Lamar Alexander

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Would you please let me know when 5 minutes has expired?

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. The Democratic leader's decision to block these nominees because of their party affiliation overturns 75 years of Federal law and custom. Since 1933, Federal law has never made politics one of the considerations for TVA appointments. Most Presidents have appointed members of their own party, sometimes political independents--such as Bishop William Graves, one of the two nominees for reappointment who is being locked up. Bishop Graves is not even a Republican. He is the most experienced member of the TVA board, coming from the largest customer, Memphis Light, Gas and Water, and he is the presiding bishop of one of the largest religious denominations in America. I have sent a letter to the majority leader. I ask unanimous consent it be printed in the Record.

Mr. ALEXANDER. I have said to the majority leader: This is an insult to Memphis. Bishop Graves is the first Memphian ever to serve on the TVA board in its history. It is an affront to the more than 1.5 million African Americans in our region. Bishop Graves is the first African American ever to be on the TVA board. At a time when there is a stream of Democratic Senators coming to the floor trying to find somebody to blame for high gas prices, why is the majority leader locking up two of the most valuable players on our team whose job it is to deal with high gas prices, high electric prices, climate change, clean air, and national security? I respectfully suggest that the majority leader, for whom I have the greatest respect, lift this roadblock--stop trying to change 75 years of law and custom. Unlock our two players and let them out and let them into the game against high gas prices and let them go to work. This is disheartening playpen partisan politics--it disappoints the American people and causes them to cry out for changing the way that we do business in Washington. I yield the floor.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I told Dr. Cicerone that what I will be proposing at Oak Ridge will require more specific and quicker action than what the National Academies already have underway. I hope that within the next few weeks, a bipartisan group of us from the Congress could meet with the National Academies and see what concrete proposals we might offer the new President and the new Congress, and that we complete that work this year. Democrat Bart Gordon, a Congressman from Tennessee and chairman of the Science Committee in the House of Representatives, was--along with Senator Bingaman, myself, and then-Congressman Sherwood Boehlert--one of the four original signers of the 2005 request to the National Academies that led to the America COMPETES Act. Congressman Gordon will join me in Oak Ridge on May 9, and he will address those who are there about clean energy independence. Also there--and cohost for the meeting, along with the Director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory-- will be Congressman Zach Wamp, a senior Member of the House Appropriations Committee in whose district we will be. I have talked this week with our leaders in the Senate on energy, Senator Bingaman and Senator Domenici--both of New Mexico--who have played such a large role in the America COMPETES Act over the last 3 years. I talked with Senator Murkowski, who likely will succeed Senator Domenici as the senior Republican on the Energy Committee when Senator Domenici retires at the end of this year. I know this is a Presidential election year. I have no illusions about the difficulty of bipartisan congressional action. But I also know that gasoline is nearing $4, and that the electricity produced by America today is not clean enough for our country. I also know that, on our present course, we permit other countries in the world to whom we are paying $500 billion a year the possibility of blackmailing us, or other countries, because of their ownership of oil assets. I believe now is the best possible time for Members of Congress and candidates for President of the United States to address the clean energy independence goal. Let us compete to see who can come up with the best ideas and compare them with one another, knowing that in the end--especially in the Senate--it will take the kind of bipartisan cooperation we had with the America COMPETES Act to get a result. After all, the people didn't elect us to take a vacation this year just because there is a Presidential election. This country of ours is a remarkable place. While enduring this economic slowdown, this year we will produce about 30 percent of all the wealth in the world for 5 percent of those of us who live here. We have 30 percent of the wealth in the world, but we are just 5 percent of all the people in the world. Despite the ``gathering storm'' of concern about American competitiveness, no other country approaches our brain power advantage--the collection of research universities we have, the national laboratories we have, the private sector companies that exist in the United States. And this United States is still the only country where people can say with a straight face that anything is possible-- and believe it. These are precisely the ingredients America needs during the next 5 years to place ourselves firmly on a path to clean energy independence and, in doing so, we can make our jobs more secure, help balance the family budget, make our air cleaner and our planet safer and healthier, and lead the world to do the same by our example. I yield the floor. Exhibit 1 Energy Challenges (Presented to the 145th Annual Meeting of the National Academy of Sciences, Ralph J. Cicerone, President, Apr. 28, 2008) As I stand before the members of the NAS, I feel as each of you would in my place--that it is a great honor and a rare opportunity to address you here in our historic NAS building. As you know, we are planning a major restoration of the building which will be discussed further in tomorrow's business meeting. I want to recognize NAS Presidents-Emeritus Frank Press and Bruce Alberts who are here with us today. Each of them led the Academy with distinction and continues to represent us well. The past year has been a very busy one, reflecting the importance of science and technology in contemporary society. One project, the revision and updating of our 1984 and 1999 booklets on science and creationism, was completed when the new booklet, Science, Evolution and Creationism was released in January. This project was initiated and supported by the NAS Council. For this third edition, we invited the Institute of Medicine to join the NAS. The authoring committee is shown here. I ask each of the authors who is here today to stand. Today I want to use the opportunity to draw your attention to a major issue of today, human demand for and usage of energy, a topic that has become progressively more serious, one that will take years to address and which requires scientific efforts of many kinds. In the past fifty or sixty years there have been other transforming issues that have dominated national and international attention and which required science and technology for any successful outcome, but these earlier cases have not been numerous. One can recall the nuclear arms race, the polio outbreaks of the 1950's, and the very rapid increases of human populations of the 1950's and 1960's. Science made possible the cessation of nuclear weapons testing through demonstrated capability to detect the detonation of even relatively small weapons, while computational methods enabled stockpile stewardship. Similarly, through medical immunology, scientists came to understand the cause of polio and created preventive vaccines; and the Green Revolution made it possible to feed many more people. Two other major issues in which public attention was focused on science and technology were the launching of early Earth-orbiting satellites (and placing a man on the Moon), and the capabilities that emerged in the early 1970's from molecular biology for safe laboratory DNA- transfer experiments. Now in 2008, we see that human demand and usage of energy is a pervasive issue. The issue has multiple dimensions and constraints. It is both national and worldwide. Enormous in scale, it will remain serious for the foreseeable future, and science and engineering are essential for progress. Main Points My main points today are: Our energy-intensive way of life, population growth and worldwide economic progress combine to create large and growing demand for energy. Our options to meet this large demand with types of energy now available to us are seriously constrained. We must assure access to energy and geopolitical security, overcome the financial impact of high costs, deal with climate change, other environmental impacts, nuclear safety and wastes. There is no simple single solution and some attractive options are mutually incompatible. Science and technology and scientists are essential to meeting this pervasive challenge. Energy Usage and Demand The scale of human energy usage today is large and projections of future demands are even larger. Let me begin by outlining current energy usage in the United States. We consume 100 Quadrillion BTU (one Quad is 10\15\ BTU) per year as a nation, or 3.3 x 10\8\ BTU per person annually. There are many ways to disaggregate these figures. For example. we can examine end usage by economic sector or by function. One such cut reveals that 28 percent of U.S. energy usage is for transportation (burning gasoline, diesel and jet fuel) and 39 percent is used in buildings for lighting, heating, cooling, appliances and office equipment. What are the sources of our primary energy? For the U.S., 85 percent comes from the burning of fossil fuels: 23 percent from natural gas, 23 percent from coal and 40 percent from petroleum (using rounded numbers). Eight percent is derived from nuclear power and six percent from renewable sources like hydropower (3 percent), biomass (3 percent), geothermal sources, wind, and solar. Two key factors are liquid fuels for transportation and coal burning to generate electricity. Slide 5 shows growth in U. S. imports and consumption of petroleum. Net imports grew from 3 million barrels per day in 1970 and surpassed domestic ``production'' in 1996. Today, we import approximately twelve million barrels of oil daily, most of it for transportation, and we consume about six million barrels of oil more each day for running our automobiles and trucks than is produced (extracted, to be more precise) domestically. A related figure is the fraction 41 percent of primary energy consumption that goes into producing electricity. Annually, the U.S. consumes about 3800 billion kWh of electricity, with an average instantaneous consumption rate of 440 million kW, or 1.47 kW per person. Because of considerable inefficiency in the conversion of primary energy into electricity during generation and losses in its distribution, the electrical energy received by the end user is only about one-third of the primary energy invested in generating it. Our electricity is generated in several ways but the major pathways are from coal burning (52 percent), nuclear power (20 percent), natural gas (19 percent) and renewable energy including hydropower (8.5 percent). While still small, electricity generated from wind power grew by over 25 percent compounded annually from 2001-2005. Slide 7 shows world energy consumption 1970-2005 and projected usage to 2030, developed & developing countries. Worldwide energy consumption was about 447 quadrillion BTU in 2004. This figure grew from approximately 207 quadrillion BTU in 1970; it doubled in 30-32 years. World average energy consumption is approximately 6.2x10 \7\ BTU/person, or only one-fifth as much as for Americans. The fraction of total world energy usage from fossil-fuel sources was about 87 percent in 2004, slightly higher than the corresponding U.S. figure. The fraction of world electricity from nuclear power was only six percent as opposed to eight percent in the U.S. although it is well known that France's electricity is generated primarily (70 percent) from nuclear power, and of course, there are other nations that employ no nuclear power at all. Recently, Germany has emerged as a world leader in capturing wind energy and in the manufacturing of photovoltaic cells for the direct conversion of sunlight to electricity, as is Japan. World energy consumption is projected to grow to approximately 700 quadrillion BTU in 2030, another doubling from its early 1990's value. Much of this projected growth is likely to occur in developing, or emerging market countries, where there is great demand for energy usage per capita to grow, while slower growth is projected for mature market countries like those of advanced developed countries. One projection is for non-OECD countries (including China and India) to increase energy usage by over three percent annually, more than doubling between 2004 and 2030 while U.S. energy growth is projected to be one percent annually. This differential growth will continue trends observed from 1999- 2005 when China and India increased their energy usage by 80 percent and 25 percent, respectively. The dynamics and impacts of this