Bill Nelson

Mr. NELSON of Florida

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, this Senator would say that it is only going to get worse if we do not do something now. This Senator thinks we are approaching a crisis because China is now on the scene, and China is becoming a huge consumer of oil. They are second only to the United States in the consumption of oil. They have had 40-percent growth in their demand on the world's oil supply. China's purchases of new passenger cars has risen by 75 percent. In a tight world oil market, with new demands put on the supply by emerging nations such as China, it is only going to get worse. And here we are, the United States of America, importing 58 to 60 percent of our daily consumption of oil from foreign shores. It is an accident waiting to happen. What does it take to collectively shake the American people to the point that the body politic will demand of their elected representatives that we start making changes--synthetic fuels, alternative fuels, higher miles per gallon, alternatives such as ethanol, hybrid vehicles, encouraging them, satisfying the demand? The waiting list is a long list. What is it going to take? Will the Senator give me any kind of reflection?

Mr. NELSON of Florida. I would like the Senator from Illinois to respond to the fact that Hurricane Katrina and now Hurricane Rita has given us another lesson of just how thin and delicate this oil supply and refinery pipeline is, so that the least little disruption in it--a hurricane or the shutting down of a refinery, in this case, five or six refineries that are shut down, or, Lord forbid, a terrorist act, the sinking by a terrorist of a supertanker in the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf--any one of these things could absolutely disrupt the world that is so thirsty for oil consumption, and could send our gasoline prices not shooting through $3, but could be sending it through $4 and $5 and $6 a gallon. Would the Senator comment on that?

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, I am here for my daily speech on oil independence for this country. Before the assistant minority leader leaves the floor, as he has been such a leader in this area, and before this Senator launches into this series of conversations for the Senate about the need to have oil independence and the ways that we can be going about it, bringing to the Senate each day a new kind of technology we should be looking at--today I am going to talk about the expansion of ethanol--I invite the Senior Senator from Illinois, since he has been such a leader in this area, for any comments that the Senator would like to make in a colloquy before I continue with the series of speeches on oil independence.

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, I would like the Senator from Illinois to comment on the fact that in America most of the oil consumption is in the transportation sector. In the transportation sector, most of the oil is consumed in our personal vehicles. So we could start reducing the consumption of oil in our own vehicles a little, have increased miles per gallon, substitute ethanol for gasoline, have hybrid engines, hybrid engines you plug in to give a full charge at night while it is in the garage. We could have ethanol not made just from corn, which is homegrown, but made from sugarcane, sugar beats, cellulose. It could be grass. We happen to have 31 million acres of prairie grass in this country. Cut the grass. Make cheaper ethanol. Therefore, for every gallon of ethanol that goes into that gas tank--and you can use existing engines in our personal vehicles--you are making a mixture of gasoline and ethanol, and that means we are burning that much less gasoline, which means we are burning that much less oil that we have to import from foreign shores. I would like the Senator from Illinois, who has been a leader in this area, to comment.

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, just exactly what the Senator from Illinois says, there is a waiting list a mile long to get the hybrid vehicles that, in the case of Toyota, get 50 miles to a gallon in city driving. Yet what do we have to do to get the rest of the automobile manufacturers? Maybe it is going to take Hurricane Katrina, with a scare of a shortage, with the shutting down of refineries, that is going to finally get our collective heads out of the sand and face the fact we are so dependent on oil--and foreign oil--and that this is not a good position for this country to be in. Does the Senator from Illinois remember when we offered a simple little amendment, and it was only to increase miles per gallon on SUVs, phased in over a multiyear period, and we could not get anymore than about 39 votes out of 100 Senators in this Chamber? Yet we are facing the crisis we are today.

