controversial issues, but to air opposing views. and it becomes very difficult when you get the goth to determine -- government to determine what is the opposing view, how many opposing views are there, the sort of messy editorial decisions that the government would have to make i don't think would pass constitutional muster at this point, and we could have a whole doctrine of spectrum scarcity which has been the rationale probably overturned. justice thomas, for instance, has sort of implied that he'd like to see that overturned, and there might be a majority on the supreme court to do just that. >> host: amy schatz. >> host: isn't that still open? it was a couple years ago, and there was a lot of concern about the fairness doctrine then, but couldn't the fcc still take that out? >> guest: they could. absolutely. it's still a concern out there. members of congress who periodically talk about how the fairness doctrine should be reinstated and other members of congress who rally in opposition

of that, i think it'd be a bad idea, i think it's unconstitutional. we've actually seen a rise in political discourse since it was abolished 2 # years ago, and, of course, on the internet which didn't exist even in 1987 when the doctrine was abolished. >> host: and finally, commissioner mcdowell, when do you see the fcc having significant action on the broadband plan? what's next in the line of -- >> guest: on the broadband plan. so i think the month of august will be spent with these workshops, 20 of them. it'll be very act i have. i would like to see the commissioners go out across the country and have town halls and do some fact gathering there and listen to the american public as well. i think as we get into fall and winter we'll start to see more interest paid to this as we get closer to that february 17th deadline in terms of the specifics or specific timeline, i don't have one to offer you

just yet. maybe i could tell you later today after i meet with the chairman, but stay tuned. >> host: do you see the february 17th date holding? >> >> guest: well, it's not just a good idea, it's the law, so i think we have to stick to that and present it to congress no later than the 17th. >> host: commissioner robert mcdowell of the fcc and amy schatz of the "wall street journal". >> guest: thanks for having me.

>> and now a senate hearing looks at climate change and technologies to develop alternative energy resources. government and industry officials testify at this two and a half hour hearing of the senate environment and public works committee. >> the hearing will come to order. very happy to see all of you here. today's hearing will focus on insuring that america leads the clean energy transformation as we address the threat posed by climate change. i want to welcome our witnesses who will share their insights and expertise on this critical subject. we are facing two historic challenges in america today, a deep economic recession and the threat of unchecked global warming. during this hearing we'll examine the ways in which federal initiatives are already addressing both of these challenges. and about additional steps we can take to provide incentives for clean energy development to transform the american economy. this country can and should be a

leader of the clean energy revolution. clean energy and climate legislation provides the certainty that companies need and the signal businesses are looking for to mobilize capital and harness the greatest source of power we have in this great country, american ingenuity. clean energy legislation is jobs legislation by creating powerful incentives for clean energy it will create millions of new jobs in america, it'll do wind turbines, installing solar panels on homes and producing a new fleet of electric and hybrid vehicles. every time we have one of these hearings, the republicans and the democrats put different studies into the record proving their point. so i want to, again, refer to the pew charitable trust study that shows that the creation of jobs in the clean energy sector is the one bright spot in our economy, the major bright spot in our economy.

and noting that a charitable organization, i believe, does come to the table without bias. legislation that provides powerful incentives for the development of clean energy technologies will put america to work and unleash u.s. investment to create innovative technologies and whole new industries right here in america, reduce our dependence on foreign oil, and protect our children from pollution. so i do look forward to hearing all of our witnesses today about how we can work together to rise to the clean energy challenge and to transform our economy. senator inhofe. >> well, thank you, madam chairman, and thank you for holding this hearing. i think it might be a good time since we're going to go into august recess to kind of assess what we have leshed from -- learned from these hearings. madam chairman, since i turned the gavel over to you, this committee's held over 30

hearings on global warming with numerous testimony from officials all over the country and world. these hearings explored various issues associated with cap and trade, and i'm sure my colleagues learned a great deal for them, but over the last two years it was not from these hearings that i, that we got to the essence of cap and trade. it was the democrats who cut right through the chase, it was the democrats over the last two years who exposed what cap and trade really means for the american people. we learned, for example, from president obama that under cap and trade electricity prices would necessarily skyrocket. we learned from john dingell that cap and trade is a tax and a great big one. we learned from peter defazio that a cap and trade, quote, is prone to market manipulation and speculation without any guarantee of meaningful greenhouse gas emissions.

cap and trade has been operating in europe for three years and is largely a failure. we learned from democrat senator dorgan that the cap and trade system -- now, i'm quoting now, the wall street crowd can't wait to sink their teeth into a new trillion dollar trading market in which hedge funds and investment banks would trade and speculate on carbon credits. in no time they'll create derivatives, swaps and more for their new market. in fact, most of the investment bankers have already created carbon-trading departments. they are ready to go. i'm not. now, i'm quoting senator dorgan in that case. we learned from democrat senator maria cantwell that cap and trade programs might allow wall street to distort a carbon market for its own profits. we learned from lisa jackson that unilateral united states action -- she was referring to the bill that is on the table now -- to address climate change through cap and trade would be futile.

she said in response to a question of me that u.s. action alone would not impact co2 levels. we learned from democrat senator john kerry there is no way the united states acting alone can solve this problem, so we have to have china, we have to have india. we learned from democrat senator claire mccaskill that, quote, if we go too far with this, that is cap and trade, then all we are going to do is chase more jobs to china and india where they've been putting up coal-fired plants every 10 minutes. in sum, we have a slew of hearings in three unsuccessful votes on the senate floor. actually i'd say four because we rejected the kyoto treaty in the beginning. the democrats taught us that cap and trade is a great big tax and will raise electricity prices on consumers i would have to say in a regressive way, send jobs to china and india all without any impact on global temperature, so off we go into the august recess

secure in the knowledge that cap and trade is riddled with flaws and that democrats are seriously divided over one of president obama's top domestic policy priorities. and we also know that according to a recent polling the american public is increasingly unwilling to pay anything, as the polling has shown, to fight global warming. but all this does not mean cap and trade is dead and gone. it's very much alive as democratic leaders as they did in the house, they're eager to distribute pork in unprecedented scales to secure the necessary votes to try to pass this thing. so be assured of this, we will mark up legislation in this committee, pass it and then it will be combined with other bills from other committees, and we will have a debate on the senate floor. throughout the debate on cap and trade, we will be there to say that according to the american farm bureau the vast majority of agriculture opposes it. according to gao, it will send

jobs to china and india, it will destroy over 2 million jobs, according to epa and the eia it will not reduce our dependency on foreign oil, and when it's all said and done, the american people will reject it, and we will defeat it. thank you, madam chairman. on that happy note -- >> thank you. [laughter] you really started my day off with such excitement. >> but that's not the first time. look what you do to my days. >> i know, i'm sorry. i apologize. senator voinovich. senator bond was here first. i'm so sorry, senator. >> thank you very much, madam chair. i want to continue to brighten your day as we talk about clean energy and climate change. [laughter] there's been a lot of, there's been a lot of charges that have been thrown around how republicans are not willing to do anything. i want to point out that the republicans are the party of yes when it comes to supporting clean energy, american energy

and affordable energy. we support harnessing the largest source of clean energy we have, nuclear power. the single greatest source of zero carbon, zero air pollution, base load energy is nuclear power. nuclear power will create tens of thousands of productive jobs, and that's in contrast to the so-called green jobs of wind and energy which can only be bought with up to $100,000 of taxpayer subsidy by jobs to produce intermittently power that we as taxpayers get the privilege of subsidizing at the rate of about $20 a megawatt hour. when it blows, of course. unfortunately, president obama seems more interested in iran's right to peaceful nuclear energy than expanding american nuclear energy. republican support, clean hybrid and electric plug-in vehicle technology. just last week we celebrated a

new electric assembly truck plant in kansas city, missouri. we had on the mall a totally electric plug-in vans with the private sector partners including at&t, coca-cola, frito lay, and my kansas city power and light who are going to be running these totally electric power zero-emission vans. in missouri i'm also working with our research in the universities and the danforth planned science center to develop economic always of producing biomass to generate electricity with less emissions. we're using algae combined with carbon dioxide to produce transportation fuel, and as we've discussed here. but i also support as my fellow republicans do harnessing the american oil and gas lying off

our shores and under our lands. environmentally-friendly drilling technology allows for oil drilling in an ocean that was safe enough to withstand hurricane katrina, and we do it without the pollution that's produced in other countries which are now producing the oil and gas that we need and from the best information we have are going to continue to need for at least the next 20 years. government estimates are that we have 144 billion barrels of oil waiting for us offshore if we only go ahead and tap it. the america west rand corporation estimates america has over one trillion barrels of recoverable oil, that is more than 2,000 years worth of imports from saudi arabia. government estimates, a 200-year supply of american coal and a 95-year supply of natural gas allowing ourselves to use america's abundant supplies of energy will report another republican core belief, and that is affordable energy.

abundant supplies of american energy will help keep prices down and keep good-paying jobs. we will oppose proposals from the other side of new energy taxes which will cost us jobs and hurt america while helping our competitors in china and india. we oppose intentionally hurting the american people with higher prices or putting a price on carbon as environmentalists and some on the other side like to say. instead, democrat proposals to impose pain on american people to force them to lose less energy which will not do anything for the climate, we support america harnessing its own clean, affordable energy. finally, there are reports of cap and trade legislation that the chair intends to introduce will omit key details vital to determining its impact on families and workers. that troubles me, madam chair. farmers pay higher production costs, drivers face more pain at the pump, and workers face

greater job loss depending on how the cap and trade legislation allocates its tradeable allowances, we ought to be conferring that over the august recess. i think the american people deserve to know how legislation will affect their energy bills and jobs. we can't leave these allocation provisions blank with place holders if we're going to give americans a fair, honest, and open, transparent view of the legislation. i would wonder how we could even hold legislative hearings on legislation without reviewing its key provision, and i'd usual the chair not to try to force the committee to do so. and i thank you very much, madam chair, for -- >> senator bond, i totally agree with you that when we mark up, we'll know exactly -- >> will we know before the recess? >> yes. before the -- today? no, we won't see that until after. we're not, we're going to have many, many more hearings before we mark up. >> will we know those provisions when they're made, when they're developed? >> of course. >> okay. >> absolutely. >> that's what we -- okay.

