Larry Craig

Mr. CRAIG

Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, what we are attempting to do for the American people is allow them, their country, and the energy sector of our economy to get back into the business of producing energy. We may well be faced with some of the highest natural gas prices that any consumer will have paid in the United States this winter. If we have a cold winter, it will be time for those who are paying exorbitant energy bills to ask a fundamental question: Why? Why is the public policy of this country driving up our energy bills? Why is not there a public policy that begins to put this country back into the business of producing energy? Our historic wealth, in large part, has been based on an abundance of high-quality, low-cost energy in all kinds of forms. The Energy Policy Act of 2003 continues that most important economic legacy for this country--to assure that we continue our traditional energy sources but with new technologies and cleaner approaches; that we invest money in new technologies so that the next generation of Americans can have the same abundance of energy that I have had and that my father had before me. It would be an absolute tragedy if in the fine ticking of all of the issues within this very large bill someone collectively decides to vote against it because, if they do, they ought to go home and try to explain why in February or March of this year their constituents are continuing to pay ever increasingly higher rates, or why there was a blackout in the Northeast this year, or why the brownouts in California a few years ago, and why gas prices at the pump are at an average historic high. There are sound answers to all of those questions. But, more importantly, the Energy Policy Act of 2003 begins to address resolution of those questions, bringing those prices down overall and creating a greater abundance. We have also stepped out in a variety of new areas, including new nuclear technologies, new fuels approaches, and new hydrogen technology which our President was very daring to talk about--a new surface transportation fuel future, hydrogen. We have set about the technology and the planning and the design for all of those types of new approaches. I say to the Senator from Alaska, his State is one of the largest energy producers of all of our States. This bill clearly gives companies the ability to come in and invest and bring literally trillions of cubic feet of gas to the lower 48 that will offer help in bringing down those high prices. We created the incentives. We have allowed them to invest in the marketplace and to get a good return on their investment. This is a truly comprehensive bill. There is no question that we have spent literally the last 5 years in attempting to design an Energy bill that will fill all of the needs of this country, and to restructure and refine the existing energy sector of our country especially in the electrical area. This has a new electrical title much different from the one before. Compromises were made. I stood in the Senate a year ago and offered an amendment to take the electrical title out because of its controversy and its impact on the Pacific Northwest. Today we have changed that. Today we have said all areas of the country can grow and develop and we will work to build an interconnectivity between those regions of the country that will, hopefully, disallow the kind of problems we had in the Northeast this summer and certainly begin to address the inability of California to produce its energy needs. All of those issues are bound up in this bill. Yet some of our colleagues have picked a very small piece of this bill, less than one- half of 1 percent of the total impact of this bill, and have said that is the problem, that is the destructive character of the bill. That is why some Members oppose it. This is a very good piece of work. It brings our country back into energy production. I urge my colleagues to vote for cloture and allow the Senate to move toward final passage for this critical piece of public policy.

Mr. CRAIG. I yield 5 minutes to the Senator from Louisiana.

Mr. CRAIG. I am happy to yield to the chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, we are in the final hour of debate on probably one of the most important policy issues to come before this Senate in a good number of years. The Senator from Nevada has talked about the quality of the debate and the detail of the debate. Certainly, that is true. I yield to the chairman of the committee, Senator Domenici.

Mr. CRAIG. How much time remains on each side?

Mr. CRAIG. Do you want to go to another speaker?

Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, I commend to my colleagues the 9th Report on Carcinogens 2000, as it relates to MTBE. This report is a product of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Public Health Service, which says that it is not carcinogenic. It is a true ground water pollutant, but there is no indication of a carcinogenic effect.

Mr. CRAIG

Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, I will be brief. My colleague from Oregon and I wish to mention only briefly the health bill which was passed.

