Clean energy and oil spill response (Sen. Lamar Alexander)

Madam President, I thank the Senator from Florida for his comments. All of us are deeply concerned about his state, the coast, and those others on the gulf coast. I know he's working hard to see that the federal government makes the appropriate response. Madam President, tonight the President of the United States speaks to the nation from the oval office about the oil spill. The oil spill is in its 57th day.

I would like to suggest what I hope that the President does not do tonight and what I hope that he does do, because the entire nation's attention is focused on this tragic spill, the consequences to the people in the gulf, consequences to the people in this country, and it creates great worries about our energy and economic future.  Number one, what I hope the President does not do tonight is use the oil spill as an excuse to pass a national energy tax collecting hundreds of billions of dollars from Americans and driving jobs overseas looking for cheap energy.  The so-called cap-and-trade national energy tax is not appropriate here because it has nothing to do with cleaning up this oil spill.  Because not only does it drive jobs overseas, it also does not work when applied to fuel.  We've had plenty of testimony before the Environment and Public Works Committee.  It would simply raise the gasoline tax but it is not going to change behavior enough to reduce the amount of gasoline consumed or carbon emitted.  Finally, when applied to utilities, a cap and trade scheme is premature because we have not yet found ways to recapture carbon from coal plants cost effectively or in a way that would permit coal plants to make money from the carbon rather than raising the price of everybody's electric bill.  So, number one, I hope the president stays focused and doesn't follow the advice of the White House Chief of Staff which has been so often quoted, “Never let a crisis go to waste.”  This is a crisis, but don't try to mislead the American people into thinking that the cure for the oil spill is a new national energy tax that drives jobs overseas looking for cheap energy.

Number two, I would hope that the President, while helping us figure out what to do about the oil spill and making sure that it never happens again doesn't destroy the rest of the Gulf Coast economy in the meantime. The Senators from Louisiana, Sen. Landrieu, and Sen. Vitter have both spoken eloquently on the livelihood of so many in that area. We don't stop flying after a terrible airplane accident, and we're not going to stop offshore drilling after a tragic spill such as this one.  What we need to do is to find out why it happened and to make sure it doesn't happen again. 30% of the oil and 25% of the natural gas we produce in the United States comes from thousands of wells in the Gulf of Mexico.  If we were to shut them down, natural gas prices, home heating, gasoline prices all would skyrocket, and we would rely more on tankers from overseas that have a worse safety record than American offshore oil drillers.

Number three, I hope the President won't recommend, as the current legislation pending in the Senate does, that we spend taxes collected for the Oil Spill Trust Fund on something other than cleaning up the oil spill. Now let me say that again. I think Americans might be looking at Washington and wondering, what is this?  You mean to say I'm paying a higher gasoline tax in effect to go into a fund to clean up the oil spill, and the Congress is thinking about spending that money on something other than cleaning up the oil spill?  The answer is exactly right. The proposal that's on the floor before the Senate today would raise from 8 cents to 41 cents the per-barrel fee on oil that's supposed to be used to help clean up oil spills and spend it on more government.  So that's another thing I hope the President does not do tonight. I hope he remembers that it is called the oil spill liability trust fund, and if we want to re-earn the trust of the American people, we would spend the oil spill cleanup money on cleaning up oil spills.

Finally, Madam President, I hope the President does not pretend that renewable electricity has anything to do with reducing our dependence on oil. Already, I see the ads for the windmills that the big corporations are putting out.  But let's think about renewable electricity for just a minute.  We're talking about oil in the gulf.  We use oil for transportation, not to create electricity.  Renewable electricity: wind, solar, and biomass, creates electricity which we don't need in new amounts for transportation.  So, a clean energy program that is a national windmill policy or a national solar energy policy or a national biomass policy some may argue is useful for the country in some ways, but it has nothing to do with reducing our dependence on oil. I'll say more in just a minute on how we can do that.