differential growth are extremely important to analyze. For example, we must understand what is driving this increased demand (electrification, pumping water for irrigation and for manufacturing and consumer uses, population growth . . .). We must also anticipate impacts on world prices and availability and on world geopolitics, environment and climate. A recent report from the InterAcademy Council is a rich source of data on growing demand and strategies for satisfying it worldwide. Impacts of Energy Usage and Constraints For many years there have been concerns over the stability of energy supplies or the cost of energy or the consequences of too much dependence on overseas sources or over various environmental impacts. Now all of these concerns are operative at once and they are seen as long term as opposed to temporary. For example, as U.S. consumption of petroleum, mostly for transportation, has grown, and costs have risen to over $100 per barrel, the net flow of dollars to oil-exporting countries has ballooned to between $450 to $500 billion annually, as noted recently by former CIA Director James Woolsey. Let me note that even at the now past price of $65 per barrel, 300 million Americans send $1000 each overseas for oil annually. At our NAS/NAE energy symposium on March 14, former Secretary of Energy and Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger said that our dependence on foreign oil is allowing some hostile oil-exporting countries to accumulate dollars, resulting in diminished U.S. influence not only toward them but also with our allies. He stated that ``we cannot ensure energy security, only mitigate energy insecurity''. Predicting future energy costs is perilous and certainly not a talent of mine. Personally, I did not predict that gasoline would cost $3.5 to $4 per gallon as it is now. However, there is general consensus that the era of low cost energy is over, largely due to increasing demand from developing countries. Thus, one can expect U.S. purchases of oil to continue and world prices to remain high enough to cause difficulties for poorer countries. Worldwide fleets of car and trucks demand oil as does the growing commercial airline sector. High costs of energy are being felt by individuals, families, businesses, universities, governments, and hospitals, for example. High energy costs are now beginning to be blamed for rising grain costs and food shortages in some countries. The imperative for access to secure energy supplies prompts some regions and countries to turn to coal or to nuclear power. For example, the U.S., China, South Africa and India have substantial domestic coal supplies. Environmental and climatic impacts must be dealt with. Inadvertent emissions of soot, sulfur, nitrogen oxides and mercury, historical challenges which have been met in some selected regions, remain major problems elsewhere and due to the scale of coal usage, they are increasingly serious problems, as are deleterious effects of coal mining on land surfaces and ground water. In each of the last several years, a large number of coal-fired power plants have been built in China; total generating capacity from these plants has increased annually by approximately 95 Gwatts (adding approximately the entire capacity of France or Germany). In recent years it has become clearer that the global climate is changing in response to increased atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel burning. Current atmospheric concentration of CO2 is over 380 ppm, compared to a pre-industrial level of 280 ppm. Climate change is being observed in elevated air and sea temperatures, losses of ice, rising sea level and several other variables, and it is judged mostly due to greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, from human activities. While some climate change can be accommodated, there is increasing evidence and concern that dangerous changes can also occur. ``Dangerous'' here is defined as irreversible changes such as sea-level rise and loss of biodiversity, and generally other physical variables whose rates of change exceed the rates at which we can adapt to them. Large or prolonged changes in regional water supplies can destabilize entire nations. While it might be intuitive to guess that we could stabilize worldwide atmospheric carbon dioxide amounts by holding worldwide emissions constant, the natural uptake of atmospheric CO2 by the global carbon cycle is only about 40 percent of current emissions; this figure has been derived by decades of research, much of it by NAS members. Current annual emissions are nearly seven billion tons of C as CO2. The eventual steady-state atmospheric concentration of CO2 from current emissions would be over 650 ppm. Thus, a specified carbon constraint such as preventing atmospheric CO2 from rising above say 450 parts per million, is difficult to satisfy: it would require reducing emissions by more than four billion tons (C) from current levels. Several examples show how difficult it will be. Reducing emissions by just one billion tons C per year would require a fleet of two billion cars to achieve 60 mpg instead of 30 mpg, or replacing 700 one GW coal-burning power plants with nuclear plants, or replacing coal-burning plants with one million 2 MWe (peak) wind turbines or 2,000 1-GWe (peak) photovoltaic power plants. Instead, if worldwide energy usage continues to grow as projected and fossil fuels continue to supply over 80% of that energy, worldwide CO2 emissions would grow to over ten B tons C annually by 2030, just 22 years from now. At such a rate of fossil-fuel burning, humans would inject as much CO2 into the air from fossil-fuel burning between 2000 and 2030 as they did between 1850 and 2000. In addition to climatic change from carbon dioxide, we expect the world's oceans to become acidified by the CO2 added from the atmosphere. Research on the biological effects of this acidification is in its early stages and there are many questions surrounding the ability of calcifying marine organisms to make shells, for example. The view that emerges is of a carbon-constrained world. Taking into account the fact that coal is relatively plentiful and that its supplies are secure within several large countries, and recognizing the carbon constraint gives rise to the need for research on carbon capture and storage (CCS) and to other means to tap into coal's energy without releasing CO2 to the atmosphere and oceans. Even if coal, for example with effective CCS, could be used even more intensively to generate electricity, one must realize that to use today's fleets of cars and trucks and airplanes, one requires liquid fuels, presumably from oil. While coal yields less energy per unit of CO2 released, carbon constraints apply to oil and natural gas as well as to coal. The constraints of energy supply, dependence on foreign sources and atmospheric carbon dioxide cause us to consider wider usage of nuclear power. Nuclear power plants, currently based on nuclear fission processes, offer several advantages in that their operation does not emit carbon dioxide nor are supplies of nuclear fuel thought to be seriously limited physically or immediately. Widespread utilization of nuclear power is limited instead by concerns over safety of operation and over waste handling, storage and disposal. Strongly related is the need to prevent the misappropriation of nuclear wastes to produce nuclear weapons or conventional bombs spiked with radioactivity (dirty bombs). In addition, costs of electrical power from current nuclear plants exceed those for coal and from natural gas; capital costs of nuclear plants are much higher. These concerns have virtually stopped the building of new and replacement nuclear power plants in many countries since approximately 1980. For nuclear power to satisfy large parts of current and future world demand for electrical energy would require the siting, construction and operation of large numbers of new and replacement nuclear power plants such as a tripling or quadrupling of the number of such plants now in service. Local limitations on volumes and temperatures of cooling water will tighten as tensions grow over water supplies and heat waves intensify. Even if successful, we would not have satisfied much of world demand for energy to drive transportation, now supplied by petroleum, with today's fleet of automobiles and trucks. Agenda for Scientists, the National Academy of Sciences and the National Research Council The constraints placed on energy choices for the United States and for the world today can appear to be intractable. For example, large U.S. domestic coal reserves, much of our existing infrastructure and the goal of energy security all argue for more dependence on coal. However, we are pushed in the opposite direction by the pressing need to reduce CO2 emissions to the atmosphere so as to limit climate change, and by several other environmental impacts including ocean acidification. In a democracy there are many different voices representing people with differing values and interests, such as protecting or advancing locally based industries, and also with differing weighting factors for addressing the various constraints. All of these challenges place scientists and engineers in an essential position--we can: Perform research relevant to energy supplies and usage, Formulate and analyze options for decisionmakers, Inform the public about research and policy options, Advise and help government officials and business leaders, Develop scientific and engineering human resources. We must address each of these needed roles with complementary skills. Along with creating specialized processes and strategies, we need big-picture synthesis. For example, achieving increased energy efficiency can relax all of these constraints but implementing this goal requires great attention to detail. The NAS and the NAE, working through the NRC, are conducting a study, America's Energy Future, and it will be published in less than a year from now. This report will present objective, quantitative data and estimates of contributions to our energy supply from various energy technologies, including energy-efficiency technologies, along with their costs. Many NAS and NAE members and other experts are involved on this project. It is led by economist Harold Shapiro, President-emeritus of Princeton University (and an IOM member). This report will lay a foundation for much more work to follow on energy research, energy-policy options and worldwide cases. It is intended to provide what Benjamin Franklin aptly described as ``useful knowledge'' to individuals and groups in business and government and the general public as they consider how to transition to the energy trajectories that are needed. We are also beginning a new suite of studies on climate change, focusing on how to benefit from and extend the scientific understanding of climate change and also how to mitigate it and adapt to it. Scientific research, as always, offers possibilities for improvements in how we extract, convert, store, distribute and consume energy. Indeed, research can lead to major changes which could revolutionize our current systems and which could dodge some of the constraints that now bind us. Opportunities for this research to create new technologies with worldwide business potential are enormous. There are numerous fascinating research topics in physical and biological sciences which could dramatically transform the energy landscape or which could at least improve our options. Photovoltaic devices based on new materials to convert sunlight into electricity and chemical means to convert sunlight into chemical fuels offer great opportunities. Photosynthesis-based designs are beginning to receive some attention. Energy-storage devices with high energy and power densities could enable much wider use of solar, wind and nuclear energy, for example, in electric- drive vehicles. Alternative energy sources for transportation must match or overcome a large advantage of liquid hydrocarbons; the oxidizer for their combustion does not have to be carried along with the fuel. A major goal is to derive petroleum substitutes from plant matter other than food crops which would be approximately carbon-neutral. Microbiological processes enhanced by molecular biology comprise many potential advanced pathways toward creating liquid biofuels such as alcohols. In such advanced processes, efficient use of normally recalcitrant material like plant cellulose and lignins must be made. Progress from this laboratory-based biological research is needed to obtain higher biofuel yields which justify inputs of energy, fertilizer, water and land. These input/output ratios themselves and corresponding tradeoffs require research to clarify the value of this option. Wider usage of nuclear power to generate much larger amounts of electricity could displace some fossil-fuel usage but it requires safe and efficient handling of wastes which in turn require secure geological and geochemical storage. Similarly, economical and safe waste-to-fuel reprocessing represent research and engineering challenges and opportunities, and some materials problems with reactors remain. As has been the case for too many years, nuclear fusion remains a distant but tantalizing pathway toward plentiful energy, with