>> senator alexander. >> thanks, madam chairman. thanks for the hearing, and i look forward to the witnesses. they know a lot about the subject matter we're discussing, and i like that the title clean energy revolution, senator bond's accurately described a republican proposal that we believe is consistent with the views of a lot of democratic senators as well which 100 nuclear power plants in the next 20 years, clean plug-in vehicles, i believe we can electrify half our cars and trucks. i learned that from one of the witnesses here today during the next 20 years. offshore exploration for natural gas, that's low carbon and then submitting manhattan projects on the things we need to figure out like capturing coal from existing, carbon from existing coal plants. by my computations, if all that were fully implemented, we would reach the kyoto goals by 2030

without a cap and trade and do it in a low-cost way. but my questions today are going to have to do with a separate part of the bill that is coming over toward us from the house of representatives. there's a renewable electricity standard that requires states to, to create 20 percent of their electricity by 2020 from a narrowly-defined group of renewable energies. wind, solar, geothermal and new hydro. it's a continuation of what i would call a national windmill policy that we've had since 1992 when we began to almost theologically subsidize the building of giant wind turbines as a way of powering our country. so if the title of our hearing is clean energy revolution, my question then to the witnesses and to others, why don't we have a clean energy standard? why do we leave out, for example, nuclear power which produces 70 percent of our

carbon-free electricity today? i congratulate mr. sand value for actually mentioning nuclear power in his testimony which is rare for witnesses from this administration. we had a very good meeting, several of us did with dr. chu earlier this week about what he hopes to do about nuclear power, and he said what we believe, that it's safe, that we have ways to deal with the waste, and he wants to get it going. so if this is so important that we need to encourage wind, why don't we encourage nuclear power and for the record, i would like to include this chart of comparisons, two different options to make another 20 percent of the united states carbon-free. the administration has said that it wants, and it's mentioned in the testimony today, let's make 20 percent of our electricity from wind. okay. well, why not at the same time try to make 20 percent of our electricity from nuclear?

both are pollution-free and carbon-free, and here are the comparisons. to do it with nuclear, you'd need 100 new reactors, about the same we have today. to do it with wind, you'd need 180,000 turbines covering an area the size of west virginia. nuclear produces 20 percent of our electricity today, wind 1.3 percent. wind is -- nuclear is a base lode power. maybe what we need is a base load clean energy standard and a renewable clean energy standard. wind, of course, is intermittent, it's only available when the wind blows. nuclear's available about 90 percent of the time on the average, that's why we call it baseload. wind is available about a third of the time. in our part of the country, tennessee, it's only available about 19 percent of the time, and the only wind farm in the southeast, so the net effect of the renewable electricity standard is to force us to pay more to buy wind from south dakota when we'd rather be using

it for nuclear or conservation or buying scrubbers for our coal plants. the 100 nuclear reactors would be built mostly on existing sites. wind would require thousands of miles of new transmission lines. we'd have to pay for that. the subsidy costs for nuclear to build 20 percent of our electricity from carbon-free would be about $17.5 billion over ten years including the nuclear production tax credit. for wind it would be ten times that, 170 billion over ten years which is the production tax credit. the chairman mentioned green jobs. there'd be more under building 100 nuclear power plants, a lot more, than there would be under building even 180,000 wind turbines according to the department of energy statistics. nuclear plants last 80 years, wind turbines 20. we have 47,000 abandoned mines in california. what if we had 180,000 abandoned wind turbines in the united states? the cost of building both is

about the same according to the national academies and the visual impact is 100 square miles for nuclear, 25,000 square miles for wind. so my question will be why not have a clean energy standard or a baseload standard that includes nuclear? madam chairman, i'd like to ask permission to include this chart following my remarks in the -- >> it will be done, sir. yes. >> thank you very much. >> senator lautenberg. >> thanks very much, madam chair. we're never quite near where the chair is. chairman, chairwoman, this is a chair of all abilities and talents. so we're glad to see the witnesses and, tom. today's hearing is our sixth in the past month on the need to fight global warming by building the economy of the future. during these hearings we've heard from business and industry leaders that the u.s. needs to

act fast to catch up to other countries that are leading the way on clean energy. right now, for example, china is investing ten times more of its gross domestic product on clean energy than the united states. we've also heard from military leaders that global warming is a serious threat to our national security. as many as 800 million people are going to face water or cropland scarcity in the next 15 years setting the stage for conflict and breeding the conditions for terrorism according to cia's national intelligence counsel. and during today's hearing we're going to hear more about science-based options we have to reduce emissions, create jobs and to grow our economy. last month the house passed a landmark bill be that would fundamentally shift how america uses energy and confronts the challenges that we have. all eyes are now on this

committee to see if we're going to do our part. and we've got to reward innovative companies and workers that are building the clean energy economy and make polluters pay for the damage that they're doing to our planet. pardon me. we must reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent by 2020 to get on the track that we need to ultimately have by 2050. that is a science-based, achievable goal and, in fact, a major new report by mckenzie and company found that the united states can reduce energy use by 23 percent by 2020 simply by becoming more energy efficient. we also need to invest in research and development to create jobs in the short term and give our country the tools to compete in the long term. right now the house bill only devotes 1 and a half percent of the allowances to research and development, but a fortune 500

company like j and j, johnson j& johnson spends about 12 percent of its revenues on r&d, and we need to improve the house bill to make sure that we provide the investments necessary to match our technology with our goals. and if we accomplish these objectives, factories that are now dark and empty can find new light building wind turbines, geothermal heat pumps, solar panels or any of the other thousands of components that generate renewable energy. and i hear our colleague from tennessee, senator alexander, continue to ask why not more nuclear, and i think the question is a fair one. i remember when nuclear was a dirty word around here, and now we've seen applications come in for people who want to make the investment, and i think certainly we have to look at

that more seriously. just look at what's happened in my state of new jersey. more than 2,000 clean energy companies now call new jersey home. they employ more than 25,000 people. so when, madam chairman, when we return to washington in september, we need to take what we've learned from these hearings, get to work building our clean energy future, and i will hope that we will have added sufficient debate and volume of air so that we can turn that air into renewable energy. thank you very much. >> thank you very much, senator. senator barrasso. >> thank you, madam chairman. unemployment has now hit 9 and a half percent in america, the administration admitted again this week that unemployment will continue to rise. it will continue to rise despite promises that the president's

$787 billion stimulus bill would prevent unemployment from reaching even 8 percent and would create or save 3.5 million job. vice president biden has said the administration misread the economy. he is correct. misreading the economy is a serious mistake given the billions we borrowed from china to pay for that stimulus bill. the people depending on this administration to restore the job market paid the price. now some in the majority in congress want to move at breakneck speed to pass a 1500-page cap and trade scheme. should america believe that the 1500-page cap and tax bill will work? supporters are putting a lot on the line by advocating the largest energy tax in the history of america. the burden of the bill will fall on the backs of working americans at a time of high unemployment, and they do not, and they are not being deliberative about this, they are rushing to do it. in an article in investors' business dale -- daily, we're

asked why the urgency? why not the time for thorough cost benefit analysis? why push a bad bill just to get something passed? why no acknowledgment that the countries that take the best care of their environment are the richest? why not tap more of our nation's abundant natural fuels in ways that are as or are more environmentally friendly than other nations? we've tried to sell the american people on the idea that we can be energy secure by having less energy but making it more expensive. they claim this approach will create jobs all across america. they also claim that this cap and trade strategy will wean america off foreign sources of energy. they claim it is critical for our national security, and they claim it will make us competitive in the world. in response i would simply ask the question, why are vaber and our -- vaber and our middle

eastern countries so viable to the energy mix? the answer, they have vast deposits of oil. if america had the same amounts, would we be in a better position to win the energy race with china and india? the answer's yes. well, we have that in america. we have oil reserves contained in oil shale throughout the west that rival saudi arabia's deposits. we also have oil in alaska, louisiana, montana, north dakota, and wyoming. do the authors of cap and trade want to tap into that? no. we have coal reserves in the west, midwest and the south that have been referred to as the saudi arabia of coal. these are in the states like kentucky, ohio, west virginia, montana, and my home state of wyoming. do the authors of cap and trade want to truly tap into that? no. america has that and more. we also have the wind, the solar, the geothermal, the biomass, the hydropower, we have it all, and we can develop it in a responsible way.

what puts us in a better position to win the energy race with india and china? well, the answer is american energy. the authors of cap and trade don't want to develop all american energy resources. they want to start the energy race with china and india two laps behind as opposed to three laps ahead. the more emergency america can -- energy america can produce, the stronger the economy will be. energy development creatings jobs. not just green jobs but red, white, and blue jobs. we need them all, and the solution rests on our shores. thank you, madam chairman. >> thank you, senator barrasso. senator merkley. >> thank you very much, madam chair. it's a delight to have you all here today. it's clear there's a central message that we have here in the united states right now the technology, the resources, the know-how to build a clean energy economy. that economy will create jobs, it will cut our dependence on foreign oil, and it will reduce pollution.

this sounds like a triple win, i look forward to hearing the details from all of you. thank you. >> thank you, senator. senator voinovich. >> first of all, i'd like to say thank you for this hearing and echo the words of my friend from tennessee that if you look at where we get our energy in this country, we're only getting about 1.4 percent from wind, and what we need to look at is nuclear. we need to look at coal. seems to me if we really wanted to reduce our emissions in this country, we would move very quickly on the nuclear and move very quickly to find a technology that would capture and sequester carbon so that we could continue using coal. we know that those people overseas are going to use it, and i think the senator from missouri made a good point when he said that we need in terms of oil we need more, we need to find more and use less.