Mr. NELSON of Florida. As we close this out--under the previous order, at 4 o'clock we will be in other business--I will continue my drumbeat on a daily basis about the need for energy independence. I know what our people in Florida believe. They feel very strongly about it. Before I engaged in the colloquy with the Senator from Illinois, I had intended to talk about some specifics of the use of ethanol and the manufacture of ethanol and how that could help us ween ourselves from dependence on foreign oil. I shall pick that up on another day, but I will continue this daily, trying to sound the alarm for this country that if we don't do something, we will rue the day that we did not. I am told that we might have a couple of more minutes here. I will go ahead and close out some of my comments. As the Senator from Illinois and I discussed in our colloquy, it is true that transportation is where we are consuming most of our oil. If you want to do something about lessening your dependence on foreign oil, go to the place where we consume most of it. That is in our personal vehicles. One thing that we have to do is pursue alternative fuels to petroleum. Gasoline and diesel, petroleum products, accounted for over 98 percent of transportation motor fuels sold in the year 2004. Only 2 percent are from alternatives to petroleum. We need to increase that 2 percent, and it can come from many different sources of alternatives to petroleum, such as ethanol. As the Senator from Illinois and I discussed, corn is clearly a basis for ethanol. But with the advance of technology, there are many other sources as well. Cellulose and glucose are two. Glucose, sugar, we raise a lot of sugarcane in Florida. They do in Louisiana. We raise a lot of sugar beets throughout the Midwest and the West. That is a source of ethanol. It was one of the things that I pushed for, at the time of the discussion of CAFTA, to get the administration, through the Department of Agriculture, to start the study on making ethanol from sugarcane. I will pick up in the future with a discussion of ethanol made from sources other than corn, as I bring to the attention of the Senate how much this is getting to be an emergency situation that we are depending on oil. And of that oil, almost 60 percent of it comes from foreign shores. That is not good for this country. We have to change that. I yield the floor.

Mr. NELSON of Florida

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, I have stated that each day we are in session I am going to try to rise in the Senate to speak about the dependent condition we find ourselves in on foreign oil. Some 58 to 60 percent of our daily consumption of oil comes from foreign shores. This is not a good position for the United States. No matter how much we sounded the alarm bells over the past several years, it is hard to shake the powers that be out of our collective lethargy, to break this stranglehold that oil has running through our economy. And it has led us to our dependence on oil for well over a majority of our daily consumption. That is not a good position to be in for the defense of our country's interests where we have to protect the free flow of oil to all of the very oil-thirsty world. A lot of those sealanes coming out of the Persian Gulf region look to the United States for the military protection to keep those lanes open so oil can flow. Clearly, we ought to, after the reminder of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, be on the journey quickly to weaning ourselves from the dependence on this oil. That means the collective will of this Nation to come together in a major project, like a Manhattan Project or an Apollo Project. In other words, the moonshot of this decade ought to be weaning ourselves from dependence on foreign oil, as going to the Moon as a result of the Apollo Project was to the decade of the 1960s. Each day I am going to try to chronicle a new technology so that we can do that. Today I will talk about coal gasification, specifically coal-based integrated gasification. It is otherwise called combined cycle technology. Our Nation has an abundance of coal. The United States has the largest proven coal reserves of any Nation in the world. At the current production levels, U.S. coal reserves should last over the next 250 years. That is the good