almost no radioactive waste, but very difficult problems in confining high-temperature plasmas have impeded progress. A host of other research frontiers must be explored, for example, can carbon dioxide be effectively captured and stored in geological reservoirs in amounts measured in tens of billions of tons and for centuries? Can transmission lines be vastly improved through superconductivity or by using direct current transmission instead of AC, with better system analysis and control? If so, solar and wind energy can be distributed in ways to match generation and demand time functions better. Scientific research on climate change is essential to enable us to predict how climate will change in smaller geographical areas and shorter time intervals than is now possible so as to guide our efforts in mitigating the changes and in adapting to changes that do transpire. Economic science and social phenomena must be incorporated in this endeavor, and as is the case in all of the topics mentioned here, computational science has become essential. In deciding how to deal with the constraints placed on us by U.S. and global energy usage, governments, businesses, NGO's and individuals want to know what options they have. An important role for us as individuals and through National Research Council committees is to help to formulate and analyze options that can illuminate the consequences of various proposed actions. This work can consist of focused analyses of specific energy sources or pathways and respective technologies, or on comparisons of many alternatives. Variables include physical, chemical and biological principles, costs, readiness for deployment, social acceptance and time frames. In many cases, those who will make decisions amongst the options will be political or business leaders who have little or no scientific background, so scientists' communications skills will be tested. In these interactions centered on formulation and analysis of options, scientists must be prepared to interact with such decisionmakers in iterative ways. It is likely that some overall pathways to a more secure, safe and robust energy strategy will involve short-term options in preparation for transitions to a longer term. More broadly, scientists can inform the public about research prospects and goals and about policy options. The pervasive nature of our challenges with energy requires wide public awareness and consensus, and arriving at consensus will be challenging. Whether deciding how to locate solar collector arrays, nuclear power plants or wind farms or how to gauge the benefits of various biofuels or automobile fuel efficiency, and how to invest their own resources or public funds, people must appreciate the constraints and the goals to choose the best options and to avoid costly mistakes and ineffective actions. Scientists who are effective communicators should present public talks and/or help other scientists and journalists who are even more effective. In our NAS communications with the general public, we plan to emphasize energy topics in several ways. We depend on many structures and institutions to govern us. Agencies of the U.S. Government which support science research, set standards, monitor and regulate trade, products and pollutants need qualified people to serve in them and they need external counsel through advisory committees, for example. Each of us should serve when invited, and we should prepare thoroughly for each assignment. Important roles in advising the government are carried out by the National Research Council. State and local governments have many significant energy issues in front of them so the need for scientific advice is even larger. Scientists can also help each other when one is called to advise. Education of the current and future generations of students is a high priority. All of the needs listed above require an educated public to recognize our options, to understand their consequences, and to exploit opportunities. Students who will go on into business and government will have big roles just as future scientists will. We must develop human resources, both broadly and in specific scientific endeavors, from microbiology and molecular biology to nuclear science and engineering. Our university curricula for science and for non-science students must create awareness of challenges and opportunities surrounding energy usage, efficiency and related research. As always, research opportunities for students are especially important. conclusion We must change the trajectories of our energy usage and energy sources. World peace, economic development for much of the world, continuing prosperity for the developed countries and a stable climate require us to do so. To create and analyze options, and to educate and inform people about the work ahead, scientists and engineers are critical. There is no single action or individual technology that will take us to this goal. (The glass(es) are partly filled and partly empty. The baseball is just for fun!) Rather we must explore all sources and pathways and discover, invent and optimize in each case. While it might disappoint some people that there is no single pathway to success, a world in which many energy sources and solutions are integral to the whole will be more stable and less susceptible to disruption. Our enthusiasm and efforts must be broad as we seek to discover and disseminate useful knowledge. A great deal of innovative and determined work is needed by scientists and engineers in the years ahead. It is our privilege and our responsibility to rise to these energy challenges. Let's get going; there is a lot of useful knowledge to be gained.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, in 1942 President Franklin D. Roosevelt summoned a bipartisan group of congressional leaders to the White House. He outlined with them a secret plan to win World War II. At the conclusion of the briefing, the President asked Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee, who chaired the Appropriations Committee in the Senate, if the Senator could hide $2 billion in the appropriations bill for this project to win the war. Senator McKellar replied: That will be no problem, Mr. President, but I have one question: Just where in Tennessee do you want me to hide the $2 billion? That place in Tennessee turned out to be Oak Ridge, one of the three secret cities, along with Hanford in Washington and Los Alamos in New Mexico, that became the principal sites for the Manhattan Project. The purpose of the Manhattan Project was to end the war by finding a way to split the atom and build a bomb before Germany could. Nearly 200,000 people worked secretly in 30 different sites in three countries. President Roosevelt's $2 billion appropriation equaled $24 billion in today's dollars. Less than 3 years later, after that conversation between President Roosevelt and Senator McKellar, the project succeeded when on August 6 and 9, 1945, the first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On August 14, Japan surrendered unconditionally. According to New York Times science reporter William Laurence, who watched the Nagasaki bombing: Into its design went millions of man-hours of what is without doubt the most concentrated intellectual effort in history. On Friday, May 9, I will go to one of those secret cities--Oak Ridge--to propose that the United States launch a new Manhattan Project: A 5-year project to put America firmly on the path to clean energy independence. Instead of ending a war, the goal will be clean energy independence so we can deal with rising gasoline prices, electricity prices, clean air, climate change, and national security-- for our country first, and--because other countries have the same urgent needs and therefore will adopt our ideas--for the rest of the world. By independence, I do not mean the United States would never buy oil from Mexico or from Canada or from Saudi Arabia. By independence I do mean the United States could never be held hostage by any country for our energy supplies. In 1942, many were afraid that the first country to build an atomic bomb could blackmail the rest of the world. The overwhelming challenge in the Manhattan Project veteran George Cowan's words was: the prospect of a Fascist world and the need to build a weapon so powerful that it would quickly guarantee victory. Today, countries that supply oil and natural gas can blackmail the rest of the world. Today's need is to create clean energy independence to quickly guarantee victory over that kind of extortion. Such a concentration of brain power directed toward an urgent national need is not a new idea, but it is a good idea, and it fits the goal of clean energy independence. The Apollo project to send men to the Moon in the 1960s was a kind of Manhattan Project. Senator Susan Collins of Maine has suggested an energy independence by 2020 project, comparable to the goal of putting a man on the Moon. Others such as Senator Kit Bond of Missouri and Congressman Randy Forbes of Virginia have suggested a Manhattan Project for clean energy or energy independence. As part of their ongoing Presidential campaigns, both Senator John McCain and Senator Barack Obama have called for a Manhattan Project for new energy sources. Likewise, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean have said a Manhattan Project-type program is needed to develop technologies to free us from oil dependence. All throughout the 2 years of discussion that led to the passage by this Congress of the America COMPETES Act, several participants suggested that we should focus on energy--believing that solving the energy challenges would force the kind of investments in the physical sciences and research and teaching that the America COMPETES Act seeks to encourage. The Manhattan Project in 1942 was in response to an overwhelming challenge: the prospect that Germany would build a bomb and win the war before America did. In his address on Monday to the annual meeting of the National Academy of Sciences, Academy President Ralph Cicerone described today's overwhelming challenge, and that is the need to discover ways to satisfy the human demand and use of energy in an environmentally satisfactory and affordable way so we are not overly dependent on overseas sources. According to Cicerone, this year Americans will pay nearly $500 billion overseas for oil--that is $1,600 for each one of us--some of it to nations that are hostile to us or even trying to kill us by bankrolling terrorists. That weakens our dollar. It is half our trade deficit. It forces gasoline prices toward $4 a gallon, and it is crushing family budgets. Then there are the environmental consequences. If worldwide energy usage continues to grow as projected and fossil fuels continue to supply over 80 percent of that energy, humans would inject as much CO2 into the air from fossil fuel burning between 2000 and 2030 as they did between 1850 and 2000. We have plenty of coal to help achieve our energy independence, but we have no commercial way yet to capture the carbon from the coal, and we have not finished the job of controlling sulfur, nitrogen, and mercury emissions. So instead of finding a way to build a bomb to win a war, the new goal would be to find ways to help our country, which consumes 25 percent of all the energy in the world, to achieve clean energy independence, and to do it at a price the family budget can afford, with the hope that the rest of the world will follow our lead. In addition to the need to meet an overwhelming challenge, other characteristics of the Manhattan Project are suited to the challenge of a new Manhattan Project. First, it will require what Harris Mayer has called meta-engineering. Next, it needs to proceed as fast as possible along several tracks to reach the goal. According to Don Gillespie, a young engineer in Los Alamos during World War II: The entire project was being conducted using a shotgun approach, trying all possible approaches simultaneously, without regard to cost, to speed toward a conclusion. Next, it needs Presidential focus and it needs bipartisan support in Congress. It needs the kind of centralized, gruff leadership that Gen. Leslie R. Groves of the Army Corps of Engineers gave the first Manhattan Project. A new Manhattan Project needs to put aside old biases and subsidies and instead break the mold. As Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer said in a speech to Los Alamos scientists in November of 1945 about the atomic bomb, the challenge of clean energy independence is ``too revolutionary to consider in the framework of old ideas.'' Most important, in the words of George Cowan as reported in a book on the Manhattan Project edited by Cynthia C. Kelly: The first Manhattan Project wouldn't have come into existence at all without initial concepts that were spelled out by a small number of extraordinary people. . . . The Manhattan Project model starts with a small, diverse group of great minds. As I said to the various National Academies when we first asked for their help in the American competitiveness project in 2005: In Washington, DC, most ideas fail for lack of the idea. We need ideas from the best minds we have. I said it then about American competitiveness, and I say it now about clean energy independence. I addressed a meeting