the crucial factor that will determine whether we have an effective climate policy is the extent to which the policy incurs the development and employment of needed technology. yet regulation without sufficient available technology will result in high cost for american consumers while offering little hope that developing nations will answer the call to reduce their emissions. tackling the climate change problem is not something we can do alone. i agree that the u.s. should be a leader, but while carbon caps are difficult to sell to the developing world, access to new technology is not. i have introduced a bill to create a new committee in the asian pacific partnership for cooperation on clean energy technology and commercialization to help speed the wide acceptance of these policies.

that technology development is needed in the areas of carbon capture and see quest reaction. capture and see quest reaction. recognizing the disconnect between what technology can deliver and the bill's objectives, its authors include numerous provisions to mask the strain this compliance burden will have on the economy. yet if all these provisions don't work out as plan and government programs rarely work out as planned, the costs could be efor must. eia offers a devastating critique who's efficacy hinges on a string of assumptions that defy political practical and technological practicalities.

it shows a range of impacts you understand a variety of technology and offset available assumptions. notably, even in scenario are, where low carbon technologies are deployed at paces that energy experts agree are implausible, there are significant economic costs, but if offsets in the growth of new technology is more limited, the legislation could devastate the economy, through increases in electricity prices of up to 77%, gasoline prices up to 33% and natural gas, up 75%, resulting in a cumulative hit to the gdp of 3.6 trillion by 2030. senator baucus recently said, let's face it, the bill we now consider is a tax bill. i agree. it's not possible to look at putting a price on carbon any other way. the government is imposing a mandate with the intention of increasing prices to achieve a certain outcome. accordingly, the costs associated with the bill should be considered with a seriousness

that any tax measure is given. against it backdrop, i do support efforts to reduce green house emissions, but our policy must be reasonable, by that i mean, it must ensure economic stability, rapid rate increases or economic dislocation. and it is contingent upon achievable requirements, that is, requirements that are consistent with the development and deployment of sources of low carbon energy during a time when the national unemployment rate is at 9.5% and the national our first responsibility is to do no harm not economy. my goals are to keep this nation's economy and that of ohio under sure footing while decreasing emissions. climate change requires a long-term solution, whose strategy is fully cape ofble of accommodating the time necessary to reduce emissions in a manner that is consistent with low carbon technology development and deployment. can he with greatly move the process forward if our policy approach embraces realistic

goals while provide the necessary resources an incenti incentives to develop and deploy clean energy technologies. >> thank you. >> thank you. senator. >> thank you. let me thank our witnesses today. i would ask unanimous consent that my entire statement can be placed in the record. let me summarize by saying clean energy's important for this country for many reasons. it's important for national security, as we become energy self sufficient here in america. it's important for our environment. we know the impacts of global climate that change and carbon emissions. it's important for our economy. this is where the growth in jobs will be in america. g.e. understands that, honey well, understands that motorola understands that, do upon the understands that. they are prepared to move forward with new technologies and energy, creating jobs here in america, saving jobs here. the difficulty is we have a

level playing field. we don't have one today, because for dirty energy, we don't calculate the true costs. we don't put into the cost equations the health dangers created by the pollution, we don't put into the equations the environmental damage being done, the cleanup that will be required in cleaning up our air and water. we don't put in that the fact that there are built in subsidies today for dirty energy that new technologies, clean energy, does not enjoy. that came home to me when b.p. solar, located in frederick marry land was planning an expansion. they took it to spain rather than america, and we lost jobs because we were not as aggressive as we should have been in moving forward as other

countries are doing today. we don't want to be left behind. let me just point out, i come from a proud manufacturing state, the maryland and particularly baltimore has a rich history as a manufacturing hub. we want to have a future in manufacturing in our community. manufacturing in our community. when i take a look at the turbine propellors, the motors, the towers, the transmission lines that are going to need to be developed, it's an opportunity for us to save and expand manufacturing jobs in america. by expanding clean energy technologies. so i'm bullish on clean technology for clean energy. i think that that is where we're going to be having the job growth in america. i was proud to be a supporter of president obama's american recovery and reinvestment act. this committee worked very hard on that act. now, chairman, you were critically responsible for many of the professor visions that were included in that act that dealt with moving forward with our infrastructure, including

our infrastructure to improve technology for clean energy. now, i just want to, if i might, just yesterday, the department of energy announced $2.4 billion of grants for -- from the recovery funds, supporting the development of manufacturing and the next generation of batteries in electric vehicles. now, part of those funds are going to go to general motors facility in white marsh, maryland. now, here's a facility that has a future, but now has a much brighter future. in keeping jobs in maryland. my state. my state. my state. that recovery bill is going to create jobs in my state. and a good future for the people of maryland. and by the way, we're going to develop the type of battery power and electric power so that we can have the next generation of vehicles in america that can compete anywhere in the world and help us with an energy policy that makes sense for our

country, that's good for our environment and is also by the way good for our economy. thank you, madam chair. >> thank you, senator. senator whitehouse. >> thank you, madam chair. you have you have assembled a y towards a clean energy future. the consequence of failing to do that are man fold, there are natural security consequences, economic consequences, jobs consequences, quality of life consequences, and environmental consequences and they're all going to become very real for our children and grandchildren if we fail to acts but the second and related point that i want to leave us with is i don't believe that our present status quo is some ideal state of

nature from which any variation is an anomaly or an interference. the status quo right now is riddled with government hand on the levers of our economy. it just happens to put those hands in places that benefit dirty polluting industries. and to move government's hand in a way that supports a better clean energy future is not a disturbance in the state of nature that some of my colleagues appear to presume the status quo represents, it's actually just making better decisions with the same government power we use right now. right now, government's hand provides incentives to pollute. right now, government's hand creates a failure in this country to meet the international market that exists for clean energy incentives and vesm. now, right now, government's

hand lays subsidies all over dirty fuel and so really, all we're doing is resetting something that we've just set in the wrong place rather than taking an ideal market and adding government interference and i just think that that's a kind of basic fact we need to acknowledge in this debate. i appreciate the hearing and will be delighted to get to the witnesses. >> thank you, senator, very much. so now we turn to our panel, the title of today's hearing, in case we forgot, climate change andy sure that america leads the clean energy transformation. so we'll hear first from the honorable john willinggoff, chairman of the federal energy regulation committee, otherwise known as ferk. >> if i could have any full comments placed in the record and i will summarize from there.

thank you for the opportunity to speak here today. the federal energy regulatory commission in many states are using their existing authorities to remove barriers to the development of local carbon renewable resources, to encourage greater efficiency in the electric system. these efforts are helping to reduce the emissions produced by the generation of electricity. our nation however has a much greater ability to reduce emissions from the usage of electricity. studies indicate we could add hundreds of gig watts of renewable energy resources by 2030. in addition, a study issued last week by mcken see and company indicated that on economywide basis, energy efficiency alone could reduce our overall energy usage by 25%. a major reason i didn't rene renewable carbon resources and energy efficiency are not used for efficiently is green houses

are an energy external it's. current coal productions causes significant reduction of grown house gases, and wind turbine does not. climate change legislation can change this. this legislation is a way to recognize in the energy marketplace the effect of green house gases. doing so will encourage more energy efficiency and the use of low carbon renewable resources, allowing us to reduce our green house gas emissions while maintaining our quality of life. let me describe some of the commission's efforts to reduce barriers to renewable energy vem. the commission has limited the charges imposed on wind generators and other variable resources for deviating from the amount of energy them schedule to delivery to the grid. because these resources often have limited act to control their output. we have also proved rates to fund the development of

transmission facilities needed to deliver resources such as hydroelectric power from canada and wind power from the upper midwest and from montana and wyoming. however, i would note it is highly unlikely that all of the transmission facilities needed newable recourses will be without additional federal planning, siting and cost allocation authorities. the commission also is supporting the development of emerging hydrokinetic energy technologies which use the power of ocean waves, tides, river currents to generate electricity. in april 2009, the commission and the department of interior signed an agreement clarifying each agency's jurisdictional responsibilities for leasing and licensing renewable energy projects on the user outer continental shelf. this agreement will facilitate the development of offshore hydrokinetic projects, as well as wind and solar edge pro equity. similarly, we have signed agreements with the state of

washington and state of oregon to review the water resources off those states. in addition, the consumer energy response, will reduce consumer costs and carbon footprints of our electric supply. the commission has required the country's regional organizations and independent system operators to make filings that will ultimately reduce barriers to demand response. the commission also recently issued a fat assessment of the man to response potential after the year 2019. that assessment found the potential for peak electricity demand reductions across the country in as much as 180 gigawatts. these savings if realized can reduce carbon emissions by over a billion tons annually. finally, congress recently tasked the commission to adopt smart grid standards.

last month, the commission identified several priorities for the development of standards for smart grid technologies. the department of energy and the national institute of standards and technology also have major roles in the development of smart grid and are working closely with those agencies and with states in collaboratively fostering our deployment of smart grid technology. in conclusion, the commission is using its statutetory authorities aggressively to eliminate barriers to renewable resources an consumer energy use management to encourage greater efficiency in the electric energy system. but those efforts and the efforts of other federal and state agencies, while helpful, are not enough to prevent the growing accumulation of green house gases in our atmosphere. climate change legislation is the key to altering this trend. this legislation will also set an example for the leadership of other countries, and help our nation change from an importer of energy to an exporter of energy technology.