But let's stop just for a minute, if I may, to back up what I just said. Solar energy, for example, is .02% of the electricity we produce today in the United States. We all hope someday that we can reduce its cost by a factor of four, put it on rooftops as an intermittent supplement to our electricity needs.  It has great potential for that. But the better way to spend money is on research and development to reduce its cost, not to pretend that somehow solar panels have anything to do with cleaning up the oil spill or reducing oil consumption.  Biomass, which is sort of a controlled bonfire, has the potential to help clean up our forests and create electricity.  We have in the forests of Tennessee and New Hampshire and other places dead trees from the pine beetle or other diseases.  Cleaning them up and burning them to create electricity is a good idea and biomass is also an important source of energy for our industrial sector as well.  But the idea cutting down and burning trees to create large amounts of electricity is a preposterous idea in the United States.  As an example, one would have to continuously forest an area one and a half times the size of the Great Smoky Mountain National Park in order to produce enough electricity to equal one nuclear reactor.  And in foresting an area one half times the size of the Great Smoky Mountain National Park, you'd have hundreds of trucks running up and down the mountain every day, belching up fumes, to deliver trees to power plants.

Finally, wind can also be a useful supplement in our country, but it is important to note it only produces 1.8% of our electricity.  Wind turbines have nothing to do with reducing our country's dependence on oil.  In addition, there are many other more efficient ways to produce clean carbon-free electricity.  For example, I just mentioned that wind produces 1.8% of all of our electricity, maybe about 6% of our carbon-free electricity.  Nuclear power produces 20% of our electricity, 70% of our carbon-free, pollution-free electricity.  To produce the 20% of our electricity that comes from about 100 reactors would require 186,000 of these 50-story wind turbines.  The Tennessee Valley Authority in the region where I live says it can depend on wind 12% of the time when it needs it because you can only it use it when the wind blows.  This compares to dependability for nuclear 91% of the time to be there when TVA needs it.  Then we've all seen and heard the awful stories of the pelicans immersed in oil.  That's not the only form of energy that causes a problem for birds.  The American Bird Conservancy today says the wind farms kill thousands of birds a year.  The point is we need renewable energy. We need to advance it, and we hope that solar becomes cost competitive and biomass can be useful, and so can wind power. But it has nothing to do with reducing or dependence on foreign oil.

Now, what do I hope the President does say tonight, Madam President?  Well, number one, I hope the President stays focused on cleaning up the oil spill and taking care of those who have been harmed.  We need a plan to fix the problem.  We need accountability for the regulation of energy production.  We need to ask the question: where is the President's plan?  And where are the people and the equipment necessary to implement the President's plan to clean up an oil spill?

This is not the first time we've had such a spill. After the Exxon Valdez tanker spill - that's different but it was still a big spill of oil - the country was convulsed by that and congress acted and passed the Oil Pollution Act of 1990.  It says the President shall ensure that he has a plan to clean up a worse-case oil spill and have the people and equipment to do it. Effectively, the President delegated that job to the spiller.  President Bush may have done the same.  Perhaps President Clinton may have done the same.  If the only option the President has under the current law is to delegate the job to the spiller, perhaps he should change his plan or we should change the law and we should discuss that.  And perhaps the President will make a recommendation on that.

But tonight the job is clean up the spill.  Get the job done.  Plug the hole. Number two, help people who are hurt. I come from a state where we just had 1,000-year flood event, where we've had $2 billion of damage just in Nashville alone, and the flood damage went all the way to Memphis. We know what that kind of pain is. People are helping each other and cleaning up and not looting and complaining. We feel deeply for the people on the Gulf Coast and we would like to help them. We would like to help make B.P. sure pays as they have promised.  We would like to help raise the limits on liability and address the oil spill liability trust fund.  Congress might consider the nuclear energy model of insurance for the future, because that model gets all of the nuclear companies involved in, one, making the nuclear reactors safe. And in, two, addressing any sort of accident that they might have.  I'd like to see a similar sort of insurance programs for the oil companies so that you don't have just B.P. involved in cleaning it up, but you have every other oil company interested also in providing the technology, help and advice to do the job.