earlier this week of about 500 men and women from all over America who were here to encourage the Congress to fully fund the America COMPETES Act that we passed into law in 2007. The President has asked for an 18-percent increase in funding for the Department of Energy's Office of Science, which is the money for our national laboratories. He has asked for a 13-percent increase in funding for the National Science Foundation. Both of those would put us on the road to doubling funding for the physical sciences so we can keep our brain power advantage so we can keep our jobs from going overseas. That was the recommendation of the small, diverse group of great minds whom we asked 3 years ago to tell us what we need to do to keep our brain power advantage. Most of the speakers at that meeting this week were talking about the need to come persuade the Senator from New York or the Senator from Tennessee or the Senator from some other State to fully fund the America COMPETES Act. I see the Senator from New York here. He was very active in that legislation, especially with a project from New York that helped focus on better ways of teaching mathematics to young people. Almost all of us here have felt some sense of ownership of the America COMPETES legislation: The majority leader and the minority leader were the principal sponsors, and 70 of us cosponsored it. So we saw the need for it. Now we need to apply even more focus and discipline on a different goal, which is clean energy independence. That is why I am going to Oak Ridge on May 9 to propose a second Manhattan Project for clean energy independence. I believe the work we did during the America COMPETES Act over the last 3 years has important lessons for how we solve the energy challenge. Let's remember how America COMPETES happened. Three years ago, in May of 2005, a bipartisan group of us asked the National Academies to tell Congress in priority order the 10 most important steps we could take to keep America's brain power advantage. Basically, we were asking for the antidote to the problems set out in Tom Friedman's book, ``The World is Flat.'' By October 2005, the academies had assembled what might be called a ``small diverse group of great minds,'' chaired by Norm Augustine, a member of the Academy of Engineering, which presented to the Congress and the President 20 specific recommendations in a report called ``Rising Above the Gathering Storm.'' We worked with the Bush administration in a number of ``homework sessions'' to refine the proposals, and we considered a number of other very good proposals by different competitiveness commissions. Then, in January of 2006, President Bush outlined his American Competitiveness Initiative to double over 10 years basic research for the physical sciences and engineering, and he included money to do that in his budgets that he proposed 2 years ago, 1 year ago, and this year. As I mentioned earlier, the Republican and Democratic leaders of the Senate became the principal sponsors of the legislation. That didn't change even when the Senate changed from Republican to Democrat. Last week, I telephoned Ralph Cicerone, the president of the National Academy of Sciences. I told him about my proposed May 9 Oak Ridge speech. He told me about an address he made this past Monday before the annual meeting of the National Academy of Sciences on America's energy future. That study will be completed in 2010. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that, following my remarks, the remarks of Ralph Cicerone be printed in the Record from the 145th annual meeting of the Academy of Sciences on Monday.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, today most Americans are struggling with filling out their tax returns which are due tomorrow. This week I am introducing legislation that will make it possible for an American taxpayer to file his or her tax return on one page, a one-page optional flat tax on individuals and businesses at the rate of 19 percent for the first two years and 17 percent thereafter. Think what a change that would be. Taxpayers spend an average of over 26 hours to complete tax returns; and 13.6 hours just to complete form 1040. Think how different it would be to simply fill out one page and turn that in. In 2005, taxpayers spent 6 billion hours and approximately $265 billion to comply with the Tax Code. Think how much extra leisure time or productive work time we could have if every American had the option of a one-page simplified tax return. Mr. President, $705 was the estimated compliance cost for a Tennessean in 2005. And operating costs for the Internal Revenue Service almost tripled between 1970 and 2004. Think how much money we would save if every American had the option of filing a one-page, 17- percent flat tax and if every American business had the option of doing the same. Here is what the optional flat tax legislation I will be introducing this week will do. As I mentioned earlier, it will simplify the Tax Code by providing an optional flat tax on individuals and businesses. It will be a 19-percent flat tax for the first 2 years, 17 percent flat tax after the first 2 years, and it would create the option to file, as I mentioned, a simple one-page return. The legislation I am introducing is almost identical to H.R. 1040 introduced by Congressman Michael Burgess, a Republican from Texas, in the House of Representatives. Congressman Burgess introduced his legislation on February 2007 and it has six cosponsors. My legislation is very straightforward. If an individual selects the option to pay a flat tax in lieu of the current income tax, the option is irrevocable. Under the flat tax, taxable income has a very simple definition. It will consist simply of wages and pensions. You do not start paying taxes on your income--wages and pensions--until you reach a certain exemption level. For a married couple filing jointly, the exemption level is $25,580, indexed to inflation. For the single head of a household, you wouldn't start paying taxes until you reached $16,330, indexed for inflation; for a single person, $12,790, indexed for inflation; and $5,510 for each dependent. For example, a family of four would not pay the flat tax until the family's combined income reached $36,600. That is $25,580 for joint filers plus $5,510 times two for the two dependents. No other deductions would exist. This optional flat tax would eliminate the marriage penalty, so it is pro-family. This optional flat tax would eliminate the millionaires tax, which was put in place in the late 1960s to catch a few millionaires and today is catching millions of middle-class Americans. It is called the alternative minimum tax or AMT. The optional flat tax for businesses is equally straightforward. It gives the business the option to pay a flat tax in lieu of the current corporate tax structure. Once a business selects this option, it is irrevocable. As it is on the individual income tax form, there is a 19- percent tax rate for the first 2 years and then a 17-percent tax rate for all other years. Businesses would be taxed on the difference of total revenue minus expenses--again, a very simple definition of income. Expenses would include wages, pensions, and the costs of new business equipment. This would provide for the immediate expensing of business capital equipment. This immediate expensing should be a very pro-growth provision in our Tax Code--rather than the current Code which requires spreading it out over a number of years. No other deductions would exist. The current tax system is overly complicated and lengthy. The Tax Code and corresponding regulations are over 67,000 pages and include 7 million words. It was only 400 pages in 1913 when the Federal income tax was first introduced, and it has now grown to over 67,000 pages. Taxpayers are expected to understand and comply with this complicated Tax Code and it gets increasingly impossible to do. That is why I, and a great many Americans and American businesses, will welcome the opportunity to file a one-page, simplified flat tax in lieu of the current system. The optional flat tax that I propose is intended to be revenue neutral. It is intended, in other words, neither to raise more revenues than the current tax system or less revenues than the current tax system. Arguably, a simpler tax will raise more revenues because a great many people pay less in taxes because they simply do not understand the forms. But the intention of my legislation is that the taxes collected, the revenue level, will be the same. Finally, I urge that our nation's revenue level is not about to stay the same. Already the largest share of the average American's budget goes to pay taxes. Taxes are high. Americans currently spend 113 days of every year working to pay their Federal, State, and local taxes-- almost twice the number of days they work to pay for housing and more than three times the number of days they work to pay for food. Beginning in 2010, the amount of time Americans currently spend working to satisfy their tax bills will increase as millions of lower- and middle-income Americans and small businesses face significant tax hikes. Democratic leaders in Congress have already allowed the state and local sales tax exemption, which affects Tennesseans, to expire. That is $400 a year for 600,000 Tennesseans, and the Democrats appear to be ready to let tax relief for millions of lower and middle-income Americans meet the same fate when those tax levels expire in 2010. Failure of Congress to act to stop these tax hikes will result in the largest tax increase in United States history, and that is one of the worst things we could do to the family budget. Taxes are too high today and we are about to face the largest tax increase in United States history. But while we are debating tax issues in the Senate, we can do something much simpler so that next year, when Americans go about completing their tax returns, they do not spend an average of 26 hours. Instead, they fill out one page. They do not take an average of 13.6 hours to complete form 1040; they fill out one page. Compliance costs are not $265 billion; they are dramatically reduced. Compliance costs for Tennesseans, $705 dollars in 2005, go down by hundreds of dollars a year. The operating costs of the IRS ought to be cut, instead of increasing, as they review one-page optional tax forms. The same would be true for businesses who also would have the option of filing a flat 17 percent tax, on one page. So as we look ahead to tomorrow and filing our tax returns, and we think about the upcoming debate about whether to stop the largest tax increase in history, let's get on a constructive page and say to the American people: By this time next year, April 15, 2009, you will have the option of filing a one-page Federal income tax return with a 19-percent rate for 2 years and 17 percent rate thereafter; businesses will get the same thing. It will save money. It will encourage growth, and it will relieve a great deal of anxiety that occurs every spring when April 15 rolls around. I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. ALEXANDER. I am prepared to go ahead.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. I ask that the Chair let me know when 2 minutes remain because Senator Kyl may be back as a cosponsor. Mr. President, I rise in favor of the Alexander-Kyl amendment No. 4429, which we hope is a helpful amendment to the Ensign-Cantwell amendment. Let me try to say this in two different ways. If you care about climate change, here is what our amendment will do. It will extend from 1 year to 2 the production tax credit for all qualified renewable sources of electricity. In other words, these emerging renewable energies, which have the capacity to work 24 hours a day, would have 2 years, as well as wind. Second, it would mean that wind would not get all the money but that some others would have more time to respond to the incentives we are creating with these tax credits. Let me use a story to illustrate. Let's say a family has several children. One of them older. Dad calls a meeting and says: I have $3 billion extra, which is the amount of money we are talking about for the Ensign-Cantwell amendment. Let's give it to the overgrown son who is still living at home who has gotten most of the allowance money for the last 16 years. Let's give him another year. Mom, who is a little wiser, says: It is nice for you to want to give an allowance to the children, but what about all these other children-- open-loop biomass and small irrigation power and landfill gas and trash combustion. Instead of giving all the money to the son living at home, let's give some to all the children, including the overgrown son. That is what we would do if we adopt the Alexander-Kyl amendment. According to the Energy Information Administration, the production tax credit Senator Ensign wants to extend for a year, 97 percent of it went to wind in Fiscal Year 2007, which has gotten most of our renewable electricity tax credit money since 1992. So the Ensign- Cantwell amendment is being advertised as helping renewable energy. It adds another $3 billion over the next 10 years to the $11 billion we have already invested in wind and these other promising children. Wind only works when it wants to. These emerging technologies might work when they are told to. We would like to include them. Wind would still get more of the money than anybody else, but it would not get 97 percent. It would not get almost all of it. There is another reason to favor the Alexander-Kyl amendment. That would be if you care about the spending of tax dollars. According to the Energy Information Administration, we spend 53 more times per megawatt hour on wind than we do on coal in subsidies, and coal provides half our electricity. We spend 94 more times on wind per hour than we do on natural gas which produces clean electricity; 15 times more on wind per megawatt hour than we do on nuclear; 26 more per megawatt hour than we do on biomass; 25 times more than we do on geothermal; 35 times more than we do on hydroelectric; 17 times more than we do on landfill gas. We spend 27 times more per megawatt hour to subsidize wind, a proven technology that only works when it wants to, than we do on all the other renewables, 27 to 1. That is not a wise use of tax dollars. We urge support for the Alexander-Kyl amendment so these technologies, and wind as well, will have a 2-year extension of the tax credit instead of 1 and so all these promising children can help with climate change and clean air rather than giving all the money to one overgrown son who ought to be out on his own by now. I reserve the remainder of my time.