congress should enact this legislation now. thank you again for the opportunity to testify today. i'd be happy to answer any questions you may have. >> thank you so much. and our next speaker will be the honorable david sandalow, assistants secretary for international affairs at the u.s. department energy. >> thank you chairman boxer, and ranking members of the committee. i've traveled to china in the past two months, during that trip, i seen the impressive efforts that country is making in clean energy. chinese companies are investing if advanced clean coal technologies, developing huge wind farms, they're building ultra high voltage long distance transmission lines and launching electric vehicle programs in 13 major cities. in europe, sustained investments in clean energy has helped create widespread economic opportunities. denmark, with a land area less

smaller than chicago is the country's leader producer of wind turbine. the wind manufacturing industry earns more than $4 billion each year. germany and spain are the top installer of not sewic palms, worth $37 billion last year. in brazil, more than a of the gasoline supply has been replaced with ethanol, made from sugar cane and more than 80% of the cars sold in brazil last year were flex fuel. madam chairman, the world is on the cusp of a clean energy revolution, whether the united states is a leader or a lagger in that revolution depends on decisions we as a nation make, in the months and years ahead. the obama administration has start today lay a strong foundation, the american recovery and reinvestment act provides more than $80 billion of clean energy investments, expected to create hundreds of thousands of new jobs. this includes $11 billion to make our electric grid more efficient, $5 billion to

weatherize low income homes and $3.4 billion to accelerate deployment of carbon capture and storage technologies. in may, president obama announced the largest improvement ever of the fume efficiency of the vehicle fleet and senator cardin announced president obama announced $2.4 billion of investment in american battery in the industry, which will result in thousands of jobs while reducing our dependence on oil. these steps will not be enough. transforming our energy economy will require comprehensive energy legislation to drive sustained american investment over a period of decades. as my boss, energy secretary steven chewa has said, we must get in the game and play to win. today, american families and businesses are burdened with energy waste. a mckinsey studied released last week identifies potential energy efficiency opportunities that could reduce possible fuel

emissions by the year 2020, by more than 10%, while saving the let me repeat that. while saving the economy $700 billion. as we work to improve this efficiency, we should also work to enhance our renewable resources. a recent report concluded there was major national commitment to wind energy. our solar resources are also extraordinary. the challenge we face is to harness these resources and grow our economy in the 21s 21st century. renewable energy presents a once in a generation business opportunity. now as we accelerate this new industrial revolution, coal will remain an important part of our energy mix. we should also make full use of this domestic asset, but do so in ways that allow us to meet our energy needs, contribute to national security and compete in global markets. carbon capture and storage technologies offer an important past to achieving those multiple goals.

today, nuclear power provides 20% of our electricity and 70% of our carbon free electricity. the obama administration is committed to restarting the and is working on $18.5 billion in loan guarantees for nuclear power plants. a cap and trade mechanism provides important advantages for nuclear power in the competition against other energy sources that emit green house gases. natural gas is another fuel with great potential to aid the transition to a clean energy economy. in the past several years, due to technological advances, our recoverable reserves of natural gas have more than doubled in this economy. now, last month, the house passed historic comprehensive clean energy legislation. the obama administration strongly supported house passage of the bill, which would help position the united states as a global leader in clean energy. your chamber now holds the pen and the administration looks forward with you to swiftly

enact strong legislation that will reward efficiency and clean energy innovation. work together, we can enact legislation that assures economic recovery, creating millions of good new jobs while laying the foundation for a clean energy future. i ask that my entire statement be put in the record and thank you, madam chairman, for the opportunity to participate if this hearing. >> thank you so very much. next we'll hear for thomas strikeland, assistant secretary for wildlife and parts, u.s. department of interior, speaking on behalf of interior secretary ken salazar. >> thank you chairman, boxer, ranking member in who have and members of the committee. on behalf of secretary salazar, i am pleased to be here to speak about the work underway at the department of interior, to transform our energy economy to one based on clean and renewable natural resources and i thank you and the secretary does for your leadership on this important issue. we are entering a new day for energy production and use in the united states, a time of increased renewable energy from domestic sources and more

efficient use of energy from all sources. together, these are the foundation of a clean energy era that will improve the environment and create jobs. as president obama has said, there's a choice before us, we can remain the world's lead willing importer of oil or we can become the world's leading exporter of clean energy. the department of the interior has the responsibility of managing approximately 20% of america. these lands not only contain some of our most treasured landscapes and historic sites, but also some of our most productive energy areas. up until recently the focus of this energy production has been on conventional energy resources including oil, gas and coal. to assure that the development of these resources is -- but we also have enormous potent for renewable energy on your public lands and under the leadership of president obama and secretary salazar, we are aggressively pursuing these opportunities. we have prioritized the development of renewable energy on our public landsnd the ocs.

bureau of land management has identified over 20 million acres of land, in 11 western states and over 29 million acres with solar energy potential in six southwestern states. there are also over win 40 million acres of public land in western states and alaska, with geothermal resource potential, as well as significant biomass potential on federal lands. these public lands have the potential to produce a total of 2.9 million megawatts of solar, enough to power eight times the total number of u.s. households. 206,000 megawatts of wind, enough to power 62 million homes and 39 megawatts of geothermal. there's also significant wind potential on our offshore waters. the national renewable energy lab, the department of energy and national laboratory has identified more than a thousand gigawatts of wind potential off the atlantic coast an more than 900 gigawatts off the pacific coast and the american business community is responding as

indicated. on june 23, 2009, the department of interior announced five limited leases to construct -- off the coast of new jersey and delaware, the first of their kind ever offered by the federal government. companies are also investing in solar facilities in the southwest and wind and geothermal energy projects throughout the questions. at the same time, we're concentrating on the development of our renewable energies, we're also maintaining our production of oil and gas. currently, the outer continental shelf ache rage produced 15% of america's natural gas and 27% of our oil. in sum, we have abundant clean, renewable energy resources on public lands and of 0 our coast, which taken together allergy provide a substantial portion of our energy portfolio by 2020 and beyond. renewables are not the only way to reduce our carbon emissions. we can store carbon both in the ground and in plants and the department is actively pursuing the work necessary to make that technology a reality through

geologic carbon sequestration and biological carbon sequestration. under congressional leadership in the 2007 energy policy act, the department is developing the methodologies and standards to accompany these efforts on a commercial scale. the blm is working on regional partnerships that promote carbon sequestration demonstration projects, promoting these efforts on public lands, the blm is currently act difficult in two demonstration projects, a deep say line project in utah and an enhanced coal bed methane projects in new mexico, san juan basin. saving america's treasured landscapes through conservation efforts will be one of the major contributors our public lands will make to the carbon reduction efforts. the carbon reduction potential produced by the biological sequestration of carbons, plants storing up carbon in many ecotypesl including forest grasslands and wetlands has not yet been fully quantified but could be virtually endless.

we have a number demonstration projects in fact throughout the country, focused on these particular efforts. the experience of our land managers in pursuing these projects is part of our broader ecosystem responsibilities and that should be useful to the committee as youville an offshore program that identifies carbon programs that are associated with land management policies on private lands. in conclusion, madam chairman, a problem is complex as climate change takes the coordinated efforts of all the branches of the federal government, cooperation with states and employments and collaboration with leaders from around the world. the department of interior is prepared to play a lead willing role in this effort, but i'd also like to have my written remarks added to the record. >> without objection, we will. thanks all of you,. you know, when senator inhoff went through what happened since we changed the gavel from senator in condition hoff to

myself, he left out a couple of things that i wanted to make sure we left out. one is the supreme court ruling that carbon is a pollutant covered by the clean air act. and the subsequent action by the e.p.a., very important action that built on the work of the bush administration that we knew through hearings had been there. which is to take the first steps toward an endangerment find and under the clean air act,úwe have to protect our families from louis, so here we are at a -- pollution, so here we are at a point where the supreme court ruled that carbon is in fact covered by the clean air act. the first steps through the endangerment finding have been made, so it seems to me -- an the other thing that happened that senator inhoff mentioned is we did change president. so now you have a circumstances where you have the court saying, the highest court in the land,

once there's and dangerment finding, clearly we have to act and we have a president who believes that this is an economic opportunity, so my question to any of the three of you that would like to engage in it is that one way or another, we're going to have to lessen the carbon in the atmosphere. it's either through the clean air act or through some flexible legislation that we're all looking at, the house has passed a version of it, which gives tremendous flexibility. now my colleagues on the other side, i think i wrote it down, one of them said it's a tax and cap scheme. i don't know of any taxes in it credits in it, that help our consumers. so my question is, one way or another, we're going to have to address carbon pollution. do you feel the flexibility that we could put together in a well-crafted bill would make it better for our businesses an our

consumers and create more jobs? >> without question, madam chairman and i would just start by focusing on the energy efficiency opportunities that this country faces. right now, american families and businesses are burdened with energy waste, it is like trying to run a ways with an iron ball chained to your foot. there is so much that we can do as a nation to improve our competitiveness, simply by using energy more efficiently. the study that several of us have referred to says that we can of is a $700 billion a year in the next decade. that is not a small amount of money. i was talking reisn'tly to a glass manufacturer who described to me how his company has made glass that would save lots of energy, but he can't move it because of the structure of real estate markets. he can't sell this glass, which costs a little bit more, because contractors have an incentive only to put in low bids, so that's a type of problem that we need to over i don't mean with things like -- overcome with things like codes in order to solve this problem of all the energy waste in our country.

