Pete Domenici

Mr. DOMENICI

Mr. DOMENICI. Madam President, I would like to talk to the Senator. We are still on the amendment. What are you asking? That we set it aside for what purpose?

Mr. DOMENICI. Madam President, parliamentary inquiry: We have set aside only one amendment to proceed with another thus far; that is, the amendment of the Senator from Oklahoma was set aside; is that correct?

Mr. DOMENICI. Madam President, now he is asking that be done again.

Mr. DOMENICI. Madam President, I ask the Senator, how long do you think you would be before we could return to the regular order?

Mr. DOMENICI. One-five?

Mr. DOMENICI. I do not wish to restrict you. You talk long similar to myself. Would you rather have 20 or 25 minutes?

Mr. DOMENICI. Twenty minutes is all right by me.

Mr. DOMENICI. Madam President, we have reviewed the amendment, and actually we have similar activity already prescribed for in the bill. This modifies some, changes some, adds in other places, but all of it is authorizing to the extent that it expands--it is pretty much the kind of thing the bill contemplated. So we have no objection on our side.

Mr. DOMENICI. I move to lay that motion on the table. The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

Mr. DOMENICI. Madam President and fellow Senators, I need now to bother you with a few minutes of time, because some very good Senators have come to the floor to speak in favor of a proposal that was brought to the floor by the distinguished Senator from Connecticut, and he was joined by the Senator from Colorado, Mr. Salazar. Between the two, they mentioned and enumerated a number of Senators who favored this--good Senators here who favor this proposal that was brought to the Senate's attention, as it was a freestanding amendment that has been floating around the Senate for quite some time as something that maybe we should consider. Now, it sounds good. Senators who spoke about it spoke eloquently about it, but I would suggest that maybe, just maybe, these goals in this amendment were necessary yesterday--maybe yesterday, Senator Bingaman--I am not sure, but maybe. But I encourage my colleagues to look to the underlying bill and compare it to the goals that are set forth in that amendment. We don't need the goals, because we have already--the amendment they offer sets goals and then directs the administration to figure out how to get where they are supposed to go. I think that is sort of like outsourcing. That is outsourcing of the legislature duties and responsibilities to the executive, and then praising the bill because it tells the executive they have to reach these goals and save all of this oil. Well, if it were that easy, ever since we found out we were greatly dependent upon foreign oil, it would have been a cinch. There would have been nothing to it. We could have come to the floor and said we have an answer. We want a dream. We want a dream, and the dream is a two-sentence bill that says the executive branch of Government shall have OMB proceed to direct goals that will get us to the point where we are no longer dependent. What a dream they could say that is. I am kind of paraphrasing my wonderful friend from Colorado who talked about the dream, that this was a dream to achieve big things. But you see, this is merely saying to the executive branch: You do what we ought to do, and when you do it, or if you do it, we are going to take credit today, because we told you to get OMB, the Office of Management and Budget, or somebody in your branch of the Government, to set the goals and then tell us how to do it, and then do it. Let me get back to why we don't need it, if we ever needed it. I would have made this same argument in any event, but I want to say yesterday it was a little more relevant. My colleagues understand we have a bill before us, and we the Congress set goals on gasoline savings and then we set the policies that will attain the goals. They are tough, hard goals. They are not saying to the President: You reach these goals. We reach the goals. In fact, we will vote on this bill and when we do, if we do, and if we have enough courage, we will be voting on changing the automobile standards in a big way. For the first time in decades, we will have changed the standards for automobiles, for new automobiles, and made the automobile manufacturers make cars every year less dependent, more efficient so they use less gasoline. But we don't say: Executive branch, You do it. Set the goals. And aren't we happy we dreamed big and we said to you, you set the goals for CAFE standards. We didn't say that. We said: Here, we changed them. And if anybody wants to vote to change the CAFE standards, they are already changed in this bill. If you want to change the CAFE standards and save a huge number of barrels, since they are talking about barrels, a huge number of barrels of crude oil, because all the gasoline for the most part comes from that, you will achieve those savings by voting for this bill. You don't have to vote for an amendment that says to the President: You set the goals, Mr. President, and then you achieve them. And, boy, when that gets done, we will have made a real dream come true. Now, I figure we should stop dreaming. We dreamed so much on energy and we have been working so hard that today, for the first time in the transportation section, the section of our law that is transportation oriented, we took one big bite out of the use of transportation fuel, and we did not need the amendment I am opposing that was brought here today and that the distinguished Senators from Colorado and Connecticut and others spoke in favor of. We don't need it anymore, because we don't need anybody else setting the goals. We achieved the goals ourselves right in the bill. In 1972, President Nixon set the goal of being energy independent by 1980. We were about 30 percent dependent on foreign oil at that time. Today, unfortunately, we are 60 percent reliant upon foreign oil. That tells me goals are not enough. We need action. Interestingly enough, this bill that they offer an amendment to is the action. It is the action per se. We have not had any action that makes us less reliant, substantially less reliant, as does this bill. By adoption of the changes in the laws that apply to new cars, we have dramatically reduced what Americans are going to spend on gasoline and diesel fuel in the forthcoming years because we have changed the law and have caused that to happen in a very good way. But we haven't asked anybody to do it for us. We haven't said: Mr. President, would you find in your administration