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, let me emphasize this point. No. 1, the Alexander-Kyl amendment has more certainty. It extends the production tax credit from 1 year to 2 for all these. Second, the distinguished Senator from Washington mentioned solar power. Solar asked to be out of the production tax credit 3 years ago because all the money in the production tax credit was going to wind. In the Energy Policy Act of 2005, I was the lead sponsor of the amendment adding the investment tax credit for solar power. No one loses under the Alexander amendment No. 4429, except wind is treated similar to everybody else. It gets 1 cent per kilowatt hour. That means it will still get more of the money than anybody in the production tax credit. But open-loop biomass, all these emerging renewable technologies will suddenly have a fighting chance to get some of the money that since 1992 has almost all gone to one proven technology. That is not a wise use of taxpayer dollars. It is not a good use of funds to continue to over subsidize wind, which is now a mature energy technology. Two years instead of one is a vote yes.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. I ask unanimous consent that a member of my staff, Jack Wells, be granted the privileges of the floor during this discussion.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. I thank the Senator from Illinois for his friendship, and we both admire a great coach and a great team and a great performance, which we saw last night. I thank the Chair.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Of course.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from South Carolina for his courtesy, and the Senator from Arizona as well, and I note the presence on the floor of the Senator from Illinois and the Senator from Connecticut as well. I am sure a great many of the men and women of our Armed Forces, over the last few days, have been watching basketball when they could, and yesterday I expressed my pride in the University of Memphis Tigers, how they got to the finals of the NCAA Men's Division in basketball only to be defeated by a very good Kansas team. Well, today I have even better news. Last night, the University of Tennessee Lady Vols won their eighth NCAA women's basketball championship. They defeated an extraordinarily good Stanford team. The Tennessee team has very good players. The Senator from Illinois, Mr. Durbin, and I talked earlier this morning about Candace Parker from Illinois, from his home State. She may very well be the best woman college basketball player already. She is likely to be the first in the draft today of the WNBA, and this is her last year. She has graduated and has played 3 years.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Nevada for his comments, and I thank him for his effort. He and the Senator from Washington, Ms. Cantwell, are making a constructive effort to give Federal support for emerging renewable energy. Clean renewable energy is very important for our country. I have a chart here which lists the sources of renewable electricity qualified to receive the production tax credit. This production tax credit is the subject, in part, of the Ensign-Cantwell amendment No. 4419. But what Senator Kyl and I have is a second-degree amendment No. 4429 that we will offer when the Ensign- Cantwell amendment comes up, which is a way to improve that amendment. Basically, what we have been hearing from entrepreneurs and those who are inventing new technologies, which would help reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, is: We need some certainty in whatever support you give us from the Federal Government. The Ensign-Cantwell amendment would--the first part of it--would allocate about $3 billion to the production tax credit for 1 more year. It would extend the ability of renewable electricity to qualify for the production tax credit. What we would say is, let's do that for 2 more years. I will explain that in just a minute. One might say: Well, how are you going to pay for that? The way we would propose paying for it is to put wind in the same category as emerging renewable energies, make it also available for a 1-cent subsidy per kilowatt hour, and that amount of money alone would make it possible for us to have a 2-year extension of the production tax credit at the same cost that Senator Ensign and Senator Cantwell propose in their amendment. Now, let me explain what I mean by that. But first, our goal with the Alexander-Kyl amendment would be to extend the production tax credit for 2 years, to focus it on emerging renewable electricity technologies, to focus it on those that have a capacity for supplying baseload electricity; in other words, electricity production that we can rely on all day and all night. If you want to turn your light on in the middle of the night or operate your computer at 4 p.m., whether the sun is shining or the wind is blowing, you need reliable sources of baseload electricity, and we would like to treat all of these energies fairly. Here is what the law now does and has done since 1992. It pays the producer of this kind of electricity, renewable electricity, 2 cents per kilowatt hour for the electricity it produces. Right now, the 2 cents is going to closed-loop biomass and to geothermal; that is heat coming out of the ground and is being converted into clean electricity. It used to go to solar, but that was removed in 2005, and it goes to wind today. So those three--closed-loop biomass, geothermal, and wind-- all get 2 cents per kilowatt hour. These other emerging technologies on this side of the chart just get 1 cent per kilowatt hour. What we propose to do is move wind from the two-cent category to the one-cent category. Wind would still get 1 cent per kilowatt hour. It would end up getting more of the money than any of these others, but it would focus more of the dollars in the Cantwell-Ensign bill on emerging baseload energy by providing more time for these to be developed. Now, that is not as complicated as it sounds. Let me try to say why it is necessary to do this. Most of the speeches we hear around here about the production tax credit say: Oh, we need to have renewable energy. We need to have everything. We need to have biomass. We need to have small irrigation power. We need to have landfill gas. We need to have trash combustion, qualified hydropower, and now wave and tidal. That is new. That is when you put a turbine in the East River in New York City and the water turns the turbines instead of the wind. It turns out there is more power in the water. In fact, it destroyed the turbines, so they are going to have to start over again. But these are emerging experimental technologies. So we say on the Senate floor that we are going to have all of these renewable generating sources, but the fact is we don't do that. We are now committed to $11.5 billion in tax expenditures, according to the Joint Tax Committee, on wind power alone over the next 10 years--$11.5 billion on wind power alone. By adopting the Ensign- Cantwell amendment, based on my best estimates, we would add another $3 billion over the next 10 years to wind alone, and almost none of it would go over here to these other renewable electricity technologies. Now, why would I say that? It is because a new report by the Energy Information Administration, which I requested in May 2007 and received this week, said that wind power accounted for 97 percent of the total renewable electricity production tax credit in fiscal year 2007. Now, Senator Bingaman said earlier when we debated the Energy bill in June 2007 that he relied on the figure that 75 percent of all of the production tax credit was being used for wind power. That was an estimate from last year from the Joint Committee on Taxation. But the Energy Information Administration in this new report says that wind received 97 percent of the production tax credit in Fiscal Year 2007. I am not saying wind power is good or wind power is bad by saying this; I am saying if you are saying with the Ensign-Cantwell amendment that you are offering support for all of these different emerging technologies, that is not going to be the case because according to the Energy Information Administration, 97 percent of it went for wind. Wind has another difference with all of these: the issue of supplying baseload power. The problem with wind is the limitation on it. Each one of these has some limitation, but one of wind's limitations is you can only use it when the wind blows. You don't store wind power; you use it when the wind blows. So if you are the city of Los Angeles or you are the city of Little Rock or the city of Nashville and it is 4 o'clock in the afternoon and you want to turn on your air-conditioners and operate your computer and turn on your light when you hear a noise, you don't want to first check to see whether the wind is blowing. So it is not a baseload power, it is not a controllable power source. It has a severe limitation. Now, solar had much the same limitation when it was--insofar as the technology has developed so far. For solar, we generally buy panels and put them on the roof and we use the electricity that comes from the panels, and that can be very useful, just as wind mills have always been useful on farms for occasional power. But the solar industry requested to be taken out of this production tax credit because it wasn't getting any of it. It was all going to wind. Now there is another provision for an investment tax credit for solar. Extending this investment tax credit is in the Ensign amendment. I fully support that. That would help, for example, new solar thermal plants where you put a lot of mirrors out on the ground, collect the Sun, create steam, put the steam in the ground, and then you can use it on a continuous basis, not just when the Sun shines. Pacific Gas and Electric has a commercial plant that they are going to build out West for that. Let's see if it works. If it does, it will be a great thing for our country. We only have a limited amount of money available to support emerging renewable energy, so why would we spend virtually all of it--97 percent--for a proven technology--wind power--that we have been subsidizing since 1992 and to which we have committed $11.5 billion over the next 10 years, if we don't do anything else, just the wind power. And, with the Ensign-Cantwell amendment, we are about to put in another $3 billion for wind power over the next ten years, acting as if we are also doing it for open-looped biomass, small irrigation power, landfill gas, trash combustion, qualified hydropower, wave and tidal, and it won't get anything. It will all go to these big wind turbines. Let me go to another chart and give an example of what this has produced. We hear a lot of talk about Federal subsidies for oil and Federal subsidies for coal and Federal subsidies for this and that, and the oil companies are called up and everybody gets excited because we are talking about $3.50, $4 for gasoline. We have a right to be excited about that. We don't like to send our gas money overseas to people who are trying to kill us, so we are upset about that. But we are talking here about Federal subsidies for electricity, not gasoline. I asked the Energy Information Administration in May 2007 to please tell me what is the Federal taxpayer doing to support the different ways we produce electricity in the country. The information came back this week, and it is really pretty interesting. Coal. Coal is half of all of the electricity we use in the United States. We are not a desert island. We use 25 percent of all of the energy in the world. If we are going to be realistic about it, we need to find a way to burn coal cleanly, which means we need to recapture the carbon if we care about climate change. But right now, we subsidize coal to the tune of 44 cents per megawatt hour. We may not know what a megawatt hour is, but we can compare it to what