news; the bad news is coal's high carbon content relative to other fossil fuels so that in the burning of it, it releases significant quantities of carbon. Right now, coal combustion, the burning of coal, accounts for more than one-third of the world's carbon emissions. Those emissions in the air is what we do not want. I will never forget being in Beijing, China, in the year 1981 in the dead of winter, January of that year. The city of Beijing was shrouded in black smog that was a result of the coal dust settling over that city because the primary source of heat was the burning of coal, with no attention to the emissions that allowed all of those particulates to go into the air. The last time I visited Beijing, about 2 years ago, after the dead of winter, I must say they have cleaned up their environment quite a bit, but they still have a ways to go. We know the negatives with regard to burning coal. Now let's look on the positives; that is, coal gasification or coal-based integrated gasification combined cycle technology has much lower pollutant emissions, and it holds great promise. Only two such plants exist in the United States today. One of them is in my State of Florida. It is run by Tampa Electric Company. I commend TECO for being one of the leaders in this country. My State of Florida is going to have another IGCC plant--that is coal gasification--by 2011, through the Orlando commission and the Southern Company. I thank those two companies for being leaders. This is the technology: First, the coal is gasified using a chemical process rather than just the burning of coal to generate a synthetic gas--or what we call a syngas, synthetic fuels--that is mostly composed of hydrogen and carbon monoxide. Then that synthetic gas is used to fuel a combustion engine, a turbine, and the exhaust heat is employed to produce steam for power generation and for gasification. The process has the potential to be both cleaner and more efficient than just the burning of coal in a steam boiler which is done to make electricity, and it generates considerable waste heat in the traditional burning of coal that then leads to the release of a myriad of undesirable emissions. In contrast, coal gasification isolates and collects nearly all of the impurities, including mercury and a large portion of the carbon, before the combustion. So those things are not going to be emitted into the atmosphere. The coal is gasified with either oxygen or air, and the resulting synthetic gas or syngas is cooled, cleaned, and fired in a gas turbine, and the hot exhaust from the gas turbine passes through a heat recovery steam generator where it produces steam that drives a steam turbine. Theoretically, the steam gasification process can be applied to any low-quality carbonaceous feedstock. The progress in developing this technology also raises interesting possibilities with respect to the future of biomass--either alone or in combination with coal--for electricity production. This has a lot of promise. This whole process, called IGCC, could also be utilized for something called polygeneration. That is co-producing other high-valued products in addition to electricity using gasification. Gasification could be used to produce ultraclean synthetic fuels from coal, and biomass. Carbon dioxide capture and storage would have to be developed to address the climate change issues coal-based synthetic fuels pose. But the long and short of it is, these synthetic fuels are inherently superior to crude-oil-driven hydrocarbon fuels. This would help us in the transition to more energy-efficient technologies, such as compression-ignition-engine hybrid electric vehicles. We could exploit our country's huge coal reserves in an environmentally responsible way. The economic and reliability challenges certainly still exist before these kinds of plants become more readily abundant. And the CO2 carbon capture and storage must be perfected. Those are all challenges we must meet. But it is a promising technology that would provide the United States with an alternative to electricity produced from natural gas and a way to set us on a course to wean ourselves from dependence on foreign oil. Mr. President, I will continue to speak out on all of the alternatives in which we can try to sever our dependence on foreign oil. I yield the floor.