Mr. CRAIG

Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, my colleague from Oregon is on the Senate floor. We thought for a few moments we would talk about something that just passed the Senate which we think is landmark forestry legislation. It has come in several forms over the last year and a half. But we here in the Senate call it Healthy Forests. The President calls it Healthy Forests. The House and Senate have worked together over the last year to try to resolve an issue that the American public has seen in the form of devastating wildfires across our public land and forests for the last several years. Of course, we watched the tragedy of San Bernadino in southern California and the greater Los Angeles area just in the last month and a half that was truly devastating not only to 3,700 homes and human life but hundreds of thousands of acres of wildlife habitat and watershed. Clearly, as chairman of the Forestry Subcommittee of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Senator Wyden and I have been working for the last several years to resolve this issue. My colleague from Oregon is the ranking member of that Forestry Subcommittee. We have known that the team effort in a bipartisan way to resolve this issue would produce a resolution. The answer is that it has. The Senate and the House just passed a conference report that has our fingerprints all over it. Frankly, we are mighty proud of it. It moves us in the right direction of active management of these dead and dying, bug-infested, and drought-impacted forested areas that are creating phenomenal fuel loads that the American public has seen played out in wildfires across our western public land and forests for the last good number of years. It is a clear step in the right direction. It is a cautious step. We certainly do not take away the right of appeal, but we limit it. We don't want an effort on the part of the Forest Service to do what we asked them to do to be tied up in the courts endlessly in many instances as it has been over the last several years. We also want them to be selective. We targeted most of our efforts in what we call the wildland- urban interface which will impact most of those forested areas where there is a substantial human presence in the form of homes and, obviously, communities. At the same time, we also recognize that the problem exists elsewhere across our forested landscape. We allow that treatment of those areas with caution. We have designated old growth definitions for protection. We have also limited it in the next decade to 20 million acres. For those critics who would suggest that this is a ``ticket to log,'' that is purely political rhetoric to solve a political constituency problem that they have because they can't justify anymore the phenomenal loss of wildlife and watershed and habitat that we have seen over the last 4 or 5 years. It is a cautious approach. It is certainly going to be limited in character. Why? Because we want to prove to the American people that there is a way to manage our forests in a right and reasonable fashion; that it does not do what we did historically 40 years ago--logged by clear-cut or logged with substantial problems of erosion and watershed degradation and all of that. This is a new day. We want to treat our forests differently. But we also understand that if we don't do something, our forestry experts have told us that we could see devastating wildfires for decades to come that will destroy the watershed, the wildlife habitat, and release huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere; and, oh, yes, by the way, destroy a very valuable resource in the form of timber that might in some areas be allowed for logging or for reasonable approaches of commercial value of the thinning and cleaning. All of that said, we have worked hard to produce a bill. My colleague from Oregon is on the Senate floor. I will yield to him for any comments he would want to make. We have other colleagues here who I think are going to address the issue of prescription drugs and Medicare reform. But today is an important day in the Senate in the area of forestry and forest and public land management. I am proud of the work we have done. I yield the floor.

Mr. CRAIG

Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, the leadership asked that I ask unanimous consent that there now be a period of morning business, with Senators permitted to speak for up to 10 minutes each.

Mr. CRAIG

Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions be authorized to meet for a hearing on The Nomination of Steven J. Law, of the District of Columbia, to be Deputy Secretary of Labor during the session of the Senate on Friday, November 21, 2003 at 10 a.m. in SD-430.

Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Governmental Affairs be authorized to meet on Friday, November 21, 2003 at a time and location to be determined to hold a business meeting to consider the nominations of James M. Loy to be Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security, Department of Homeland Security; and Scott J. Bloch to be Special Counsel, Office of Special Counsel.

Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Friday, November 21 at 9:30 a.m. The purpose of the oversight hearings is to receive testimony on the implementation of the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program.

Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Finance be authorized to meet in open Executive Session during the session on Friday, November 21, 2003; to consider nomination of Arnold I. Havens, to be General Counsel for the Department of the Treasury.

Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Foreign Relations be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Friday, November 21, 2003 at 9 a.m. to hold a hearing on Nominations.

Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Veterans' Affairs be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on November 21, 2003, for a markup on the nominations of Gordon H. Mansfield to be Deputy Secretary of Veterans Affairs, Cynthia R. Church to be Assistant Secretary of Veterans Affairs for Public and Intergovernmental Affairs, Robert N. McFarland to be Assistant Secretary of Veterans Affairs for Information and Technology, Lawrence B. Hagel to be Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims, and Alan G. Lance, Sr. to be Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims. The meeting will take place in the Senate Reception Room in the Capitol after the first rollcall vote of the day.

Mr. CRAIG

Mr. CRAIG. The chairman of the full committee has just come to the floor. Senator Cornyn is on the floor ready to speak. Senator Jeffords has such time as he will consume. I was going to offer a unanimous consent to allow Senator Cornyn to speak, to be followed by Senator Domenici. Is there any objection to that?

Mr. CRAIG. I thank the Chair.

Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, I understand Senator Jeffords will follow the Senator from Wyoming.

Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, will the Senator yield for a unanimous consent request?

Mr. CRAIG

Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, if the Senator from New Hampshire would stay on the Senate floor for a moment, I don't blame him for being frustrated about the MTBE.

Mr. CRAIG. Certainly. I have no problem with an order.

Mr. CRAIG. No more than 15 minutes for me.

Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, the Senator from New Hampshire has left. I don't blame him for his frustration over MTBEs. What he didn't say was that it was a Federal program and a Federal mandate. If there is a liability, maybe it ought to be the Federal Government. It was the Clean Air Act that drove States in meeting their air shed requirements to address additives to gasoline that would result in some improvement in that pollution. I don't blame him for his frustration in all of that. I hope we can sit down and resolve this issue apart from the bill that is currently on the Senate floor as it relates to the concern of the Northeast or any State that has experienced pollution and now has a groundwater problem as a result of a Federal program and a Federal mandate passed by this Congress in a Clean Air Act. The product, yes, produced independently by a private company to meet a Federal mandate and now, of course, years later, after the application of that product, we find that there were environmental consequences. For a few moments this morning I want to talk about the energy bill we have before us, the Energy Policy Act of 2003, and to bring some context to it, on where I believe we are and how I believe we ought to approach this particular piece of legislation. I came to the Senate in 1990. I went on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee in 1990. In 1990, we began to talk about the need for a national energy policy because we were growing increasingly dependent upon foreign sources for our energy--primarily hydrocarbons-- but we had a myriad of Federal regulations that were in large part driving energy policy into a nonproductive approach. We were basically saying to the energy companies of our country, whether electrical, hydro-based, or nuclear-based, or whether they were coal-based--we were saying to the hydrocarbon companies: You really ought not do business here because it is going to be so expensive to meet all of these Federal rules and regulations. We had the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. National environmental policy has been talked about by the Senator from New Hampshire. That was in play, and it was beginning to have very real consequences in the ability to produce an abundance of energy for our country at a reasonable cost to the consumer. Our economy has been based on--historically and even today--an abundant supply of low-cost energy. Every American is the beneficiary of that. From the car you drive to the toys you play with out there in recreational ways, to the home you heat, to the products you use--all of them have been tied to an abundant supply of energy at a relatively low cost. But that was because we had always been producing a lot of energy. In the 1990s, all of the environmental regulations came into play. Attitudes shifted there. There seemed to be an attitude on the part of policymakers that energy was always going to be in abundance, always going to be there; therefore, you could begin to regulate and control it for a variety of different reasons and it would just keep coming. That is not so. The decade of the nineties proved it. In the decade of the nineties, we experienced unprecedented economic growth, but we also became increasingly huge consumers of energy at a time when we were no longer producing much energy. We were living off the surpluses that had been built into the capacity of the energy development and producing system in our country and a delivery system that was produced in the sixties and the seventies and the 1980s. Guess what began to happen in the latter part of the nineties. The lights went out. The lights dimmed and, of course, energy costs began to go up. That once 75 cents or 80 cents a gallon for gas all of a sudden went to $1.25, $1.60, and not long ago, in some areas, it spiked at $4 in one instance. We saw what happened to electrical energy. No longer was that switch that you woke up to every morning and flipped expecting your home and bedroom and bathroom to be filled with light-- no longer was that switch something you considered automatic, that you just flipped and it was always going to be there. The generation at hand always accepted that energy was always there and relatively inexpensive, but, more importantly, they believed it was always going to be there: Just throw the switch and on came the lights. In the late part of the nineties, they threw the switch in California and the lights didn't come on. What happened this summer in the Northeast? They threw the switch and the lights didn't come on. Somebody has to be to blame; the lights are not coming on. We went to the gas pumps, and all of a sudden it was costing us an arm and a leg to fill up our cars or SUVs; any form of transportation was beginning to cost more. What happened? Why are we here? This President, George W. Bush, before he came to office as President elect, met here with the majority leader and leaders in the Senate and said: We have to get this country back into the business of producing energy--all forms of energy, including hydrocarbon, electrical, green energy, black energy, but environmentally sound in all respects. We have to get back into the business of production. No longer were we 35, 40, 45, 50 percent dependent; now we were 55 percent dependent upon some other country to supply our hydrocarbon base. We had to begin to extend our politics around the world to secure the stability of that market and that supply because we decided here at home that we were no longer going to be producing it because there was an environmental cost to that production. If you were witnessing the Senate floor a couple of years ago, the debate was on producing oil in Alaska. This Senate basically said: No, we are not going to do that anymore; the environmental consequences are too great. So we will let somebody else produce it in Saudi Arabia or in Iraq or Russia, and we will pay them and we will ship it over here. They will profit by it and we will spend it, we will use it. That is really what our policy said--not in a spoken way but in an unspoken way. That is why this President and it is why others--I and others who work on the Energy Committee and studied the market and watched the trends over the past decade--realized something had to be done. We began to try, as Republicans and then as Democrats. The Senator from New Mexico is in the Chamber. He chaired that committee. He worked mightily hard to produce an energy bill a couple of years ago, and we got it to the floor and we passed it out of the Senate. I voted for it. Why? Because it was a major step in the right direction. In fact, it was the bill of the Senator from New Mexico that passed out of the Senate this year because we could not get our bill out. We could get enough votes for that bill. What was happening out there was a growing consensus in the Congress, the House and the Senate, that something had better get done. Now, let's take the Clean Air Act. To maintain clean air quality, you heard about the problems we created in the Northeast with MTBEs--that additive to fuels. We have another problem as it relates to all of that. The lights went out up there this summer because we had not created an environment in which investment in a profitable way could be put back into the electrical grids and electrical systems, that could be returned to the investor so that these kinds of problems would not exist. There were a lot of other things we tried to do. Out of all of that, there clearly came a consensus that something ought to be done. What you have before you now--and my guess is we ought to debate it for a good long while--is the Energy Policy Act of 2003. It just passed the House. It is a mighty big piece of legislation, no question about it. What does it do? It puts the United States back into the business of producing energy. That is what it does. It didn't pick winners or losers. It largely said, pick it all, get it all, advance solar power, advance wind power, advance conservation, take the old technologies of gas, coal, and oil and put new technology to them so that we can use those abundant resources in a way that they will be environmentally cleaner. That is what we are saying here. We are not subsidizing. We are saying that if you invest your dollars into the market, you are going to get a tax credit in return. That is called incentivizing investment. That is why those who look at our work product say that over the course of the decade this bill could produce over 800,000 new jobs in the lower 48 States and Alaska and Hawaii. Why? Because we are asking the marketplace to invest, and we are incentivizing all of the bits and pieces of the marketplace. I used to be a bit selective--solar is only a percent; wind may be a couple to 3 percent. Was it worth doing? Yes, it is worth doing. It is clean. So we add it up and it is 4, or 5, or 6 percent in the total marketplace over the next decade, and it is clean energy. Americans want clean energy, and we ought to be doing that. So we are doing it in this bill. We are also saying, without question, that coal is a huge producer of electricity today and it has caused problems in the past. We have a Clean Air Act, and we want to drive ourselves toward ever cleaner air. Here we are continuing to incentivize the substantial investment in clean coal technology. What is also transpiring here--and we heard it debated on the floor a good number of times--is the issue of greenhouse gases and climate change, a product of burning of hydrocarbons. This bill goes more toward climate change and improving our environment than any climate change bill we ever had on the floor of the Senate, and here is the reason: Every new technology, every new dollar invested in the marketplace puts down a cleaner form of energy and brings down the overall emission of greenhouse gases. That is what happens when you create new technologies and you bring on line new approaches. It was the old approaches that were producing the greenhouse gases using hydrocarbons. The new approaches are producing substantially less greenhouse gases. As this economy comes back under new technologies, already per unit of production in our economy we are using less carbon, and that has already been shown. We are leading the world as it relates to unit of production as to the amount of energy or carbon produced by that production. This bill drives us even further toward a cleaner environment because we are investing in the environment, and we are incentivizing that investment. Madam President, how much time do I have?