we do for others. Refined coal is a very small part of coal, and it gets a very high subsidy. That is very interesting. I didn't know about that. That is a special subsidy which was put in for refined coal, but almost all the coal we burn gets 44 cents. Natural gas. Almost all the plants built to make new electricity in the 1990s were natural gas and petroleum. That is oil and gas. We assume it gets a lot of subsidies. It only gets 25 cents for a megawatt hour. Nuclear power. Nuclear plants generate 19 percent of all our electricity in America, but they are 70 percent of all our clean electricity. If we want to have clean air and to deal with climate change in this generation, nuclear power--other than conservation--is our best option because, with that, you have no nitrogen, no sulfur, and no mercury, which dirties the air, and you have no carbon. So 70 percent of our carbon-free electricity comes from nuclear power. How do we subsidize nuclear power? EIA's report says $1.59 per megawatt hour in Fiscal Year 2007? Biomass is a new renewable energy, which gets 89 cents. Geothermal. They are interesting new technologies that drill way down into the ground and out comes heat and you can heat your house from that. That is 92 cents per kilowatt hour. Hydroelectric, which is water over the dams. It is about 7 percent of all the electricity in America. It is clean, but you and I know how many new dams are going to be built. Not many more. Subsidizing that will not solve the problem of clean electricity for a country that uses 25 percent of all the electricity in the world. Solar is misleading. We are subsidizing it at the rate of $24 per megawatt hour, about 50 times that for coal. That is an infinitesimal amount for electricity. We don't sell much solar electricity to the grid today. It is from solar panels put on the roof. Then we have wind. That $11.5 billion we are already committed to spend to help developers build wind turbines all over America in places where it blows or doesn't blow, we are subsidizing the electricity produced by those wind turbines at the rate of $23 a megawatt hour in Fiscal Year 2007, while coal is less than a half dollar. That is 50 times the subsidy for coal. It is $1.59 for nuclear--70 percent of our clean energy--and wind is 2 percent of our clean energy. If we were subsidizing nuclear power at the same rate as wind, it would cost us $300 billion over the next 10 years. We don't have that much money in the United States with which to subsidize electricity. So go all the way down to the bottom, past landfill gas and municipal solid waste, and I have talked about that before. In Johnson City, TN, a company is using the landfill there and paying Johnson City a million dollars a year for that purpose because it produces electricity, and Johnson City is keeping its property taxes lower. It is worth, perhaps, subsidizing that a while longer. We are doing that at the rate of 13 cents per megawatt hour. All renewables--and this is supposed to be a bill about encouraging renewables--are being subsidized at $2.80 per megawatt hour. Yet the Ensign-Cantwell legislation would add $3 billion to wind power, which is already being subsidized at $24 per megawatt hour. That is not a wise stewardship of dollars. What Senator Kyl and I are seeking to do is improve the Ensign-Cantwell bill. The objective there, if I can go back to the other chart, is this. The objective is to identify some of these emerging renewable technologies that have the capacity to turn into base-load technologies and encourage them. They are more likely to be encouraged if we give them a 2-year extension for the production tax credit instead of 1 year. That is what we would do. They are more likely to get some of the money if we don't let wind gobble it all up, as it did last year. Why give $3 billion more to a proven technology when our goal is to support emerging technology? That is what we are trying to do. If the Senate would like to resolve the gridlock and spend $6 billion or $7 billion in support of helping us find ways to encourage new emerging base-load technologies, the way to do that would be to support Ensign-Cantwell as amended by Alexander-Kyl. Wind is getting $11.5 billion over 10 years, plus many other subsidies. With the Alexander-Kyl amendment, wind would get 1 cent per kilowatt hour and most of the $3 billion we are talking about over a longer, two-year period. But some of these other emerging renewable energies would have a fighting chance to get some of the money because they would have more time to plan and invest. I have been visited by a lot of people who want to see some support for renewable energy. I want to see that too. I was the principal sponsor of the solar energy tax credit, increasing it in 2005. I would like to see solar thermal plants. I would like to see support for open-loop biomass, and small irrigation power, landfill gas, trash combustion, qualified hydropower and wave and tidal. But the Ensign legislation would not do it by extending the production tax credit for 1 year because wind will gobble it all up such as it did last year. The others will have a fighting chance if we extend the production tax credit for 2 years and treat wind like all these other ones, particularly now that it is proven. That is a wiser use of our money and puts us on a better path toward cleaner air and dealing with climate change.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, if it is agreeable with the other Senators, I ask unanimous consent for 4 minutes, to be followed by the Senator from California.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask through the Chair whether there is more time or whether the Chair would like to reclaim the time.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, yesterday I made a few remarks about an amendment Senator Kyl and I have offered to an Ensign-Cantwell amendment, and today I wish to place in the Congressional Record a couple of documents. In May 2007, I requested that the Energy Information Administration conduct a study of Federal subsidies of electricity, including a comparison of subsidies for different fuel types. Last week, I received a 250-page study in response to my request. I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the following: a copy of my May 17, 2007, letter to the EIA Administrator, Guy Caruso; a copy of the April 2, 2008, cover letter from Mr. Caruso that arrived with the EIA's 250-page study; and finally, a table titled ``Federal Subsidies of Electric Power'' that is based on information that was included in the executive summary of EIA's study.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, today General Petraeus comes to the Senate. I suggest that we listen to the General. When he reported to the Senate last September, some Senators were unwilling to listen. One even said that she thought that in order to believe the reports from Iraq it required a willing suspension of disbelief. Let us remember what has happened since then. I can remember last August visiting with General Petraeus in Baghdad. I handed him a paper that said: It is time for a new strategy in Iraq. I had been urging President Bush and the Senate to adopt the Iraq Study Group recommendations. In my view, what General Petraeus has done since that time has been to adopt the Iraq Study Group recommendations with some amendments. We are acknowledging that it is time to shift the mission from combat to support, province by province. We are acknowledging that there will be a long-term presence of the United States in Iraq, but as General Petraeus said, it is steadily diminishing. We are acknowledging that this is an important step-up in diplomatic and political efforts. As General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker speak today, the questions we should ask are: What progress are we making down this new path to bring this war to a successful conclusion? Second, now that there is widespread agreement that there has been success since last summer with an American-led military surge, what are the prospects for an Iraqi-led political and diplomatic surge, letting the Iraqis invite their neighbors to embassies in Baghdad, reconciling their differences among themselves, and paying for more of their own bills? So instead of suspending our disbelief, let's listen to the General and to Ambassador Crocker, acknowledge the progress they are making and make it easier for them to progress on the diplomatic and political fronts. I thank the managers of the bill for their courtesy. I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Montana especially. There is sorrow in our Bluff City on the Mississippi River and across Tennessee today because the noble University of Memphis Tigers lost last night to Kansas in the finals of the NCAA National Championship basketball tournament. But there is also reason for great pride. The ebullient John Calapiari and his team gave Memphis a new source of pride and the sport a season to remember, winning more games than any college basketball team ever has. Years from now, fans will be talking about the magical Douglas-Roberts, the indomitable Dorsey, the ubiquitous Anderson, the reliable Dozier, the explosive Rose, and the super sub Taggart. They have given fans a great year. They have helped unify Tennessee's largest city. They should hold their heads high as we look toward next year.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business until the managers of the legislation wish to proceed.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, over the last several weeks, a number of visitors have come to Capitol Hill urging us to support renewable energy. There is a lot of interest in this country for so-called renewable energy. The idea is for us to be less dependent on energy that is shipped from other parts of the world. Some of those places are unfriendly to us. A number of us are also very concerned about climate change, and we would like cleaner energy. Renewable energy is usually cleaner energy. Some of us, as I do, live in parts of the country where clean air is a problem. We have coal plants that produce sulfur and nitrogen, and now we have become more concerned about mercury, so we are interested in clean air. So if there is some way to find new sources of renewable energy which can help our country have cleaner air, deal with climate change, and be less dependent on other countries, that would be a terrific thing for the United States of America. Senator Ensign and Senator Cantwell, the Senators from Nevada and Washington, have offered to the housing bill an amendment that would provide support for renewable energies. I would like to talk about the Ensign-Cantwell amendment No. 4419, and I hope I would be construed as talking about it in a friendly way. Because Mr. Kyl, the Senator from Arizona, and I have a proposal, amendment No. 4429, which we have already introduced that we believe would improve the Ensign-Cantwell amendment in support of renewable energies. I would like to talk about that amendment for a few minutes this evening. Today, the Federal support for renewable energy is basically in a piece of legislation called the renewable electricity production tax credit. That gives 2 cents or 1 cent for each kilowatt hour produced of renewable energy to a variety of emerging technologies. In summary, the Ensign-Cantwell amendment extends the production tax credit for 1 year in its current form, with the addition of wave and tidal as a qualified emerging technology. Senator Kyl and I propose to double the amount of time that the tax credit is extended from 1 year to 2 years to focus it more on emerging rather than proven technologies, to focus it on baseload technologies--that is to say technologies that will produce large amounts of reliable electricity around the clock and not just from time to time--and that would treat the various technologies the same, and it wouldn't cost any more than the estimated $6 billion or $7 billion over the next 10 years that the Ensign-Cantwell amendment would cost. So that is our goal: to extend from 1 year to 2 years the extension; to focus on emerging baseload technologies to treat wind fairly, which has been the proven technology that has received most of the support to date; and not to spend more money than Senator Ensign and Senator Cantwell have proposed. Here is a picture of where we are today. The renewable electricity production tax credit began in 1992. As with many Government subsidies, in the early stages it was suggested that it would just be there for a while until the technology was proven and then we would step back and let it flourish on its own in the marketplace. But the year 1992 was a long time ago. Here are the technologies that today get Federal support through the renewable electricity production tax credit. Getting 2 cents per kilowatt hour are closed-loop biomass, which is the burning of plant materials grown specifically for energy production; and geothermal, heat from underground. Solar received this support for several years, but it was removed in 2005 because this is a tax credit that focuses on energy produced, and most people who use solar power put panels on their roofs so they weren't really selling that power to the grid or to the utility company. So the solar manufacturers and others