somebody who could set these goals and achieve them? Boy, we have told you how to do it. We have set them very high so we can go home and tell the American people how high we have set the goals and how much we achieved. But we did nothing in the amendment. We did nothing; we just asked the White House to do it. I know a lot of people have endorsed a bill that does this, that has these goals that asks the President to ask the OMB to achieve the goals, and we have everybody on it. We have people in ordinary life who are great citizens. We have former Senators, former members of White House staff. They all joined this bill. But the bill was nothing more than a set of goals, and it said the White House should go out and achieve them. It was sort of saying: We would like to be President, but we are not. Since we are not, we are going to adopt this amendment and it is going to tell the President that is what he ought to do. But I say that once again, the amendment, which I am going to call the Salazar amendment for a moment, would require the administration to develop a plan to reduce oil consumption by 2.5 million barrels of oil per day during the calendar year 2016, ramping up to 10 million barrels per day during calendar year 2031. But the bill we are considering already includes an ambitious gasoline savings goal. It goes on to achieve the goal. The bill itself achieves the goal by changing the law. Senators are going to be voting--not the President--to get it done. The bill we are considering already includes ambitious savings. The bill sets gasoline savings at 20 percent by calendar year 2017, 35 percent by calendar year 2025, and 45 percent by calendar year 2030. Now, we did not ask the President to ask staff to come up with a goal and then today brag on the goal because the President is going to do it. What we did in this bill is we adopted these goals and then changed the law to achieve them. As you know, we changed the law to achieve the savings, by changing the law on new automobiles and other things in this bill. These goals are consistent with what the President articulated in the State of the Union Address. But we didn't wait around to see how he was going to do it and let him call the shots and then brag that he set the goals. We did it ourselves. The President's Twenty in Ten Initiative calls for a reduction in gasoline usage by 20 percent in 10 years, or by 2017. This bill not only includes these gasoline savings goals but establishes the programs that will put us on track to meet them. In particular, the bill includes an ambitious renewable fuel standard that will displace foreign oil with homegrown renewable fuel. I urge my colleagues to oppose the amendment. Then we set the policies that attain the goals we are trying to achieve. Outsourcing our authority--we outsource it to the White House in the amendment that was put before us--Senator Lieberman first brought it up. I don't know who takes credit as its author. Perhaps it is the distinguished Senator from Colorado, Mr. Salazar, but we all know which three or four Senators first came up with it. I wish to talk for a moment about this. On the biofuels part of the bill, we save 2.5 million barrels per day by 2017--I have converted some of this to barrels so they won't wonder what we are doing--4.5 million barrels per day by 2025, and 6.5 million barrels per day by 2030. This is just the renewable fuels section. If we add the CAFE standards from the bill, we probably will exceed these goals in practice by passing this bill. This amendment is unnecessary. The amendment offered by Senator Salazar and others here today is unnecessary because we, as a matter of fact, already adopted law changes. We will be the ones who were courageous and did the work. We are not going to just set goals and put numbers there and say, now we have done our job, and say to the President, you go do it, and then come to the Senate and say, won't it be great. We set these goals, and the President will do it. I don't believe that is the way we are going to do that. If that was the way we were going to do it--I told you about Richard Nixon and how far we were already substantially indebted to the world, 20 percent dependent. We were all trying to get a balanced budget in terms of the energy consumption. He wanted to have a zero difference. He wanted to make everything work, where we didn't have any excess use of oil, and he announced that. But, you see, he was President. He could have done whatever he wanted that was legal. He must have found that the President cannot do it. He didn't achieve it. The Congress tried but could not achieve it with him, and nobody could do it very easily. We have been doing very well when you consider what we did in the bill we passed 2 years ago, the Energy bill, plus the two things which are in this bill which are gigantic, the likes of which we have never done--the CAFE change, which is giant. You heard the effects from Senator Feinstein. That is not set in stone. That is adopting the changes in CAFE standards, big changes. And then we did the dramatic thing the President recommended in terms of moving ahead with ethanol and beyond ethanol to the kind of cellulosic ethanol, which is going to be truly a magnificent substitute for the oil we are using. But we are not setting a goal; we are going to do it. The bill will do it. By the time we are finished, the bill will achieve almost as much as the Salazar amendment requested in goals. With that, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. DOMENICI. Madam President, I want to get it clear in the Record who this amendment belongs to. It was introduced by Senator Bayh some time ago. It had as sponsors Senators Brownback, Lieberman, Coleman, Salazar, Cantwell, Kerry, Dodd, and Kohl. The amendment was also proposed by Senator Reid. I now have it straight that these were the Senators on this amendment. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. DOMENICI. Madam President, we probably are going to enter into an agreement to have a vote this evening, but I didn't want the good Senator to leave the floor without me making three points. I do not seek now to have an argument about his approach. I will do that before the vote when we set that up. But when the Senator from Minnesota talks about a goal of saving oil and the bill before us has savings of gasoline, I just wonder if he knows that most of the crude oil goes to gasoline in the United States. That is a fact, isn't it? Most of the crude oil we import, that we bring into our country to go to refineries, is turned into gasoline and used by automobiles.

