Cap and Trade Revenue

Floor Speech

Cap and Trade Revenue -- (Senate - May 07, 2008)

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to be able to call up amendment No. 4731 which I filed earlier today with my colleague from South Dakota, Senator TIM JOHNSON.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?

Ms. LANDRIEU. I object.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard.

Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, I wish to congratulate the Senator from New Mexico for his comprehensive energy bill which he introduced. It is a solution we need to take a hard look at, perhaps moving to it sometime in the not too distant future here in the Senate. I think his bill starts the debate.

Unfortunately, he has tried over and over and over again to start the debate here in the Senate. The legislation he introduced--and I am a cosponsor of that bill last week--is comprehensive in that it addresses the supply issue. We can't address America's high energy costs absent addressing the issue of supply. We are sending, as was already noted, $1.6 billion every single day outside the United States and, in some cases, to countries that would do us harm, in order to meet our demand for energy here at home. The Senator from New Mexico has put forward a solution which is broad based and which addresses the supply issue by making available some of the reserves we have in this country on the North Slope of Alaska, on the Outer Continental Shelf, and he addresses the need for additional refinery capacity. We haven't built a refinery in 30 years, since 1976. He also addresses some of the new technologies such as coal to liquid, which was talked about earlier.

I should say he changes a definition that was modified very late in the Energy bill debate last year that precludes forest waste residues from being a source of cellulosic ethanol because in many respects, the future of renewable energy in this country is transitioning from corn-based ethanol to cellulosic ethanol. We have enormous biomass available in this country in forests in the form of switchgrass that can be grown in abundance on the prairies in this country and other forms of biomass that can be available and can be converted into cellulosic ethanol. So his solution is to create additional supply--the supply of fuels but also the capacity of refineries--in order to be able to process more of those natural resources into refined gasoline. If we don't do that, we are going to continue to send billions and billions and billions of dollars every single year to countries outside the United States which, in many cases, use those very dollars to turn around and fund terrorist organizations that attack Americans, that to the tune of about almost $500 billion. Half a trillion dollars last year left the United States in order to meet the demand we have for energy here at home.

I congratulate the Senator from New Mexico and hope we can get a debate going here in the Senate that addresses the supply issue.

I am all for conservation measures. There are some conservation measures as well, and there are lots of steps we can be taking. Last year as part of the Energy bill, we created the first change in a long time--something like 20 years--in fuel efficiency standards. That is something we need to be pursuing as well. But at the end of the day, our appetite for energy in this country and the world's appetite for energy is not going away. In fact, the Department of Energy estimates that even with intensive conservation efforts in place, maintaining our economic growth through the year 2025 will require a 36-percent increase in energy supply, including a 39-percent increase in oil consumption. Sixty percent of our oil is currently imported. So as demand rises and domestic supply is not increased, we are subject to prices that are set by foreign countries, including, as I mentioned, some hostile regimes.

Senator Domenici has put forward several ideas in his plan that are not new. Some of them have been debated previously, some of them blocked by bipartisan politics. But I hope that $3.50, $4-a-gallon gasoline will change some of that. In my State of South Dakota, the average price of gasoline today is $3.60. Oil, of course, traded at an all-time high of $122 per barrel. Diesel is $4.18 a gallon. As the farmers in my State continue another planting season, they are faced with those diesel fuel costs that are substantially higher than previous years. They are faced with higher fertilizer costs because natural gas prices have gone up.

This is a crisis that reaches into the pocketbooks of every American. I was talking in my State of South Dakota this week with someone in the tourism business who was saying the numbers this year are already down 11 percent from the previous year. I think that is a sign of more to come in terms of the economic hardship that is going to be imposed on the economy all across this country. My State of South Dakota, because it is so energy dependent as a result of tourism and agriculture and some of the industries that are very energy intensive, is particularly hard hit. Since I was first elected to Congress over 10 years ago, we voted on opening a small section of ANWR at least five times. Most recently, in the 2006 Defense appropriations bill, we had that vote.

It is important to note at that time the Senate Democrats blocked oil and gas exploration in ANWR oil was trading for just over $50 a barrel. Well, now it is at $122 a barrel, and at that time it was argued it would take at least 10 years to develop the resources in ANWR. But I think it is high time we began the process of authorizing that exploration and production. We have up to 16 billion barrels of oil, we are told, up there, or a million barrels of oil each day that could be coming into our pipeline in this country and taking pressure off of gas prices. So I hope the fact that today the high price of gasoline is impacting more and more consumers across this country, more and more small business owners, more and more families, we will see a change in the mindset that will enable us to move forward with legislation such as that introduced by my colleague from New Mexico that will get at the heart of this problem. The problem is we don't have enough supply to keep up with the demand either at home or around the world, but at a minimum, we ought to be coming up with those solutions that are domestic, that are home grown, and by that I mean the oil reserves we have here in the United States or off our shores, the infinite amounts of coal we have that can be converted into fuels, the enormous potential we have out there for renewable energy such as ethanol made not only from corn but from other sources of biomass, and that we take steps to add refinery capacity.

It is absolutely critical, in my mind and in my view, that we start moving in this direction. I heard a report earlier today that some projections are that oil prices could get up to somewhere around $200 a barrel. I can't imagine that happening or what the impact would be on our economy, but it is never too late to do the right thing, and we need to move quickly now and decisively on an energy policy that will increase our supply, our domestic supply, take pressure off of oil prices and prices at the pump that American consumers are dealing with every single day.

I congratulate again the Senator from New Mexico for his bill. I am happy to be a cosponsor of it. I hope we are able to get a vote on it, and I hope we can do something once and for all about high gas prices and bring some relief to the American consumer.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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