came to me, among others, and said this production tax credit isn't doing anything for them. In the Energy Policy Act of 2005, I was the sponsor of a proposal that increased the amount of Federal subsidy for the solar panels. Now, there is within the Federal law a separate provision that provides an investment tax credit for what appears to be a very promising idea called solar thermal powerplants. Instead of putting a panel on your roof, what you would have instead is a whole field full of mirrors that would then catch the Sun, turn it into steam, put the steam underground, and then you could use the steam as you need it to produce electricity. What people often forget about solar and wind energy is it is available when the Sun shines and when the wind blows, and that may not be when you want to turn your air-conditioning on or run your computer. The solar thermal plant has the potential of being a 50-megawatt plant or a 100-megawatt plant or a 500-megawatt plant. Solar thermal is beyond the experimental stage. I believe Pacific Gas and Electric on the west coast is putting in one 500-megawatt solar thermal plant. There may be another. If there can be solar thermal powerplants, that would be a tremendous addition to our arsenal of electricity-producing facilities in this country because most parts of America can benefit from solar power if the technology can catch the sunlight and we can store this solar energy. Basically, with solar and wind, you have always had to use it or lose it, and if the wind blew at midnight but your air-conditioner was on at 5 o'clock, the wind power, or the solar power for that matter, was not of much value. So closed loop biomass, geothermal, and wind are receiving a tax credit of 2 cents per kilowatt hour of electricity produced. These have been preferred. This is an example of the Government doing what I don't much like, along with many others on this side of the aisle, which is called picking and choosing technologies. I would rather see, if we are going to subsidize toward an objective, that we let the marketplace pick the technology. But we, in our wisdom, have said today biomass, geothermal, and wind get 2 cents per kilowatt hour of electricity produced and sold to a utility for distribution to customers. Now, over here on the 1-cent side, 1 cent per kilowatt hour had been and would, under the Ensign-Cantwell bill, continue to be open-loop biomass, small irrigation power, landfill gas, trash combustion-- Johnson City, TN, made a contract with a private company that takes its landfill trash and over the next number of years makes electricity from it and pays the city $1 million a year, which helps reduce property taxes. So that is promising. Also, qualified hydropower, about 7 percent of our electricity in the United States comes from rivers and dams. It is small, new hydropower projects that are qualified to receive this tax credit. Wave and tidal facilities are interesting. In the East River in New York, they are taking what amounts to be wind turbines and putting them under the water. There is more energy in the waves and in the rivers than there is in the air; in fact, so much that it broke the blades from the turbines and they are having to replace them, but at least there is energy there. We would subsidize that to the tune of 1 cent per kilowatt hour under the Ensign-Cantwell proposal. Here is the difference that Senator Kyl and I would make. We would move wind to the 1-cent per kilowatt-hour column. Why would we do that? Because wind is a proven technology. We know it works. Where the wind blows, such as in Texas and the Great Plains states, wind works. The electricity produced is competitive. Where it doesn't blow, such as on Buffalo Mountain in Tennessee--the Tennessee Valley Authority ratepayers are paying some big bill to developers in some other big city to put up a bunch of wind turbines on top of our mountaintops that only work 10 percent of the time in August when we need the electricity the most. So it may work in Minnesota and South Dakota, but it doesn't work in the foothills of Tennessee. So wind is a proven technology. We would like to focus more on technologies that have the capacity of becoming baseload technologies; that is, that might produce large amounts of electricity all day and all night if we needed it. Wind can't do that. Solar, until lately, hasn't been able to do that. But biomass, geothermal, irrigation power, landfill gas, trash combustion, hydropower, wave and tidal, all of those have a potential--a potential--to substitute for what we use today, which is primarily coal, nuclear power, and gas. So the Alexander-Kyl proposal would, for about the same amount of money, give 2 years of business certainty to those emerging renewable energy technologies. It would focus then on the emerging ones, not the proven ones. It would focus on those that have the capacity to produce baseload power. It would treat wind fairly because wind would still get, under our amendment, 2 years instead of 1; and wind would, based on my computation, get more of the Federal dollars than any other of the types of technology, and the extended tax credit would, as amended, cost about the same. Now, let me go to a picture of where our renewable electricity comes from today. This green line, this is wood, burning wood; bonfires, one might say. We call that biomass, I guess, in scientific terms. Biomass has consistently produced about 35 million Megawatt-hours of electricity over recent years. That is a fair amount of electricity. This is waste, such as the landfill at Johnson City, TN, that I was describing, where we take what we have disposed of and turn it into electricity. That is beginning to amount to something. Our waste is being burned to consistently generate about 15 million Megawatt-hours of electricity. The red line is geothermal. It is also consistently generating about 15 million Megawatt-hours of electricity per year. I have seen some of these technologies. You drill deeply into the ground, and the heat comes up and you can use that on a regular basis. The yellow line is wind. We can see that it has increased rapidly since 1999. It has been the technology that has grown the most, although it is still less than 1 percent of all of the electricity that we produce. Then down here at the bottom is a blue line which is solar. The reason the solar is so small is because this represents electricity which is sold to the utilities; as we say, sold into the grid. Most people haven't sold their solar power into the grid. They have just put the panels on top of their houses or their businesses and used it when it was available to reduce their demand for electricity from the grid. Now, let me go to the larger overall picture of where our electricity comes from because if we are talking about a realistic use of limited dollars--and we do have limited dollars in the Federal Government-- sometimes it doesn't seem as though we know that. Where will we put those dollars? Ensign-Cantwell say let's add about $6 billion or $7 billion toward this worthy goal of renewable energy. Well, let's look at the whole picture. This is where our electricity comes from today. We are not a desert island. The United States of America uses a lot of electricity, about 25 percent of all of the electricity in the world for about 5 percent of the people. That is the number of us who are Americans. How do we produce that electricity? Today, almost half of it is coal. Half of the electricity is coal. If coal disappeared, the lights would go off, the industries would stop, the computers would shut down, and there would be a revolution in our country. Forty-eight percent comes from coal. Next comes gas, natural gas. During the 1990s, almost all the new powerplants were natural gas. The advantage to that was they were predictable, and easy to build. Investors in utilities could make practical business decisions, and they were cleaner than coal in terms of nitrogen and sulfur and mercury and carbon. The problem is it drove the cost of natural gas from $2 a unit to--at one point in the last few years $14 or $15 a unit--and begin to drive almost all of the chemical industry jobs and many other manufacturing jobs out of the United States. It began to drive up the cost of farming so that many farmers have a hard time making a profit because natural gas is used to make fertilizer, and that drove up the cost of food to people who couldn't afford to pay more for it. So using natural gas increasingly for electricity is not a good idea for our country right now, particularly since the Congress the other day voted down my amendment by 52 to 47 to allow us to drill offshore for more natural gas so that we could increase the supply and reduce the price and reduce our dependence on foreign natural gas. So that is second. And third is nuclear power. Nineteen percent of all of our electricity in America comes from nuclear powerplants, which have the advantage of having no nitrogen, no sulfur, no mercury, and no carbon, if one is concerned about climate change. Then comes hydroelectric, which in 2007 produced 6 percent of our electricity in the United States. This is electricity from our rivers and the dams. There are even some parts of the United States where people want to take the dams out of the rivers for a variety of environmental reasons, which may be good reasons, but that will reduce one source of clean electricity. Then we get down to oil, petroleum. Sometimes we get oil confused with electricity. We do not use much oil to make much electricity in this country. We use some natural gas. We use oil in automobiles for fuel, but we don't use it for electricity. Actually, it produces about the same amount of electricity as all the renewable technologies put together. Wood is less than 1 percent; waste is half of 1 percent; geothermal, half of 1 percent; solar is not sold into the grid; wind is not even 1 percent. The point is, the renewables are less than 3 percent of the electricity we use. We live in not only a big economy but a growing economy. The Tennessee Valley Authority, in the area where I live, in 7 States, has said to me they need 700 more megawatts of electricity every year during this next few years. The Dominion Power Company, which is Virginia, I read in the Washington Post the other day, is estimating they need 400 more megawatts. Madam President, 700 megawatts is more than one gas plant or more than one coal plant or a little more than half of a nuclear powerplant, which today takes 8 or 10 years to build. We not only use a lot of electricity, primarily produced from coal, nuclear, and gas, and very little from renewables, but it is growing, and if it doesn't grow, our incomes will go down and we will not enjoy that same high standard of living. I know, having been a Governor, when I was recruiting Nissan to come to Tennessee and Saturn to come to Tennessee--now one-third of our manufacturing jobs in Tennessee are automotive jobs, and we have nearly 1,000 suppliers of auto parts in Tennessee--one of the most important items in our favor after location and a right-to-work law is the supply of large amounts of reliable, low-cost, clean electricity because that is not available everywhere in the United States and certainly not everywhere in the world. This is the picture of where we get our electricity and what we are talking about in the Ensign-Cantwell amendment. The amendment Senator Kyl and I have is to increase this renewable electricity from about 3 percent of all the electricity we produce to something a little higher. But in the next 10 or 12 years, it is not going to be a lot higher. It will be somewhat higher, and we hope we stumble upon something that will make a big difference. Even though, for example, wind has been around and heavily subsidized since 1992, it is still only eight-tenths of 1 percent of all the electricity produced in the United States. The only difference in this next chart title is the word ``clean.'' We care about clean really for three reasons: nitrogen, sulfur, and mercury. Federal ozone standards were stiffened recently. That means Knoxville, Chattanooga, Memphis, and cities in our region have to work harder to have cleaner air to meet those standards because a lot of the dirty air comes in from other parts of the United States which have dirty plants, mainly coal plants. The clean electricity, which we prefer--and this is the reason the TVA is now focused on nuclear production--is 69 percent nuclear. That is an important figure for anyone who cares about clean air and climate change. Nearly 70 percent of all the clean electricity produced in the United States today is nuclear power; 21 percent of it is hydroelectric. There are not going to be more dams on rivers. And this little bit here, which all adds up to about 8 or 10 percent, is renewable energy. So if you care about climate change and if you care about clean air in this generation or in the next 10 years, you better look at nuclear or hydroelectric. Hydroelectric will not grow rapidly because there are not going to be a lot more dams, or we better be realistic about renewable or look at one other area, which would be conservation. What have we done with our money? We have tried to focus, so we say, on renewable energy. I noticed in the debates here people talk about