Mr. DOMENICI. Madam President, I am going to yield the floor in a moment. I just want to say, if my colleague thinks carefully, the amendment that was offered that was spoken to by my good friend sets goals to be achieved by the White House, by the executive department. We have a bill before us that I am so proud of because for the first time, we did it right. We put in the bill the kinds of law changes that will save gasoline and oil because we change the law. We don't have to ask the President to find ways; we did it. When Senators vote for it, they will not be voting for a goal that asks the President to do something. They will be voting for a change in the law that makes cars more efficient in the future if produced and used in the American market. That same bill will save tremendous amounts of electricity and whatever is used with electricity because we are going to become so much more efficient on appliances and the like. And, third, there will be some enormous savings because we are going to make gasoline from something other than crude oil and other than by making it out of corn. We are going to make it out of switchgrass and other products that are part of the biomass approach. I am proud that just those three will do more than we have ever done, and we won't be asking a President to set goals to achieve, which a President has never been able to do. If they could, they would do it without us asking them. We are doing it in this bill. I yield the floor and will return when we have a vote on this matter.

Mr. DOMENICI. Reserving the right to object, what were the last two lines?

Mr. DOMENICI. I have half the time?

Mr. DOMENICI. I have no objection.

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

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, fellow Senators, let me say, we are getting close to the end of a good day on the bill. This is a three- part bill that came to us from the Energy, Natural Resources Committee, the Commerce Committee, and the Environment and Public Works Committee. Then the majority leader put them together, and I was very proud to be able to come to the floor and tell the Senators and the American people what an outstanding bill this was. We had not heard much from anybody, and people were not quite sure what happened. But people kept saying: We had an energy bill. Well, we can, at the end of the first day, say we still have it. It has not been changed any. We accepted one amendment. It was an authorizing amendment, and it enlarged upon some pieces of the bill. But essentially it is intact. And, lo and behold, without this amendment that is before us, which I urge the Senate not pass, that they not vote for it--it is harmless, but I do not think we ought to pass it. I wish to tell you all why. To do that I have to talk a little bit about the bill, because the bill changes the law. If all of the things in this bill get adopted, we will save huge amounts of crude oil and gasoline. The other side keeps mentioning that the bill saves more gasoline and not enough crude oil. But I guarantee you that if we could get the kind of savings that could be forthcoming from transportation fuels, America would be safe, America would be happy, and we would not be dependent, because we would be using much less crude oil also. So there is no difference. They are almost the same. Nonetheless, the truth of the matter is that never in the history of the Congress have we saved so much gasoline--that is the thing that moves transportation in America: diesel fuel, transportation, and related products. Never have we changed America so much in terms of how much of that fuel we would use. What fuel? The fuel everybody says makes us more and more dependent, the transportation fuel. Right. Now, what happened is we did not adopt a bill in the Energy Committee or the Commerce Committee, headed by the Senator from Hawaii and Senator Stevens from Alaska. Those bills that produced that came from these committees and are actually changes in the law. Let's talk right off and say the biggest change is the CAFE standards. The Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction, had the courage and the guts to adopt a long-standing amendment sponsored by the Senator from California, Mrs. Feinstein, and it had been regularly known as the bill that changes the CAFE standards. We adopted it. It is in here. The changes we have been yearning for are here. We adopted them, and they are now before us. We don't have to ask anybody to make the changes that will cause the biggest single savings in transportation fuels that we ever did. Then right on top of that, the Energy and Natural Resources Committee adopted a huge multiyear program to use more ethanol but ethanol that would not be produced by corn but, rather, by switchgrass and come out of that whole area we are now researching and just almost over the hurdle in terms of a new kind of production of ethanol. When you add the two together, it is the biggest reduction in transportation fuel we will ever get. I wanted to make the point that we did not set any goals; we did not adopt any targets; we did not ask the President to find any savings. We asked the President to sign a bill that will make the savings because we change the law. When oil savings amendments were offered in the past, people would say this was a hidden CAFE standard. They were correct. When you direct the executive branch to save oil in such a dramatic way, one of the only ways you can do it and reach that goal is to change the CAFE standards. So whenever you were telling the President to make these savings, everybody would say: In transportation, the only way you can do it is to change the CAFE standards. Isn't that interesting? But we didn't do that here today. We changed the CAFE standards and saved oil and gasoline over the next 30 years, calculated as it is in the bill, because we got that done. We don't need a hidden CAFE in this bill, which essentially is the only way you could get to your targets in oil is to do something to transportation consumption, and that means you would have to do something with the so-called hidden CAFE standards that would be incorporated in your suggested targets. In the bill we have, there are real increases in the CAFE standards that are adopted and they were articulated by Senator Feinstein and talked about at length. Perhaps when we pass this amendment asking the President to save oil, perhaps when we do that--and I know my good friend, the occupant of the Chair, thinks that amendment I am talking about is a great thing because it sets targets and let's us dream, as he says, but I think all the President would have to do, if we adopt and sent to him the Bayh amendment--that is properly the name of it because he was the first name on this many months ago--I would venture to say, without fear or trepidation, if we had the bill we have before us today, Senator Bayh wouldn't be introducing this amendment with these kinds of targets, because he would look down and say: The biggest target for crude oil that is used in gasoline is already done because they have changed the CAFE standards. They don't need another target. If we continue this way and we adopt the Bayh amendment, then when the President signs our bill, he can send it back to us and say: This is my plan, to do what you asked me to do, because in this bill we have already accomplished the things you were talking about. Let me say, there isn't any rancor. I am not trying to belittle anybody. The truth is, when you have to set targets and tell the President to achieve the targets, you have accomplished nothing. Because if that is the way you could have saved crude oil in the past, every President would have done it himself, would have taken us out of this crisis by doing just what your targets say, go out and find them and do them. But you can't do them. You have to have Congress. You have to change laws. I want to sit down for a moment and reserve the remainder of my time.

Mr. DOMENICI. How much time do I have?

Mr. DOMENICI. What do you want, five total?

Mr. DOMENICI. I will say five.

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, that was an eloquent statement and I want to acknowledge it. But I want to make sure those who are worried about America's energy crisis know a mere statement, whether it be verbal or written down on a piece of paper, that says we ought to achieve this doesn't achieve anything. Or we in the Senate think our goal should to be save 3.5 million barrels of oil and then say how proud we are that we are going to achieve this great goal; that doesn't do anything. All you have is, if you have a bunch of targets and goals and they are high and they are big, you can say: We are a better dreamer than the other side, because we have these great dreams about how much we should save and what our target should be. But think for a minute, what do they accomplish? The truth is, the underlying bill, for a change, saves on crude oil consumption and gasoline, because we have changed the CAFE standards permanently. As anybody in here remembers, every time we were talking about saving large quantities of gasoline, if we could just change the CAFE standards. Remember? Well, we changed them. The biggest way to save on gasoline is to change them. We changed them. We don't need a target in the bill that says we should save on gasoline. Maybe you should say by changing the CAFE standards, but the President can't change the CAFE standards. Only we can, and we did. They have some auspicious goals, some magnificent targets. They can speak eloquently about what will be required to do them. But the point is, they don't save one single penny's worth of gasoline. They don't achieve 10 cents' worth of savings. They are merely goals, things we wish to do. I guarantee you that the bill they are attaching this amendment to for a change will truly save by changing the CAFE standards permanently. By changing the standard for ethanol and the second generation of ethanol, we will save more on gasoline and then on crude oil, which it comes from, than we have ever done before. So we don't need an amendment to a terrific bill. The bill is something we can be very proud of. Three committees participated. They did it bipartisanly. Now we have bold and high words about what the President should do because it says the President shall find ways to achieve these goals. That is essentially the plan: Mr. President, we have these goals. Mr. President, you go talk to OMB and you achieve them. That is it. I do not believe anybody thinks that will work. But I would say, if it passes, I do not know what it does, and I do not know what we would do with it because I do not know how you get any savings from that kind of proposal. But I kind of know where we are. A lot of Senators and non-Senators got together before we were here with this bill and decided they would introduce a bill that sounded good, that set high goals, and they did. Then we come along with a bill that actually does it, and they want to amend it to get in on the action, which I do not believe would accomplish much. I compliment the Senators for the way they have worked, and in particular Senator Bayh, whom we do not see very much, but I see him a lot, and I am pleased always to see him. I say to the Senator, I thank you for the way you have responded. I wish to say again, I don't believe with the bill we need your bill. With the bill that is underlying, we do not need another bill. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. DOMENICI. I move to lay that motion on the table. The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.