Mr. CRAIG. Madam President, another area that is significant in this bill--and I will be talking later about a variety of the approaches we have taken--is the area of nuclear energy, without question one of the cleanest forms of energy out there. There are no emissions. There has always been a concern about waste management and the waste stream that comes from nuclear plants, but we also have recognized our ability to manage it and other nations' ability to manage that waste stream in a responsible fashion. In this bill, we clearly incentivize the marketplace to get back into the business of electrical production through nuclear generation. We have even proposed a new reactor concept called a passive generation 4 reactor, and also we will tie to that an electrolysis process to produce hydrogen, to begin to fuel this new exciting initiative which our President led in saying the transportation fuel of the future ought to be hydrogen. Why? We can produce it, and we can produce a lot of it. We ought not be producing it from natural gas; we ought to be producing it from water. Let natural gas heat space. Don't ask natural gas to generate electricity or create hydrogen. That is not the way to use natural gas. That is part of what has driven the cost of it up. So another new initiative. While anyone can stand on the floor and pick at the pieces, look at the whole. It is a market basket full of energy for the future of this country to ensure reliability so that when you wake up in the morning and you turn on the light switch, the light comes on; when you plug in your computer, the screen lights up; when you go to the Internet, you can communicate across the world instantly, and it is all driven by energy. Every single minuscule thought is driven by energy, and this country hasn't been producing energy for over a decade. We have been only the consumer of that energy basket. I think we ought to be proud of this work. I think we ought to be energized to pass it for the future of our country, for the future of our economy. We incentivize the marketplace to go back to work and produce all forms of energy from every concept and every idea. Let's not pick winners and losers. I am sorry, we don't pick winners and losers. The Senator from New Hampshire is wrong. We say do it all and do it well. Out of it may come new sources that 30 or 40 years out dominate the energy supply of this great country. I am proud of the work we have done. I hope the Senate will join collectively in adopting the conference report. The House has already seen the merit. The President strongly supports it. Let me tell you, the American people support this package because they don't want $4-a- gallon gas, and they want the light to come on in the bathroom when they wake up. I yield the floor.