all the different kinds of renewable energy. The fact is, almost all of our investment has gone to wind. This, I imagine, would startle most Senators to know, that over the next 10 years, we are already committed to spending $11 billion subsidizing wind power although it produces less than 1 percent of our electricity and it does not produce it when we need it, it does it when the wind blows. But we have proven we can produce electricity from time-to-time when the wind blows. We have large amounts of huge turbines that are going up around the country, some in our most scenic areas, which in some parts of America are providing useful power, but at what cost? This is a recent report that I asked for and just received this week from the Energy Information Administration where I asked: How much are we spending of the Federal taxpayers' dollars to subsidize the electricity we are using in this country? Remember, coal produces about half the electricity we are using at this minute in the United States of America--44 cents per megawatt hour. Refined coal, which is a very small part of coal, is a very expensive subsidy--at this moment, the biggest Federal subsidy for electricity. For natural gas, almost nothing, a quarter per megawatt hour; nuclear, $1.59 per megawatt hour; biomass, 89 cents; geothermal, less than a dollar; hydroelectric, two-thirds of a dollar; solar, $24 per megawatt hour for Federal subsidies of electric power. This is a little misleading because, as I mentioned earlier, almost no one sells electricity today into the electric grid. That is all this represents. If you had extra electricity from the panels on your roof and you sold it to the local power company, that is what this would be. Only few people do that today. In the future, we may have solar thermal plants. Wind we have quite a bit of, and we spent $23.37 per megawatt hour actually produced for wind. Landfill gas, $1.37; municipal solid waste, 13 cents; all renewables average $2.80, and all sources, $1.65. I would argue wind is over subsidized, that we are not making the wisest use of our Federal dollars when we take a proven technology and spend $24 per megawatt hour and we starve a lot of the other emerging technologies and we ignore what we are spending for the ones on which we rely. For example, we spend $24 per Megawatt hour for wind and $1.59 for nuclear. Nuclear produces 70 percent of our clean electricity. Wind produces about 2 percent of our clean electricity. If we were subsidizing nuclear power at the rate we subsidize wind, we would be spending $340 billion over the next 10 years for nuclear power. No one is proposing we do that. It would not be a wise expenditure even though it is a working technology that today provides most of our power, and if we are going to deal with climate change in a new generation, we would have more nuclear power. I am doing this to show how disproportionate our renewable energy subsidies have become. Coal provides half of our electricity. We have two problems with coal: one is it has too much of three pollutants--nitrogen, mercury, and sulfur--and the other is carbon. We can get the nitrogen, sulfur, and mercury out of coal almost entirely. So would it not be better to spend some of this money on coal and have clean air or to spend some of this money on investing in the recapture of carbon from coal plants so they can be operated cleanly? One of the major environmental organizations has a coal solution for climate change because it knows China is producing two new dirty coal plants a week, and unless we invent a clean way to use coal, which means also getting rid of the carbon, then the rest of the world will not use it. If we do it, they will do it also or they will suffocate. If they do not do it, we will soon suffocate because the air blows all around the world and comes back to Los Angeles and then Wichita and then to Knoxville, Nashville, and Memphis as well. This list of federal subsidies of electric power from the Energy Information Administration is a very revealing chart. It would suggest that at the very least, what we might do with a proven technology, wind, which is competitive where the wind blows and not competitive, obviously, where it doesn't, is take some of that money and focus it on some of the other emerging technologies which have been starved over the last 15 years because wind has gobbled up most of the money, and these new technologies have a capacity for being baseload technologies. The solar thermal powerplant is a very good example. If it works for the Pacific Gas & Electric company, I bet you the Tennessee Valley Authority, within a short period of time, will start building it for reliable power plants. Why would they do that? Because last summer, in the middle of our drought, when we were all sweating and the rivers had run dry and lakes had run dry and our air-conditioners were turned up, the TVA had to go out and buy 6,000 or 7,000 megawatts of electricity. What did they buy? They bought natural gas because it was all that was available. They were paying--and I know my numbers are going to be a little off here--they were paying in the neighborhood of $78 or $80 per Megawatt hour for natural gas as compared to $2 per Megawatt hour for electricity from their hydro plants. They badly need some other form of clean energy. Why spend 2 cents per kilowatt hour on wind when we can still subsidize wind generously at 1 cent per kilowatt hour and release enough money to extend to 2 years the length of the subsidy for other emerging technologies? Just to be specific, the percentage of the renewable electricity production tax credit that goes for wind energy is 75 percent. In other words, 75 percent of all the money we give to renewable energies goes to wind. It does not go in meaningful amounts to this broad list of renewable technologies. Over a 10-year period, from fiscal year 2007 to 2016, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation, in a letter they wrote to me in May of 2007, we are committed to spend $11.5 billion, and the Ensign-Cantwell amendment would add another couple billion dollars to that. So we would be spending $13 billion or $14 billion for wind even though we are subsidizing at a rate of $24 per megawatt hour. Senator Bingaman, the chairman of the Energy Committee, said in the debate on the Energy bill in 2007 that wind will receive about 76 percent of the production tax credit subsidy over the next 10 years. According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, in another report, wind energy is estimated to be 74 percent of that, and it is projected to grow as a percentage of the total production tax credit. What we are doing is increasing our support for a technology that is proven, that is not reliable enough to be used for baseload or for peaking because it only works when the wind blows, you cannot store it, and it is already over subsidized by a massive amount compared to every form of electricity. The largest single Federal tax expenditure for electricity over the next 5 years is the renewable production tax credit, and 75 percent of that goes to one proven technology, wind, which is competitive where the wind blows, not competitive where it does not, is not reliable for baseload, and is not reliable for peaking. That is not being good stewards of the Federal taxpayers' dollars at a time when we really do need to encourage renewable electricity and we need to deal with climate change and with clean air. I have just a couple more points. As one might suspect, when you are subsidizing something at $24 per Megawatt hour as compared to $1.50 for nuclear and 25 cents for natural gas, you get a big surge in wind capacity. That is what happened during the period of the subsidy. Even with this rapid growth, wind produced 2.7 percent of our clean electricity, of only 0.8 percent of all our electricity. And as I have mentioned several times, wind energy is not reliable. You can't store it. It is not produced when you are likely to need it most. Another limitation on wind power is it is not available everywhere in the United States. There are some parts of the United States where wind power works fine, and there are some Members of the Senate who love to advocate wind power. You can see where those are. It is where the wind blows down from the North, and it blows on a reliable basis. So you can put up wind, and particularly if you are paying $24 per Megawatt hour to subsidize it, you are going to find a lot of investors in Chicago and New York and around this country that can make a big buck off putting wind up here where it is competitive and where they do not need the subsidy, or putting it down here where the wind doesn't blow, and they apparently get enough subsidy anyway. You may say: Well, if they only get paid when the wind blows, how do they make any money? Well, we have all kinds of tax subsidies for wind, and the production tax credit is one, but there are a number of other subsidies that I am looking for right now. There are subsidies in agriculture. There is the clean renewable energy bonds--the Federal Government. Those can help build the wind turbines. There is the Department of Energy grant incentive programs for renewable energy production. In the farm bill, there will be some renewable energy and energy-efficient grants and loans. Thirty- three million dollars of that goes to wind. There are a variety of State subsidies for wind. Twenty-four States have enacted renewable portfolio standards. We have gotten all excited about renewable energy, which is a good thing, but what we have forgotten to do to be careful to encourage a wide variety of forms of renewable energy, so that we can have reliable energy that has the capacity to be used as a base load or peak load. Then there is the other limitation that affects some people and doesn't affect others. Here is the Buffalo Mountain wind project in Tennessee. This is the only wind farm in the Southeastern United States. It is the only one the Tennessee Valley Authority has. There are 18 of these turbines here. They are tall and they are white. They are about twice as tall as the sky boxes in the football stadium at the University of Tennessee. Now the Senator from Michigan will smile at that, because Michigan and Tennessee have, for years, had a little friendly competition going about who has the largest stadium. We are up to about 107 thousand on a Saturday afternoon, and I think the University of Michigan is at 1,010 or 1,011 people. So they are a little ahead of us now. But to visualize, each of those stadiums have these large sky boxes, and each of these towers is twice as large as those sky boxes. Each one has blades extending from the goal line to opposite goal line. They are white, and they have flashing lights so you can see them from 20 miles away during the day. We are paying $24 per megawatt hour to subsidize that all over the country--only 25 cents an hour for natural gas--in a place where the wind doesn't blow. Last August, during the drought, that farm was operating at 10 percent. So it doesn't work there very well. My argument is for realism. I would like to see us have a realistic policy. I would like to have clean air and deal with climate change not only in this generation but in the next 10 years. To the extent we need to do that with electricity, we need to look first at conservation. The Tennessee Valley Authority operates at about 27,000 megawatts on the average, but every night it has about 7,000, 8,000, 9,000 or 10,000 megawatts of idle capacity. Now, some people remember how Ross Perot made his money. He noticed that in Texas, in the 1960s, the banks were closing at 5 and not using their computers. So he bought their time and came to the States and got a contract to manage Medicaid data, and he made a lot of money doing that. It is the same thing here. We have, in the TVA region, 7,000 or 8,000 megawatts of idle capacity at night. That is seven or eight nuclear power plants. That means we probably have 210,000 megawatts of idle nighttime electric capacity. We should be spending this $11 billion on smart meters that encourage people to buy electric cars and plug them in at night and use the idle capacity we have already built rather than paying $24 an hour for wind that is proven where it works and would not work where the wind doesn't blow. Or we should take some of that money, as I have suggested with Senator Kyl, and focus it on other emerging technologies. Wind has had its chance. It has done well and grown rapidly. Now, I see the majority leader, and I will be through momentarily, because I imagine he has a report to make about Senate business. So I will wind up in this way. What the Kyl-Alexander amendment would seek to do is to improve the Ensign-Cantwell proposal by extending from 1 year to 2 the length of the production tax credit extension by focusing it on emerging technologies, and by focusing it on base-load technologies. Our amendment would treat wind fairly by adding another billion dollars to the $11.5 billion we are already spending for less than 1 percent of our electricity on wind, and that would cost about the same. I hope our colleagues will consider the Alexander-Kyl amendment, No. 4429, when the Ensign-Cantwell amendment is offered tomorrow. I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor.