energy and use less oil, so it can see that in the future we are on a path to energy independence and, as a result, the prices of oil today will stabilize and begin to go down. I yield the floor.