The third and the final thing I hope the President does is chart a way for our clean energy future.  I've heard a lot about that on the other side of the aisle, and there is a great deal of bipartisan cooperation in this area, and let me be specific. For fuel, I hope the President will renew his call for electric cars and trucks.  Republican Senators, all 41 of us, have said we support the idea of electrifying half our cars and trucks. That's a very ambitious goal for our country, but we can do it, and it's the single-best way to reduce dependence on oil.  If we were to electrify half our cars and trucks, which would take awhile, we could reduce our dependence on oil by perhaps one-third.  We'd still be using 12 million barrels of petroleum products a day.  Sen. Dorgan, Sen. Merkley, and I have introduced bipartisan legislation to create a better environment for electric cars and trucks in America, and the President has strongly urged this idea, and Secretary Chu worked hard to create support for batteries and cars.  There's room for bipartisan agreement on the single-best way to reduce our dependence on oil - and that would be by encouraging electric cars and trucks.

Number two, for electricity, the single-best way to produce clean energy is nuclear power. 104 nuclear reactors produce 20% of our power but 70% of carbon-free electricity.  Sen. Webb and I have introduced legislation to create an environment where we can produce 100 more reactors.  We don't need these reactors in order to have electric cars and trucks. The Brookings Institute and Obama administration officials have said we don't need to build one new power plant in order to electrify half our cars and trucks because we have so much extra electricity at night.  If we plug them in when we sleep, we can have electric cars and trucks and no new windmills, no new nuclear plants, no new coal plants for that purpose.  But if we do need new green electricity, the best source for it would be nuclear power plants.  They are the most useful, they are the most reliable and they do the least damage to the environment.

The number of deaths due to a nuclear accident at a nuclear power plant in America is zero.  The number of deaths due to a nuclear accident in the navy nuclear fleet since the 1950's is zero.  There is a system of accountability and as a result, a very good record.  So, it's electric cars and trucks for fuel, nuclear power for electricity. The president's been very good in the last few months on nuclear power. He appointed strong members to the nuclear regulatory commission.  He appointed strong members to a commission to deal with used nuclear fuel. He's done a good job of beginning to get the loan guarantees going for the first new plants. So electric cars and trucks and nuclear power are areas where we should be able to work in a bipartisan way in the future.

The third area is on energy research and development. The president has recommended and the congress has approved more money for energy research and development.  Republicans support doubling our energy research and development for a clean energy future.  That would mean projects such as reducing the cost of solar power to one-fourth of today's cost, recapturing carbon from coal plants, and developing a 500-mile battery – which would almost guarantee the electrification of half our cars and trucks over time. It would mean intensive research to find ways to recycle used nuclear fuel in a way that doesn't isolate plutonium.  And it would also mean research for making biofuels from crops that we don't eat.  Making great advances in solar, carbon recapture, electric batteries, nuclear recycling and biofuels would be the third important part of our energy future.

And while we're at it, Mr. President, Congress should pass the Clean Air Bill that Sen. Carper and I and 13 other senators have cosponsored.  There are eight Democrats, six Republicans, and one Independent.  While we're finding out what to do about carbon, we can go ahead and do what we know how to do, which is reduce pollution from mercury, sulfur and nitrogen at our coal plants to improve the quality of our air and help save lives.

So there are four things that I would hope the President would talk about that have bipartisan support: for fuel, electric cars and trucks; for electricity, nuclear power; energy research and development for solar, carbon recapture, batteries, nuclear recycling, and clean biofuels.  Finally, the clean air bill that senator carper and I and others support.

This is an important time for our country. It is a time when we deserve bipartisan action. It is a time when we deserve to look to the future.  It is a time when we need to focus on cleaning up the spill, helping the people who are hurt, planning for a future and doing all this in a realistic and bipartisan way.