Energy and the Climate

Floor Speech

ENERGY AND THE CLIMATE -- (House of Representatives - April 21, 2009)

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Mr. HIMES. Thank you, Mr. Blumenauer. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I am deeply honored to be standing on this floor where, for over a century and a half, our predecessors have taken the tough decisions, made the hard choices to set the American economy up for greatness. I'm talking about the investment in the highway system. I'm talking about the investment in the Internet, which has opened up vast new swaths of our economy. And we have that kind of opportunity now. In fact, we have that challenge right now. And the question is, will we find the will to rise to that challenge?

And I want to confine my remarks tonight to a very, very important topic, which is the fact that we have a renewable energy resource that is clean, cheap, abundant and available right now, by which of course I refer to the energy that we don't use because we conserve it, because we take advantage of the ugly fact that we are far too inefficient in our use of energy.

There is a history to this. We would simply be accelerating something that has been true now for decades. The Alliance to Save Energy estimates that without the efficiency gains that we were forced to make starting in 1973, when foreign nations decided to force us to make these efficiency gains, that we would use 50 percent more energy than we used to. And there's a lesson here. There is a lesson here that we can continue, not because a foreign country forces us to do it, but that we can choose to affirmatively capture this readily available energy resource.

Let me comment on a couple of ideas and areas that I happen to know well, having worked on the rehabilitation of this country's affordable housing stock for many years. The fact is that roughly 40 percent of the energy that we use in this country is used in our built environment, in our homes, our building, our commercial facilities, and we operate far less efficiently than we might.

At Enterprise Community Partners, we would do a rehabilitation of a 100-year-old tenement, 5-, 6-story tenement in New York City, built at a time when coal was pennies per ton and, therefore, builders and architects didn't think about efficiency. We would rehabilitate that structure and take 60 or 70 percent of the energy usage out of that building, 60 to 70 percent out a building which represents collectively 40 percent of the this country's energy usage.

You can't always achieve 60 or 70 percent. In our homes we achieve something; when we weatherize we achieve something like 30 percent energy savings. And I'm

delighted and proud that the Recovery Act that passed on this floor made available $1 billion for weatherization around this country.

I was holding a caulk gun a mere 36 hours ago helping to weatherize a home in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where not only would we reduce the energy used in that home, but we would create a healthier home for the individual. And as it happened, these programs target low-income individuals, and so we would cut their energy bill substantially. And in this particular home, this woman was struggling to pay her bills. And if we could take 30 percent off of her utility bills, that would make all the difference between the kind of food she could buy, whether she could take some time off, whether she might educate her children. We can do this. And I'm delighted to say that as part of this much broader effort to rise to the generational challenge of our day, we will be submitting legislation very soon that will require the use of green building standards in HUD-subsidized housing; that will provide financing mechanisms which bridge a gap which has existed for far too long, a guarantee which recognizes the fact that you can spend a little bit of extra money, not a lot, a little bit of extra money to build green, but that you quickly get that money back in reduced utility and power bills in 2, 3 and 4 years.

This mechanism would simply guarantee lending associated with that small increment of additional capital that will very rapidly be repaid through reduced operating costs.

This bill, we hope will drop this week and, hopefully, will take a very big step towards addressing what is 40 percent of the energy usage in this country. So I'm just as excited as possible to stand here with my colleagues to say that we will rise to the generational challenge of our era.

My colleagues on the other side of this floor often are fond of asking us what sorts of burdens are we placing on our children and our grandchildren. The reality is that the energy consumption and use that this country does right now places a tremendous burden in health, in costs for remediation, in pollution, in further subservience to foreign energy sources on to our children. We have done this for too long. We are presented with a generational challenge that, on this floor, for 150 years, has been met by wise men and women who stood up and said we will take the hard decisions.

Change is never easy. But we will take the hard decisions because our children deserve and should expect nothing less from us.

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Mr. HIMES. Well, I just reiterate. We see a tremendous commitment on this floor at this late hour to what I really believe is the legacy that we will leave for those who follow in our footsteps. I really believe that this is the generational challenge of our time. And we will be truthful about it; we will explain it to the American people. And we will act or we will fall prey to the misinformation, to the fear, to the anxiety that is rooted in the desire for political gain, but also in the natural fear that many people have of change.

So I would just close with the notion that we need to stand united and go forward with this terribly important initiative.

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