Mr. NELSON of Florida

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, I am pleased to join Senators Hutchison, Stevens, Inouye, and Lott today in sponsoring an amended NASA Authorization Act and managers package that provides policy guidance for keeping NASA on track to achieve their objectives; and to ensure that there is a good balance between the different activities that NASA performs. Just a few days ago, NASA released their Exploration Systems Architecture Study. The study describes how NASA plans to implement the President's Vision for Space Exploration by returning to the Moon and preparing to go beyond. Through this NASA bill, Congress can provide constructive support to the good work being done by Administrator Michael Griffin, as they begin to implement the President's vision and prepare NASA for the challenges of the future. This is a 5-year bill, authorizing NASA from 2006 through 2010. It authorizes NASA appropriations in excess of the President's budget request. For fiscal year 2006, the President requested $16.456 billion, which is a 2.4 percent increase over the fiscal year 2005 NASA operating budget. Recently the Commerce, Justice, and Science Appropriations Subcommittee approved $16.4 billion for NASA. This bill authorizes $16.556 billion for fiscal year 2006, which is a 3 percent increase over the fiscal year 2005 NASA operating budget. This bill authorizes increases at a level of about 3 percent each year, consistently providing more funding than the President's budget projection. Like many of our colleagues, Senator Hutchison and I believe that recent NASA budget requests have been below the levels required for NASA to perform its various missions effectively. Once this bill is enacted, we intend to work with the Appropriations Committee to ensure that adequate funds are provided for NASA to succeed. This legislation authorizes NASA to return humans to the Moon, to explore it, and to maintain a human presence on the Moon. Consistent with the President's vision, it also requires using what we learn and develop on the Moon as a stepping stone to future exploration of Mars. To carry out these missions, our bill requires NASA to develop an implementation plan for the transition from shuttle to crew exploration vehicle, CEV. The plan will help NASA to make a smooth transition from retirement of the space shuttle orbiters to the replacement spacecraft systems. The implementation plan will help make sure that we can keep the skills and the focus that are needed to assure that each space shuttle flight is safe through retirement of the orbiters, and to retain those personnel needed for the CEV and heavy-lift cargo spacecraft. It is essential to our national security that we prevent any hiatus or gap in which the United States cannot send astronauts to space without relying on a foreign country. The Russians have been good partners in construction of the International Space Station, and the Soyuz spacecraft has been a reliable vehicle for our astronauts. But with all of the uncertainties in our relationship with Russia, we simply cannot allow ourselves the vulnerability of being totally dependent on the Soyuz. We need to maintain assured access to space by U.S. astronauts on a continuous basis. We therefore require in this legislation, that there not be a hiatus between the retirement of the space shuttle orbiters and the availability of the next generation U.S. human-rated spacecraft. We have worked with NASA to address their concerns regarding the hiatus, and have crafted language that expresses our desire not to have a gap, and that NASA feels is suitable. We are aware of Dr. Griffin's efforts to reduce the potential for a gap and we appreciate the work that he is doing to accelerate the crew exploration vehicle. Our bill directs NASA to plan for and consider a Hubble servicing mission after the two Space Shuttle Return to Flight missions have been completed. Americans are inspired by the images that Hubble produces. The new instruments to be added during the SM-4 Hubble servicing mission will produce higher quality images; enable us to see further into space; and give scientists a better understanding of our universe's past, and perhaps of our future. The replacement gyroscopes and batteries that are planned for the mission will extend Hubble's life by 5 or more years. This NASA authorization bill calls for utilization of the International Space Station for basic science as well as exploration science. It is important that we reap the benefits of our multi-billion dollar investment in the Space Station. The promise of some basic science research requires a micro-gravity or a space environment for us to better understand the problem that we are trying to solve. This bill ensures that NASA will maintain a focus on the importance of basic science. In order to assure that we can meet our obligations with respect to the Space Station, the administration has requested that Congress modify the Iran Nonproliferation Act to ensure that we can continue to cooperate with the Russian Federation in this area. There may be periods when our only access to the Space Station will be on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft. But Russia's failure to cease all proliferation activities with respect to Iran has resulted in sanctions against Russia that would preclude such cooperation. This bill directs NASA to improve its safety culture. According to the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, CAIB, report, the safety culture at NASA was as much a cause of the Columbia tragedy as the physical cause. Low- and mid-level personnel felt that you could not elevate safety concerns without reprisals, or being ignored. NASA has already taken significant steps to address these problems, but we need to assure that the safety culture improves as quickly as possible and that it continues to improve. This legislation proposes that the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel monitor and measure NASA's improvements to their safety culture, including employees' fear of reprisals for voicing concerns about safety. It also contains policy regarding NASA's need to consider and implement lessons learned, in order to avoid another preventable tragedy like the Challenger and Columbia disasters. This authorization bill addresses NASA aeronautics and America's preeminence in aviation. The Europeans have stated their intent to dominate the airplane market by 2020. It is not in our national interest to let that occur. We are calling on NASA to develop and demonstrate aviation technologies for reducing commercial aircraft noise levels at airports, making aircraft more fuel efficient, improving aircraft safety and security, and continuing the pursuit of revolutionary concepts such as hypersonic flight. Aeronautics is a very important function of NASA and needs to be continued and further developed. This bill calls on NASA to assure that at least 5 percent of the aeronautics budget is allocated for fundamental aeronautical research. NASA has a new direction, and they have outstanding leadership in Dr. Michael Griffin. We have an opportunity to authorize NASA for: implementing the Vision for Space Exploration; renewing our commitment to U.S. aviation and NASA aeronautics research; retaining or resurrecting very important science activities at NASA; and assuring that America has continuous human access to space. By passing this legislation, we will continue to advance our national security, strengthen our economy, inspire the next generation of explorers, and fulfill our destiny as explorers.