>> anybody else wish to --c >> madam chairman, i would add to that, i think one of the most important things about cap and trade, it's a market mechanism and we need to move to market mechanisms to solve our problems, but to do that, we need to ensure that those markets are structured correctly, so i think that's what we're attempting to do is correctly structure the market in ways that we interna internae external it'ity to ensure the mt will make the right suggestions. >> as part of the whole calculus to make this work, we need to have adequate sources renewable energy and we believe we have that now in a variety of areas and again if the public lands, we have a huge backlog of applications for solar projects. we use some of the recovery act money to establish four offices through the southwest to accelerate the process of these solar applications and in april, secretary salazar put forth regs for the development of wind on the outer continental shelf, which is a huge potential

resource. >> ok. i also wanted to point out that under the analysis of the house bill, it's projected that 161 new 1,000-megawatt nuclear power plants would route from that bill, as a result of the putting a price on carbon there through the market. senator alexander urges the building of 100 new nuclear power plants and we believe that would cost rate payers $70 billion a year. so i am -- i believe that anyone who is very fervently for nuclear power should be for this type of global warm willing legislation, because it will spur more nuclear power, and it -- and rate payers will be assisted through tax credits, some i'm confused as to why some of the proponents of nuclear power are missing this point, and i guess i'd like to ask

mr. weldinghoff if he's even that analysis, because you get more nuclear power plants that cost the rate payers far less and most of the nuclear power companies i know are supporting this legislation. >> yes, madam chairman. i haven't seen that specific analysis, although i think i've the finance committee and

this committee, senator baucus who says this is a tax bill. of. committee, it will automatically be referred to by the finance committee as a tax bill. >> there are tax credits in it. we are going to start this regardless of who puts what in the record. that is ok. >> let me ask the three of you -- one of the consistent things we keep coming up with -- and it was always back to win vice president gore had -- when vice president gore had tom woodland,

and he said if we were to pass the key of the treaty, and these are essentially cap in -- cap and trade bills. he came up with the response that all the developed nations would live by the emission requirements of kyoto. he said it would raise the temperature by now more than 0.07 of 1 degrees celsius. the chair of the environmental services cannot the same thing. he said it would reduce it by 0.1 of one degree. lee said jackson said it would not reduce it at all. let me ask the panel. if you think we passed the bill as it is today, it will have the effect of reducing the co2

worldwide? real quickly? >> i do, and the analyses you are citing assume that america will not leave or innovate. what i hear is the rest of the world is waiting for the united states to take strong steps and eager to follow american leadership. i also believe in the american entrepreneurial spirit. once on to burn norse get strong signals, it will move forward. -- once entrepreneurs get strong signals, they will move forward. >> china, elsewhere -- again, does anyone else want to respond to that question? do you think it will reduce the overall co2 if we pass this thing? >> i am not a scientist, senator, as you know. i do not have the scientific background.

i support the position of the administration. >> we have heard time and time again that american possesses 3% of the oil reserves in the world and use 25% of the world's oil. yet that 3% number refers only to the nation's 21 billion barrels of proven reserves. to prove reserve, you have to drill. if you cannot drill, you cannot prove reserves. 83% of federal onshore lands are inaccessible or restricted due to our policies here. 85% of offshore continental in the united states is off-limits. more assessment, honest assessment combines 21 billion proven reserves -- that is combined with the usgas estimates of technically- unrecoverable oil resources. that shows american oil resources equal to 149 billion

barrels of oil, or seven times the number cited by the democrats. and those who are conservative -- those are conservative government estimates. methane hydrates, oil shale, corp. estimates 1.1 trillion recoverable in utah, wyoming. to put that in perspective -- that equals more than two dozen years worth of imports from saudi arabia. i think it is clear that we have the resources. i would say this in a statement. you said there were two alternatives. this is your statement, secretary strickland. either we can remain the world's leading importer of oil, or we

can become the world's leading exporter of oil. i think there should be a third one. develop our own resources. you're the only country in the world that does not develop our own resources. the question i have is to do you agree with these analyses? should we develop our own resources? the start with you, secretary strickland. >> is the position of the administration that we should actively and aggressively developed our conventional energy resources. since this new administration came into office in january 21, we have offered just under 2000 parcels for least. 2.3 million acres. there were bids on 145,000 acres. i accompanied secretary salazar to new orleans. we have a bit coming up in august with respect to additional offshore lands. we are looking at the oc in its

entirety. we think there is substantial opportunity to continue to develop oil and gas. we think it has been undervalued and under develop -- under developed. we are moving quickly to bring balance. that is not at the expense of our conventional committed. we agree there are additional opportunities. >> secretary strickland, i appreciate that response. it is and all of the above response. thank you. >> thank you. >> i want to ask a question in response to the quest for further development of our own resources. if we develop more of our will

-- oil and energy resources as they are defined today, do we help global warming get to be reduced? >> the most important steps we can take or to improve energy efficiency, to innovate with renewable energy sources, to bring a low carbon sources. developing our own fossil resources in environmentally- responsible manner and comprehensive way is important for it achieving a number of objectives. the most important thing we can do in the short term is energy efficiency -- >> energy efficiency. therefore, as the contemplate touching the abundance of oil and gas in our country, we therefore do not automatically control the growth of global

warming? i think we need to stop going through this charade and step up to the plate and say, look. yes, perhaps we cannot find some more oil. we want to reduce our cost for living, etc., etc. leading scientists say that the united states must cap emissions by at least 20% by 2005, and the study that i talked about before said be can reduce our energy use by 23% i-2020. at little or no cost to energy efficiency. how crucial is it to our long- term objective of reducing carbon emissions in our world that we are again reducing by at

least 20% by the year 2020. >> in my view, senator, it is important to get started. is important to take the steps needed to assemble the right incentives for families around the station. there are such huge opportunities where we just need a consistent and clear policy structure. >> mr. wellinghoff? >> i agree. it is absolutely essential we start the energy efficiency as early -- early is the key. that is why it is important to allow by market mechanisms, cap and trade, to have efficiency rise to the stock -- to the top of our energy resources? . >> the international energy agency says that achieving reductions will require an

annual global investment. annual global. of $400 billion a year on research and develop a. the gao estimates the u.s. government spends one or $4 billion a year on energy research and development. -- spends $1.4 billion a year on energy research and development. how much should our government spending? >> in the past, our government has under-invested in energy research and under-invested dramatically. at this is a focused to increase our investment in this area, in bringing the best lines and to clean energy research. if we do that, we can solve these problems. >> mr. wellinghoff? >> in addition to research, we need to do development

deployment. that is what we are doing to get these things in place. both are important. @@@@@@@ " not just somebody's fictional view of what's happening in our world. thank you. >> thank you, senator lautenberg. senator alexander is next. >> thanks, madam chairman. the chairman mentioned the relative cost of nuclear and wind. the national academies made a very interesting report this week on our energy feature. they said that the relative cost of building a comparable amount of nuclear and wind would be about the same, not counting

you'd have to build 180,000 wind turbines to equal 100 new reactors, and that wouldn't include the cost of transmission. which must be hundreds of new transmission towers, or maybe thousands for the wind turbine its. and it doesn't include the cost of backup now we are, since after you build the wind turbines, you still have to have nuclear, coal or something else for when the wind doesn't blow and the senator from rhode island mentioned the end of government subsidizing dirty energy, that's not true interns of electricity. the biggest subsidies by far go to wind. which is 19 times per kilowatt hour times the subsidy for nuclear. much more than coal per kilowatt 30 and 30 times even all other renewables. mr. strickland, your department is sort ofúthe custodian of our national landscape and we're

celebrating 100 years of protecting it. what are you going to do about 180,000 new wind turbines that are 50 stories tall, many of them in the west and thousands of miles of transmission lines? and with solar, therm am plants that are being built are -- well, to equal one nuclear plant, it would take a solar power plant 30 square miles, that's five miles on each side and they sell us in the southeast to use biomass and i figured up that we'd have to continuously forest an area the size of the great smoke mountains to equal one nuclear react tore and we'd have hundreds of trucks roaring in and out every day carrying this stuff. some conservationists are talking about a renewable energy sprawl. are you developing any policies to deal with that? >> we are. right now the blm is looking at solar and involved in a programmatic eis to look at just

that very point that you make. let's rather than just let this develop haphazardly with individual projects that come in, let's look at where they're best located that takes into account some of these environment lal issues, wells transportation issues. we're looking at transportation corridors in the same way we're working with local and state governments out in the west, we're working closely with the western governors association, so the sigh deis to try to take into account the very points you make, the environmental considerations, i'm responsible for a big part of the enforcement of endangered species acts. there are real issues that we will process and work through. >> we wouldn't want to destroy the environment in the name young the environment. wrote for told me one time that you right, you thought with a concerted effort over 20 years, we might be able to lake-effectfy half our cars and trucks without build ago new power plant? >> that's correct, senator. >> i'm hoping --

>> i just wanted to add on congratulating you on all your work on this topic and i know you bought the first plug-in vehicle in the washington, d.c. area and i want to congratulate you for that. >> thank you. did you ever make a computation about how much that might reduce our reliance on foreign oil? >> it can dramatically reduce our reliance, senator. i don't have the numbers off the tip of my tongue, but quite significant. >> you're dealing with policy over there and i've already congratulated secretary chew for his interest in nuclear power, but what i'm struggling with is why do we have a renewable energy standard? why don't we have a clean energy standard? i mean, the hearing is not about renewable energy, it's not about a national windmill policy. it's about clean energy. so why are we picking and choosing and subsidizing -- why do we have a mandate, and the chairman said that we're going to build a lot of nuclear plants but we don't have a mandate to do that.

we have pan dates in effect an we're proposing more that basically require tennesseans and people in the southeast to buy wind from south dakota which makes no sense or to force us to put 50 stories wind towers. we don't want to see them. when the wind doesn't blow, it doesn't make any sense, so why don't we have a clean energy standard or a base load clean energy standard and a renewable clean energy standard. wouldn't that produce a lot more carbon-free energy more rapidly? >> senator, the bill that was passed by the house contains a very powerful mechanism for doing roughly what you're describing. >> it excludes nuclear power. >> it includes a cap and trade mechanism and the cap and trade -- >> i'm asking you about a mandate. we have a map date for wind and solar, really mainly wind is the practical effect, why not do the same for base load power? >> i guess, senator, the bill as a whole accomplishes the objectives that you are -- that

you're promoting here. >> we don't need the renewable mandate then. >> i think that's -- it's a helpful part of the overall mechanism, and senator, you know, i think there's going to be discussion in this chamber, and all ideas should be brought forward on this. >> thank you. thank you, madam chairman. >> thank you, senator. now, let me see my list here. senator merkley is next. >> thank you very much, madam chairman, and thank you for your testimony. as i hear the discussion about what we can achieve through increased energy efficiency, and the amount renewable energy that can be produced, and often it's couched in the time line of 2030, i think some the statistics that were mentioned is mr. welling o wellinghoff, ye could produce renewable energy gig watts by 2030, isn't it possible to take these factors and weave them into a coherent

strategy, eliminate our dependence on foreign oil? >> senator, yes, i believe it is, and i think part of it is what the dialogue between secretary sandalow and senator san car, with respect -- alexander, with respect to moving toward electricfication of our transportation system. that really is the key if we want to move off foreign oil, we have to electrify that transportation system and ensure that we have the clean, reliable, electric energy to provide that energy for the transportation system, but i think it is very doable, yes. i think it is very doable, yes. >> i would strongly agree with chairman wellinghoff and just highlight the announcements made yesterday. more than $2.4 billion grants under the recovery act promote exactly -- i think it has the potential to be transformational in terms of our country's reliance on i. this is the future. >> mr. strickland, do you want to add to that? >> i totally agree with that, and i think that heretofore within the department of

interior, there had not been active efforts to look at our public lands, inventory them, put a regulatory framework in place, to accelerate permitting, so we could develop those renewable resources that are there, as well as the transportation piece that secretary inhofe was referring to. we need to develop our renewable resources which are just there. >> i think i just heard three yeses to the question of could they be woven together to eliminate our dependence on foreignism i think it would be helpful to have the administration lay out just such a more detailed strategy. because it is a huge challenge to this country to be dependent upon a few nations for foreign oil. and it is a huge cost to be spending 2ful dollars a day -- $2 billion a day on foreign oil and we could create a lot of jobs by spending that money in the united states and then we have a vision that we could lay out to the american people of

the triple win, triple win on national security, on creating jobs here and a tipple win, the third being reducing the carbon dioxide in our atmosphere and good see wardship of our planet, leadership and stewardship of our planet, so i want to encourage you all to work to try to present that. and 2030 is a while into the future, but maybe when the numbers are crunched and we see what could be produced by all the investments being made, it could be done in a much shorter period. i wanted to specifically pursue the comments about the electricfication of our passenger transportation and i applaud senator alexander for his work in this area. i have heard statistics along the lines that if we were to have all of our cars produced in the near future, able to go 30 miles on simply electricity, and have braking systems,

reagain ratify braking systems to recapture the energy loss when you slow down a very heavy vehicle, that we could reduce by 80% the carbon dioxide generated by car transportation. are these numbers in the right area or do you have better numbers hand is it -- would it be feasible to have an aggress i strategy and -- aggressive strategy if which we said at some date in the future, indeed, every new car produced in the future had have to go 30 miles on electricity, have r regenerae regenerative braking? >> there's no question that the savings can be very substantial, senator merkley, for two reasons. they allow us to tap in to low carbon energy sources, sociates wind or solar or nuclear, so the carbon emissions from a fleet that's electricfied is going to be much less.

you mentioned 2030, around that time, maybe i'll be a grandfather and i think some day, my grandkids are going to look at my kids and say, what, you mean you didn't plug in cars back when you were young. i think they're going to think that is as odd as not having cell phones today. >> any other comments or thought about that effort? >> yes. i think your numbers are correct. there's actually two very good studies that have been done on this issue, one by the pacific northwest labs an another by efry and the nrdc jointly that looked at what the carbon reductions would be, both for automobiles and then with the overall carbon reducks would be if we -- reductions would be if we moved to electric transportation system, so definitely, there would be very large reductions in carbon, and has been shown that it is all feasible. utilizing electricity. to move that direction. >> thank you all very much. >> thank you.

senator barrasso. >> thank you, madam chairman. i would like to defer to senator voinovich. >> thank you, senator barrasso. i introduced a bill with byron dorgan called the national energy security act, and one of the reasons i did that is because i have been concerned for a long time that we haven't harmonized our energy, our economy, our environment and our national security. and if the public knew how vulnerable we were today in terms of oil, they'd be shaking in their boots. and it seems to me that today, we're sending, what, over 60% of our oil comes from overseas and about 60% of that is coming from the opec nations. we send about $240 billion,

$300 billion overseas to countries that produce this oil. we have no idea of the environmental impact that that is having. and so i thought to myself on many occasions, what we should be doing as a nation from a public policy security, energy and so forth, is that we should take an advantage of all of the natural resources that we have, mr. strickland and i'm glad and i talked with former senator salazar about this, in terms of our own oil. at the same time, we should be as aggressive as anyplace in the world to find a way that we use less oil. so that perhaps in a dozen years, we would -- we would be out there as the country that's least reliant on foreign sources of oil, and the least -- and the country that uses oil the least. and then we would be, i think, in terms of competitiveness, right up there where we should be. so i'm glad to know that you're

moving forward and i wish the president, when he talks about the issue of becoming oil independent, should talk about the fact that not only are we going to use less, but we're going to go after those areas where we can responsibly find oil and i think i would like you to put together that bill, as put together, sponsored by many generals, admirals, it talks about finding more,úusing less, it talks about 250, that 85% of our vehicles would be electricfied, it talks about the fact, mr. wellinghoff, that we need to grid and epry says that, you know, we're going to need $165 billion to do the grid and we need the grid not only for wind and solar, but we need it for the rest of the energy that we produce here in the country. the other thing that i want to comment on is the issue of, in your testimony, you talked about a major reason why hoe carbon renewable resources and energy

efficiency are not used more efficient l the cost of green house fasts is not reflected in the bill. if we simply tax energy more so it costs more and never build another nuclear or coal plant, people would use less and switch to less reliable sources. : experts in the world.

they have said you have to do all that. if you think some day down the road we're going to take care of our energy needs through solar and wind, it is just plain not needs. -- niave. what is your reaction to that? how can you say something like that when the facts are different? >> senator >> what i said was depending upon our ability to look at a number of scenarios with respect to the market and how the market will operate, it may be possible to bridge to a low carbon energy future utilizing a combination of our renewable resources which would include solar wind, geothermal hydrokinetic, biomass, and energy efficiency and demand response and natural gas. if you look at that in combination i think everyone would agree, every expert i've seen and talked to would agree that it is feasible, depending upon how we structure our

markets. >> fifty years from now, 100 juicer knockwurst let's get serious. >> certainly there is a transition that there is no question about it but we need to look at things like natural gas. in this country, we have probably over 100 years of worth of natural gas. mr. sandalow said we now have a visor cool figures. there are probably 100 years or less of coulter could look at the two and compare them, natural gas, when you burn it puts out half the carbon that cole does. from that perspective ultimately it would seem to me to make more sense to emphasize a bridge with natural gas combined with energy efficiency and renewable resources than it would to a bridge with carbon, intensive coal. >> i am at a time but i want to make one point, okay. you are talking about natural gas. we encourage our electricity to go to natural gas. our gas prices went up to the

top here we lost millions of jobs in this country because of the high natural gas cost. i have people in my office, bayer manufactures move jobs from the u.s. because of our high natural gas cost. when we did a policy we didn't pay attention to the impact it would have on our economy. these are all these things relate to each other. you can do this thing in a cocoon. at. >> and i'm not digesting we do. our natural gas supply resources based has been increased by more than 50% in the last three years. we found a vast amount of new natural gas that we never knew existed before. we need to look at that, consider that as how it can fit into the bridge of getting into a low carbon society. >> thank you very much, senator voinovich. senator cardin. >> again, thank you, madam chairman, and i want to thank the witnesses for their testimony. i think we all agree with senator voinovich that there is not one source that will solve

our problems for energy in america, that we have to look at all the different sources. but i would point out i think it is naïve not to look at renewables and doing a better job of renewables in trying to reach our goal of energy security, of having energy reliable sources for our economy, and leading on global climate change in reducing carbon footprint. several of you have mentioned what's happening in other countries. secretary sandal you specifically mentioned that. i guess my concern is whether america is going to wake up one day and by the innovations that we came up with that was developed here in america, perhaps even with government support. this all of a sudden is being used in other countries, and literally purchased by other countries making us once again

dependent upon energy developed in other parts of the world for our own energy needs. i will give you just one example. we are developing in baltimore allergy -based ethanol. it hasn't promised. if it works it could be a tremendous source of energy, and its carbon footprint is negative. that is a new technology. there's going to be companies that are going to move ahead on, whether they are here in america or in another country. i worry that we may not be doing enough. the key to this technology in america with the jobs with the use of the technology base in america rather than based in another country. the future, a lot of this will be very fungible. we will be able to import energy. i don't want to import energy. i want to have the energy produced right here in america. and i do applaud again the

american recovery and reinvestment act, the stimulus package. we wanted that you have a major impact on this issue, and with the department of energy did yesterday was a major step forward on a electric cars and batteries. but i do worry that we may be missing the opportunity for allowing our market to develop the jobs here in america. your response. >> senator cardin, in my view your concern is very well-founded and borne out by some of our recent history. the technology behind the cell was developed here in bell labs and now other countries have the lead. in manufacturing that technolo technology. the technology behind the previous battery was developed with u.s. government support. and is known mainly commercialized elsewhere. we need strong policies in order to make sure we develop the technology for the future here and that we keep them here.

programs like the one announced yesterday, programs likes the won is absolutely essential to make sure the united states leads the clean energy revolution. >> i think americans will be surprised that prius technology was developed in america and i hear from my neighbors all the time about, you know, the prius. we helped develop it. the problem is we didn't keep the technology here. we let it slide and now we are getting back to it. i think we are taking the right steps right now, but i just hope we have staying power in order to accomplish the goal that all of us wants to see america being energy independent and environmentally friendly way. secretary strickland, i want to get you to the management of public lands for a moment. public lands are critically important for energy production in america. can you just tell us what we are as far as the use of public lands for renewable energies, and where ucs as far as i hope

changing that equation using more of our public lands for renewables. >> senator cardin, i think we are in very early stages in terms of using public lands in terms of potential for renewable energy. i was just this spring that regulations were for the first time put in place to provide for the development of offshore wind and the outer continental shelf. there was one project at least caitlin a project that had gone forward with in room rags, at least the application for the project had gone forward. so we are very much in our infancy, but we are very much moving quickly to put the infrastructure in place with respect to solar, much the same, we have limited proposals for solar up until recently now. we have a huge backlog of private sector interest in developing solar on our public lands. as i mentioned a few moments ago, we used some of our recovery act dollars in the department to use the four offices in place throughout the southwest to help you with that

backlog to get these projects through the system. and those that meet the standards for environmental review and otherwise make sense are going to attract capital will come on line. so we are early on in this effort but there is huge potential. >> i just want to talk to the committee, i think it would be good for them to have information for the amount of public lands that are being devoted to renewable versus the traditional mineral extraction. i would urge you to ask for information. >> senator, i would be glad to organize a letter and whoever would like to sign that we will make an official request. >> thank you, madam chairman. mr. wellinghoff, you said in april there is no need to build new coal or nuclear power plants in the united states. you also said the renewables like wind, solar and biomass provide enough energy to meet baseload capacity in a future energy demands. you later said that baseload capacity is going to become an akron is him. 10 senators sent a letter to the president in response to your comments.

we were troubled that the nation's top power industry regulator would make what i believed was a reckless and unrealistic comments. and i'm going to ask madam chairman that that letter be submitted as part of the record. thank you. secretary salazar recently testified and we talked about senator cardin's questions about the amount of land, public land being used for renewables. secretary salazar testified that 138,000 acres of land, 138,000 acres of land would be needed to build a wind farm with the capacity to replace one coal-fired power plant that is roughly three and a half times the size of washington, d.c.. there are hundreds of coal-fired power plants in the united states. and i guess the question comes down to are we willing to set aside an area three and a half times the size of the district of columbia for a wind farm to replace each one of these coal-fired our plans. how do you do the math on that?

>> first of all, senator barrasso, i'd didn't respond to a question by senator voinovich that was very similar. that initially i would like to clarify. i did not say that we would not need those types of facilities, either coal or nuclear. what i did say was that in fact under appropriate market scenarios, i believe it is possible to construct a combination of renewable resources which would include not just wind, but also geothermal or finding for example much more geothermal than we ever knew existed. there are literally hundreds of gigabytes of geothermal and acupressure wells in texas that we did not know existed or had the technology to extract. we are finding literally hundreds of gigawatts of hydrokinetic resources available

in our rivers and streams and offshore in the oceans and wave energy. as well as biomass and other renewables, but add to that the 23% energy efficiency that mckenzie talks about in their study, add to that the 188 gigawatts response that we've done in our study, combine that with our 100 years of natural gas that we have in this country. there is a scenario, i believe, in a market construct that could be a least cost scenario for this country where we could impact the move to a lower carbon transition utilizing just those resources. that's what i said. so in that context, i think there are challenges with wind and the land that it takes to put that wind up, but i think also secretary salazar said there is as much of 802000 gigawatts of wind off the atlantic coast. again, we have plenty of land

out there in the ocean to take care of the area that we need to ultimately develop that when. so i do think we do have the resources and i think we do have the land area potentially to develop it if we look at all the resources and how they can be combined together. >> in terms of senator cardin's question about how much land is being used for the renewables onshore that he just asked for that number, you may want to include some of those offshore issues as well. thank you. >> mr. strickland, if i could. the president of the american farm bureau testified before this committee. he was here. he said there will be winners and losers in the agriculture community based on waxman-markey bill you are from the west, the rocky mountain west in colorado. western ranchers whose operations are heavily dependent on these, the federal land for livestock, have very limited offset opportunities under this bill. the ranchers are constrained in the types of grazing practices that they can use on federal

land, and federal lands themselves don't really qualify for offset opportunities. so the majority of the west is federal land, half of wyoming, a great portion in colorado. i am concerned about how the agriculture community any mountain west could possibly survive under waxman-markey bill, you know, given what the president of the american farm bureau has had to say. why is western agriculture being put to me at a disadvantage and do you have any solutions for your department? >> in terms of the issues that we deal with relative to access to public land for agricultural purposes, we see that as he continued important value and critical to the economy of the west so we don't believe that is at issue or at risk here. we also believe that there are outstanding opportunities for carbon sequestration, biologic carbon sequestration that involves cooperation with the agricultural community. senator inhofe i know has been a

leading proponent of conservation partnerships, and just order this week i was out in montana and i've met with the montana rancher who has sold an easement to his ranch to keep it in agriculture production. and yet it helps facilitate very important wildlife values on the front range of the rockies in montana. and so very clear examples of how we can partner between the public and private sector to advance environmental bags, and i think there are opportuniopportunities along those lines to look at biologic sequestration and to work with the agriculture community so that those kinds of uses in the land are seen as part of the solution. >> thank you, madam chairman. senator whitehouse and then we'll move to our next panel. >> thank you very much. secretary strickland, first of all, thank you for your service as the united states attorney. former u.s. attorneys need to stick together and also, please, pass a regards to our friend and

colleague, secretary salazar. you just mentioned wildlife. i understand that the wildlife adaptation amendments that have accompanied previous senate legislation in the climate change area are gathering broad, bipartisan and multi-regional support, is that your observation as well? >> it is, senator. that's a very important role we believe for the department of the interior. obvious either the art of agriculture with the land as well. but the adaptation challenges and issues and responsibilities that we have with our public lands, and more broadly to protect wildlife and to deal with the rural impact of climate change, impacts on land and species is externally important. i know you have shown great interest and leadership on this and we would like to work with you on the. >> very good. thank you. >> chairman wellinghoff, years ago i practice in an era when

electric utilities were far more vertically integrated. and since then we have seen him break out into transmission copies, generation companies, distribution companies, and i would like your thoughts on whether we should be trying to incident electric utility industry to move toward conservation companies as well. where their conservation efforts can become a profit center for them in ways that will offset the diminished sales that are associated with conservation. >> i think we have absolution, senator. in fact, ferc is doing that at this point in time. we aren't sending both the distribution utilities and private third parties to become much more involved in both energy efficiency and demand response by incorporating into the wholesale organized markets

of this country, tariffs that allow demand response and energy efficiency to be actually get up into those wholesale markets. to the extent we can have those markets open and allow for the demand side as well as the supply side to participate in them it will encourage both distribution utilities and third parties that will aggregate customers and reduce their loads and data into those markets to reduce the overall costs and improve the efficiency of the market's. >> that is a good price signals into the market under existing market structure. my question went more to -- there have been efficiencies in the market that have been captured in distribution and generation. >> right. >> should be also be thinking about pursuing a similar disaggregation so that the conservation portion of the utility portfolio actually has to be separate, and therefore

more distinct and competitive and go beyond just a market signal into the existing market? >> i'm sorry, i didn't understand that part of the. is, i think we should. the more we can does aggravate and bundle those services and make them more competitive, i think the more players will get in or entrepreneurs will get in and will have more ideas of how to do it in a more robust way and we will be able to drive down cost for consumers. yes, i would great. >> my last question is to secretary sandalow. and it relates to nuclear power. over time, a lot of objection has manifested itself to nuclear power, primarily around safety. but the u.s. navy and the european power agencies have demonstrated that nuclear power can be managed safely. around khost, because ratepayers who i was in front of chairman wellinghoff's agency trying to defend.

we are getting creamed by the cost of the nuclear power plants, but it appears as we get more towards modular systems we can manage the cost aspect better. and then the third big piece has been disposed. it creates perhaps the most dangerous hazardous-waste man can create. we don't have a means of getting rid of it. there is a technology called traveling wave nuclear technology that appears, at least, to create nuclear power off of our existing nuclear waste stocks without adding to the nuclear waste stock, and becomes a net gain in terms of our nuclear exposure. are you following that and if you would like to take it for a record since i have just run out my time. please feel free to do so but i would like to get the energy department's answer on that. >> i'm not personally but we will look at that, senator.

>> thank you, senator whitehouse very much into all my college. i found this to be extremely important. and i thought the three of you were very direct in answering our questions, and i appreciate it. will follow-up with a hopefully bipartisan letter and it is going to ask you particularly for the issue of how much land is available offshore and onshore for renewable development, mr. strickland, and then i will also add to that if you could confirm because i do want to ask anymore questions, if you could confirm that it is true that 68 million acres of undeveloped offshore oil and onshore oil leases are still not in production. because i think that is an important part for all of us that say we need everything. we need to know what leases are out there that haven't been acted upon. if you could confirm that.

i just wanted to thank all three of you very much for your time and your answers. thank you very much. >> nevermind, we have a second panel your we will proceed with. >> thank you. >> well, mr. cropp, we will start with you and then we will proceed to mr. fehrman or vice versa. whatever you do would like that is fine with us. >> that is fine. chairman boxer, i am honored to be here today. the stakes couldn't be higher. on the current path by the end of this entry, key west and the everglades will be underwater. the american southwest will be at risk of truly catastrophic droughts, and summers in michigan will be like summers in texas today. these are just a few of the

things that we learned from the authoritative science report that the u.s. government released this past june. and yet i'm optimistic. my message is simple. we can't achieve strong emission targets by 2020. we can't achieve those targets at low cost. and in meeting those targets we can create new jobs and new businesses. so my first point, we can achieve strong targets by 2020. this has been studied again and again. that epa has looked at it. the department of energy has looked at it, so has mit and mckinsey and company. these teams of experts have used different tools and different assumptions. but they all come to the same conclusion. we can cut emissions in 2020 by 17 to 20%, or more below 2005 levels. my second point. we can reduce emissions at low

cost. that epa has done an exhaustive analysis of h.r. 2454. the agency found that between now and 2050, the annual cost of the average household will be less than the cost of a postage stamp. and the poorest families will actually have a few more dollars in their pockets. just two days ago, the energy information administration, the eia came to the same conclusion. the cost of the house bill will be very low between now and 23 the eia says the average household costs will be about $0.22 a day, about a dime per person. my third point is this. lowering our emissions will create new businesses and new jobs. one of the most important studies of how we can reduce our emissions was done by the respected consulting firm, mckinsey and company. they looked at dozens of ways to

cut our emissions. and here's what they found. this chart, exhibit one, that i would like to introduce for the record. now, in just one of those areas, just one of those bars is coal power plants, and a technology ccs where new builds can be done with enhanced oil recovery. and i just want to talk about one slice of that bar. ccs of course means carbon captured storage. it needs captioning the carbon dioxide from a power plant or factory and burying it deep underground. there are three main ways of capturing carbon dioxide. i would just focus on one of those. a team of researchers at duke university has been studying the supply chains behind 11 different carbon solutions carb and low carbon solutions. one of those solutions is called show damone technology for

capturing co2. you can see here that what duke found about the supply chain, there are dozens of different benefits and workers in the works force that will be involved to make the chilled ammonia process work. we will need more minors, steelworkers, chemists, pipefitters, designers, engineers, every type of engineer, construction workers, computer modelers, geologist, and factory workers to make the thousands of different components that will go into the finished products. now finally, the last exhibit i would like to show some of the specific companies around the country that are poised to play a role in creating this technology. companies in virginia and texas and arizona, new mexico.