Mr. NELSON of Florida

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent I be allowed to speak as in morning business.

Mr. NELSON of Florida

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, I am going to vote for Judge Roberts as Chief Justice. I will be making a lengthy statement later on in the day as there is time allowed, since the time allocated right now under the previous order is very limited. However, I did want to take this opportunity to say, with the fresh memories of Katrina and now Rita, I think it is incumbent upon us to finally get our collective heads as Americans out of the sand and face up to the fact that we are dependent on foreign energy sources, and that since we cannot drill our way out of the problem because the development of those resources of oil would take years and years to complete, one of the great natural resources of this country is coal. Of course, that does not affect my State of Florida; we have 300 years of reserves of coal, and we now have the technology to cook this coal with highly intense heat in what is known as a coal gasification project. It burns off the gas, and that is a clean-burning gas. It would be my hope that this country will start getting serious about weaning ourselves from dependence on foreign oil by using our technology to address this problem. So that is what I wanted to share with my colleagues, since there were a couple of minutes under the previous order, and then I will be making my statement about Judge Roberts later in the day. I yield the floor.

Mr. NELSON of Florida

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, I am going to continue to speak out on the vulnerable position our country finds itself in with regard to our dependence on foreign oil. Somewhere between 58 percent and 60 percent of our daily consumption of oil comes from foreign shores. If that in and of itself is not enough to alarm us--and I think the collective Nation has put its head in the sand to ignore the ramifications of that fact--certainly the two hurricanes, Katrina and Rita, hitting the gulf coast at a very vulnerable position of our oil supply as well as our oil refining capacity has reminded us. So now with several of the refineries shut down first from Katrina in the New Orleans region and the gulf coast region of Mississippi, but now with some additional refineries that will be shut down in the Lake Charles, LA, region as a result of Hurricane Rita, it all the more underscores how vulnerable we are on this thin thread of oil supply and oil distribution. I think we need an Apollo project or a Manhattan project for energy independence. I do not think we ought to make decisions for the governing of our country and the comfort and protection of our people based on a system of supply and distribution of energy that makes us so subject to the whims of things that can happen beyond our control. I think we are likely to see this play out in the concern that we are not going to have enough home heating fuel for this winter because of the disruption that has already occurred. We clearly know what the disruption has done already to the prices, but I want to remind the Senate that the prices were very high before Hurricane Katrina happened. In the townhall meetings I was conducting throughout the month of August in Florida, continuously people were telling me: Senator Bill, we cannot afford to drive to work or, Senator, we cannot afford to drive to the doctor. That is when the price was at $2.70. After Katrina, of course, it went to $3. Who knows what the effect is going to be now as a result of Rita. We are living on a thin little margin of error in our supply, in our distribution of oil products. Is this not enough to wake us up to the fact that this Nation collectively ought to come together and say we are going to reduce and ultimately eliminate our dependence on foreign oil? We can do that in so many different ways. Yesterday, I spoke about the coal gasification process for which we have put incentives in the energy bill that was signed into law, a process that cooks coal, emitting the gas that is a clean-burning gas. But that is just one process. Remember, we have 300 years of reserves of coal in this country. We do not have to worry about going elsewhere in the world to get oil if we are able, through technology development, to convert that coal so that it is a clean-burning fuel. That is what I spoke about yesterday. Today, I tell my colleagues about a process that was actually developed back in the first part of the last century by the Germans, that is the making of synthetic fuel from coal that is clean burning. The South Africans did it, and a lot of the transportation vehicles in South Africa run on this synthetic fuel--I think it is a kind of diesel--that powers almost all of their vehicles and some of their airplanes. Well, we certainly have the resource. We have the coal. Do we have the will? The technology is certainly here. It has been here since the early part of the last century and one country has already employed it and employed it very successfully. Tomorrow I am going to come to the Senate floor again and I am going to talk about another technology that will help us move toward energy independence and to stop this dependence that has put us in such a vulnerable position with regard to the defense interests of our country and certainly our economic interests. Look what has happened to Delta Airlines already. They were in trouble economically long before the price of fuel started shooting up, but that is just one consequence. Look at the ripple effects of the thousands of people who are going to be laid off. Look at the ripple effects of what this Congress is going to have to do as we consider the protection of those employees' pensions. So here it goes. It all comes back to one thing, and that is our dependence on an economy that runs on oil when we have known for years that we were going to reach the crisis point. It happened with Katrina, but it happened back in the early 1970s when there was an oil embargo out of the Middle East. It happened again in the late 1970s when there was another embargo. When is America going to wake up? Each of us has our own ideas, but whenever we try one little thing, we cannot get a consensus in the Senate. For the last 4 years, we have brought an amendment to the floor, a simple little amendment on doing nothing more than raising miles-per-gallon on SUVs, phased in over a 10-year period so it would not hurt anybody, and we cannot get the votes on this floor to pass that. Are we beginning to wake up because of what we are facing with Katrina? I hope so. This Senator is going to continue to speak out. My State, Florida, is in a vulnerable position because we are a peninsula that sticks down into these wonderful seas that surround us. But that energy has to be brought in. We are a State that does not have a natural resource such as oil or coal. We are a State that has to import that, and we have to bring it usually from long distances. I will continue my dialog with the Senate of the United States tomorrow, bringing forth another technology that we can develop if we but have the will to change our dependence on foreign oil. I yield the floor.

Mr. NELSON of Florida

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

Mr. NELSON of Florida

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, I was necessarily absent for yesterday's vote on the Protocol of Amendment to the International Convention on Simplification and Harmonization of Customs Procedures. Had I been present, I would have voted ``aye'' on the treaty.

Mr. NELSON of Florida

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to address the Senate as in morning business.

Mr. NELSON of Florida

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, Hurricane Rita, bearing down on the gulf coast of Texas, perhaps Louisiana again, a category 5, with winds that have gotten up to 175 miles an hour, is very similar to Hurricane Katrina 3 or 4 weeks ago. It sprang up as a category 1, hitting south Florida first. Katrina did quite a bit of damage, as you would expect with winds in the range of 80 and 85 miles an hour. There was a lot of debris. There was the loss of electricity as it went over Miami, Dade County. Then, of course, when it got out to the gulf, fueled by those warm waters, about 87 degrees, providing the fuel for the hurricane, it surged in intensity on up to category 5, coming down to a category 4 before it hit the Louisiana coast. It is eerily similar; Hurricane Rita springing up and hitting Florida this time actually 50 miles south of Key West, of course, with those counterclockwise winds, and a category 1 hitting Key West--that being the strongest side of the storm--and then out over the warm waters of the gulf. This is what we have as it is approaching landfall Saturday morning. Before Katrina, this Nation was finally waking up to how vulnerable we are in our dependence on energy sources. Specifically, the Nation was waking up to the fact that 58 percent of our daily consumption of oil comes from foreign shores. That is not a very good position to be in if you have to depend on foreign lands for that oil. The price of gasoline was spiking up prior to Katrina, in the range of $2.70 a gallon. This was during August. I was doing townhall meetings all over my State of Florida, and I can tell you at $2.70 a gallon, people are hurting. Senior citizens on fixed incomes cannot afford to drive to the doctor. People making $20,000 a year can't afford to drive to work. Then along comes Katrina, and because of hitting the area of our refinery capacity, the scare goes into the market and the price of gasoline surges. In one station, overnight--one station on Interstate 10 near Tallahassee--it surged 40 cents to well over $3 a gallon. I can tell you because I know what my people feel in Florida, they are hurting. They are having difficulty making ends meet, even without now having this additional cost. Here we go again. Here comes the next major hurricane, Hurricane Rita. It is now apparently bearing down on the Galveston-Houston area, one of the major shipping ports of the world. Also, that is where a great deal of the oil activity and the oil refinery capacity of this country is located. If it does knock out some of that refinery capacity, we are going to see these spikes in the price of gasoline to the point that it is starting to hurt our people. Is it going to take another tragedy like this for us to finally wake up and, as a nation, get our heads out of the sand and address this energy-dependent condition in which we find ourselves? Mind you, this is with the backdrop that over the past 4-plus years I have been privileged to be a Member of the Senate, we have tried almost every year to do a simple little thing, and that is to raise miles per gallon on SUVs and phase it in over a long period of time so it doesn't hurt anybody. But we cannot even get 40 votes out of 100 Senators for an amendment like that, to try to address the energy-dependent condition in which this Nation finds itself. What are we going to do? Is it going to take another Katrina-like tragedy to shake us out of our lethargy? We might be shaken come next Saturday morning. There are a number of things we can do. But before I go into that, let me tell you about this thin thread we are hanging onto in our energy dependence. With 58 percent of our daily consumption foreign oil, any disruption in the system automatically will cause prices to spike and could come to the position of paralysis. It could be a major shutdown because of some malfunction in a refinery. Lord forbid, it could be a terrorist sinking a supertanker in the Strait of Hormuz, that 19-mile-wide strait in the Persian Gulf through which all of the world's tankers have to go out into the open sea to supply a world thirsty for oil. It could be another series of hurricanes. Whatever it is, that thin thread of the supply line could have devastating consequences for this country, if we cannot satiate our parched throats, this thirst for oil. We best get on with it. I suggest we start rethinking and get more than 39 votes for mandating increased miles per gallon. I suggest we start making ethanol, not just from corn--which is an expensive process--but from less expensive sources from which our technology now allows us to make ethanol. We can surely make it from sugar cane. We can make a lot from normal waste. Do you know something else. We can make it from grass. We have 31 million acres of prairie grass in this country. Let's cut the grass. Let's make cheaper ethanol and let's mix that ethanol with gasoline that will burn in our existing car engines. The primary consumption of oil is in the transportation sector, and in the transportation sector are our personal vehicles, where we consume most of that oil. If we start mixing ethanol with gasoline in greater proportions, it will burn in our existing car engines and we will use that much less oil. But let's do something else. Let's make sure that when the car manufacturers are satisfying the demands of the American public for new automobiles, they satisfy the demands and start producing more hybrid vehicles. If you have a hybrid vehicle, which Toyota has had for the last 6 years, that will get the equivalent of 50 miles per gallon in start/stop traffic, then you are burning less oil. The consumption of oil is less. If that hybrid vehicle is now burning a fuel that is not just gasoline but is a mixture of gasoline and ethanol, then you are consuming all the less oil. I suggest one more thing, that we build our hybrid vehicles so that when you park in your garage at night, you plug it in and it charges up that battery, so the next day, when you drive out, you have a fully charged battery so the gasoline engine in your hybrid vehicle is being used less to charge up that battery, and you have charged up that battery overnight from a source of energy other than oil. These are steps we can take right now. How many more monster hurricanes is it going to take, hitting the refinery capacity of this Nation along the gulf coast, for us to get our heads out of the sand? I hope and pray that Rita is going to lessen and that it will not strike a portion of the coast that brings devastation and tumult and hardship. But as of Thursday midday, that is the course it is on for Saturday morning landfall. The National Hurricane Center is pretty accurate in their predictions. I am talking to an empty Chamber because we are all out there in committee meetings. I have just run here from trying to help protect us in the Commerce Committee on a question of communications after a natural disaster--which we have experienced after Katrina. The Judiciary Committee is meeting at this moment as they consider a nominee for Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. I have made similar remarks on this floor time and time again. If they have not fallen on deaf ears, they have been ignored, as have the similar remarks of other Senators. How many times do we have to be reminded of our vulnerability as a nation, dependent on foreign oil? Let's start enacting some energy policies that will address this problem immediately, to wean ourselves as quickly as possible from dependence on foreign oil. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. NELSON of Florida

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. NELSON of Florida

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. NELSON of Florida

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, I rise today to discuss an important project by both NOAA and the University of Miami. Virginia Key, FL is the home of two important NOAA programs dealing with the oceans and fisheries and the home to the University of Miami Rosentiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. Because of their proximity, overlap in focus, and the quality of the research at both NOAA and the Rosentiel School, the two have developed a close, mutually beneficial working relationship. As the Rosentiel School has grown in prominence it has also grown in size to over 500 professors, graduate students, researchers and staff, and can no longer fit in its current facilities. The school had considered relocating, but moving away from Virginia Key would weaken the relationship between it and NOAA. That is why last year Congress found it appropriate to pass a bill authorizing NOAA to grant land to the University of Miami to construct a new Marine Life Science Center in Virginia Key. This new center would be home to both the Rosentiel School and NOAA staff, allowing their collaboration to continue and to grow. The research performed on marine habitats, fishery economics, ocean chemistry and tropical meteorology will be brought together in a modern facility where it can be presented and shared. Currently, planning is underway to develop this center, and I believe we should assist NOAA and the University of Miami with the design and schematic plans of this joint facility. Once design plans are in place, the University of Miami plans to finance the building construction through non-Federal funds. Once completed, up to 50 percent of the space will be used by NOAA.

Mr. NELSON of Florida. I thank the Senator from Maryland for her knowledge of this issue and her readiness to work with me on it. Virginia Key Marine Life Science Building

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, I rise today to discuss an important project being undertaken by the University of Miami: The Center for Southeastern Tropical Advanced Remote Sensing, or CSTARS. This state-of-the-art system will perform real-time analysis from multiple satellites of the ocean, atmosphere, environment and weather around the Gulf of Mexico, Caribbean and the Southeastern U.S. Every year, Florida and the entire Southeast must prepare itself for hurricane season. People around the Nation and the world have seen the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi. The images we are seeing daily on television are horrific and greatly disturbing, and we all are hurting for the victims of this tragedy. Last year, four hurricanes hit Florida within 5 weeks, causing billions in damage, which we are still digging out of. Many scientists predict that we are seeing the beginning of 20 to 30 years of storms of this magnitude. The information available through CSTARS will greatly enhance our ability to monitor storms and the conditions in which they develop by observing ocean temperatures, wind speed and air pressure. After storms, CSTARS can provide rapid assessments of urban and coastal infrastructure and coastline damage. Programs like CSTARS are vital for states that regularly have to prepare for these storms and recover from the damage left in their wake. Additionally, CSTARS can assist our comprehension of inland water levels, pollution, vegetation growth, coastal erosion, ocean currents, volcanic activity and much more. It is a deserving program, and I hope that this Senate is able to find the funds necessary to support it.

Mr. NELSON of Florida. The people of Florida and the nation owe NOAA's National Weather Service a debt of gratitude for their work last year predicting the four hurricanes that hit Florida and the southeast and this year for their work predicting Hurricanes Dennis and Katrina. The National Weather Service website had more than 9 billion hits during the four storms last year. That site provided vital information to the people of Florida as they prepared their homes and evacuated their families from the path of the hurricanes. For these reasons, I want to thank the distinguished chairman and ranking member of the Commerce-Justice-Science appropriations bill, Senators Shelby and Mikulski, for working with me to ensure that the National Weather Service's ability to continue to provide the American people with weather forecasts and warnings through the internet and other sources will not be undermined or limited. I agree with the chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Disaster Preparedness and Prediction, Senator DeMint, that the National Weather Service deserves an ``A'' for its predictions about Hurricane Katrina.

Mr. NELSON of Florida. I thank the Senator from Maryland for her assistance and I look forward to working with her.

Mr. NELSON of Florida

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, I rise today to introduce the ``Protection from Price Gouging Against Disaster Victims Act of 2005'' and ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. NELSON of Florida

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, I rise today to introduce the ``Protection from Price Gouging Against Disaster Victims Act of 2005'' and ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.