just literally everywhere. and as you can see, we are just looking at the component manufacturers of just one of hundreds of technologies and companies all over the country that will benefit. in conclusion, putting a ceiling on greenhouse gas emissions is an act of patriotism twice over. it is the right thing to do for our kids and grandkids. and it is the right thing to do to help america lead the clean energy revolution as it has led every other technological revolution in the past century. the time to pass the law is by early december so the united states can walk into copenhagen with a strongest hand to create a good treaty. >> thank you very much. mr. fehrman, welcome. >> chairman boxer, senator inhofe and members of the committee, thank you for inviting me to testify. midamerican energy company is the largest utility in iowa and

also serves customers in illinois, nebraska and south dakota. our generation x is about 50% goal, 20% renewables, 20% natural gas and 10% nuclear. and we lead the nation in utility owned wind generation in our parent gummi, midamerican energy holding company is a subsidiary of the perks are happily. midamerican supports reasonable emission reduction goals and was fully commit to take the necessary productive actions to meet these goals at the lowest possible cost to our customers. controlling costs is critical because the slogan make polluters pay hide the fact that it is our customers and your constituents who will actually pay for whatever program is implemented. cap and trade embraces two concepts. declining caps in the matt weitzman markey bill that will force companies to make productive investments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions much like the investment described by the first panel. what we oppose is the great part of cap and trade and is allowed. the bill's market trading

mechanism imposes an unnecessary second cause on our customers. the cost of buying unproductive emission allowances for every ton of emissions will also pay for the infrastructure to actually reduce those emissions. we don't need market signals from a trading program to act that we only need the compliance targets. the bills for the sport is giving free allowances to utilities split them 50/50 between emissions and retail sales. free allowances based on retail sales means that utilities with nuclear and hydro generation will receive allowances that they do not need. it also means that utilities with coal and natural gas generation will not receive enough allowances. this inequity beat will be extended costly for our customers and the customers of our sister utility. midamerican will only receive 49% of the allowances needed to meet the bill's requirements. this creates a shortfall of 11 million allowances and just the first compliance year which at $25 per allons will cost our

customers $276 million. in addition, another allocation of allowances will create an unlevel regulated utilities and make wholesale sales in the same market without allowances. these are just some of the inequities created by this wall street allow its trading scheme and its dissolution formula. in our view there is no value added by imposing a cost of a volatile and speculative market-based trading program on a highly regulated industry. the way to remedy this is to give states a choice. keep the caps in place but permit each state on the utility by utility basis to either participate in a trading program or to develop an alternative mechanism for working directory with a regulated utilities to meet the caps under a state implementation plan without the trading. in both cases, the federal government would set the standards and enforce the penalties for noncompliance as it does for many environmental programs today. in the industry would then be

responsible for implementing the program. there is precedent for this approach. while not a perfect analogy when congress two years ago raised fuel economy standards, it gave automakers a simple understandable standards and told them to apply. no allowances, no offset, no trading. just a standard and mandate to meet it. however, if you remain wedded to the bills of trading mechanism that all three allow the should be distributed based on emissions like the successful acid rain cap and trade program is supposed to be modeled on. under the acid rain program the free allowances only went to the emitters that actually need them for compliance. under waxman-markey bill this with nuclear and hydergine generation will receive billions of the free windfall of allowances that they do not need for compliance. the acid rain program gave out 90% of its allowances to emitters and the allowances are freely distributed over the life of the program. not here. under the program, the proceeds from the auction will be redistributed to emitters that

have actual compliance obligations, not here. under that program, once an e-mail or beat is read target, meaning the cap, it has met its compliance obligation. not under waxman markey. it will still be required to purchase millions of additional. changes to the bill must also eliminate the penalty for early action. utilities around the country have built thousands of megawatts of renewable resources in the past decade. our company does and install ref 1300 megawatts of wind since 2004. under this bill, the early action reduces our historic commissions and thus reduces our allowed allegations forcing us to buy even more. if the goal is to actually reduce emissions we must advance the construction of renewable resources significantly enhance energy efficiency programs, change customer behaviors, develop carbon capture and storage and expand the nuclear power play. i appreciate the chance to be here this morning, chairman boxer, and would be glad to answer questions you might have. >> thank you very much, granted

that i have so many questions. i want to talk about the speculation issue brief because i was a former stockbroker on wall street so i understand what happens when speculation that we have all seen it with oil futures and if there is cause for some concern. and that is why i would not support a bill unless it had real tough oversight. but i wanted to ask you and mr. krupp this question. in the waxman-markey bill they put a floor of the $11 on the price. some utilities have come to me and said what about a caller? so what i do ask your response to that, mr. krupp and rancheria. >> the aspect of a caller would certainly promote upside protection on the cost of the customer. but fundamentally, even with the collar would still impose a second cause of customers we find would not be productive. and the reason for this is if a

customer is going to spend a dollar we want that dollar to be spent on actually investing in infrastructure to reduce carbon emissions. the need to spend a second dollar to buy an allowance to get up to a cap does not seem productive or useful for us. so fundamentally we would want to stay. >> if you are worried about the consumer im as well. and we will measure our consumers are not hurt. mr. krupp, could you talk about that, about many of the other utilities to support the waxman-markey bill. and i understand it's probably dependent on their mix and so on. but some are very heavily coal, like duke energy, very strongly support of this. and so if you could talk about the collar, but the supreme court said carbon is covered under the clean air act. we have to clean up the pollution to protect your customers, my constituents, everybody. and you talked about, mr. krupp, some of the issues if we don't do this. without getting into that we are going to have to do it. and it just strikes me as

unusual that a business person would rather choose a hard cap and no ability to get allocations, no ability to get offsets. it seems to me that is really going to put costs for them through the rooms. and missed the opportunity of all is job creation, all this money we need, which i also strongly endorsed. mr. krupp, if you could respond. >> thank you. yes, mid-america is a very unique position. they have made some business decisions that i think in retrospect were bad business decisions. they just opened a new 800-megawatt coal-fired power plant in 2007. a wholesale 30% of their electricity. they sell it to the wholesale

market under waxman markey, the allegations follow the electrons. so the allocation goes to the people they are selling to, the customers. so the best way to protect the customers is to do it by having allocations go to the ics for the benefit of the customers. i think mid-america is a very special case that reflects a series of decisions that they made. certainly the proposition you've asked me about specifically cat but no trade would be extraordinary extensive to consumers. because trading gives us the reflects ability to the lowest option. it gives them the possibility to switch clues, do carbon sequestration, to open a new wind turbine or a new nuclear power plant. and no trading makes just a single utility responsible and they may not have the flexibility to do all these other things.

>> comment on the collar idea. >> the price collar is specifically just another word for a safety valve. and a safety valve, the problem with a safety valve is that it busts the integrity of the cap. it means that we are not going to guarantee the environmental reductions. we will not be able to have two say to other nations that we aren't making reductions, therefore we want you to make reductions. so the price collar response to a legitimate concern about price, but it responds in a way that violates environmental integrity. so there are many other things in the waxman-markey bill that control costs that whole cap and trade mechanism, the allocation to the retail consumers. i understand that america doesn't get all the allocation it would like, but the fact of the allocation goes directly to the consumers controls prices. and in terms of market manipulation, and i stand you, chairman boxer, whatever comes

out of this committee needs to have jail time for those who manipulate the market. there should not be any exotic derivatives, trading should be publicly on exchanges. >> okay. i would just ask you to look at a collar in a slightly different way because if we know it leaven is the low price, and we know that at that point we can still give the market signal, then i don't know why, and i'm not going to debate with you, we can't consider this as one which would more certainly. and i am looking at it is all i am saying. >> thank you, madam chairman mr. fehrman were you during my opening statement? >> i was. >> and you heard me quote a long, long list of democrat house and senate members that strongly reject the whole concept of cap and trade.

and that is augmented by jim henson who is probably the strongest voice historically for the limitations of co2. eisa cap and trade is a temple of doom. it would lock in disaster for our children and grandchildren. ralph nader, cap and trade is not going to work. it is too complex. so there are a lot of people who join a saying this thing isn't going to work. and it will not pass. but you have stated on the make polluters pay, the slogan that they are using and they are very good at these slogans. and if your customers, my constituents that are going to pay for this. now the other side responds and says the bills worker, adjust the protection and consumer refund provision will offset these costs are quill you elaborate on that? >> absolutely. at midamerican, we have not had electric base rate increase since 1995. and we are a leader in renewable

generation. to mr. krupp's comments about our miss management, if you will, over company we obviously take exception with that, the fact that we have not had rate increases. this bill, when you look at the exorbitant cost that the trading compliment of this would add to our customers, for no value, we just find it unreasonable for us to take those fees for allowances and apply that to our customers when we would be much better off taking those dollars, investing in additional renewables, additional non-carbon emitting resources such as nuclear. and actually reducing our emissions to meet the caps. that is our fundamental issue with this bill. >> thank you, mr. berman. you mentioned that you oppose the trading part of the cap and trade. kenya for the blind how purchasing of the allowances and the subsequent trading of them will not reduce greenhouse gas

emissions? i think you said by 1 ounce. >> corrector again, when you look at the way the waxman-markey bill is set up, it takes for 2005 emissions and applies a declining cap to that level. their are two pieces of the cost. there is the cost of compliance which is actually taking you your actual emissions and driving it down to the level of the cap. and then there is a second compliment to this bill, which is buying allowances from your very first emission of co2 up to the cap. that cost provided no benefit and no value and doesn't reduce co2 in any manner. the cost to reduce co2 is the cost to change our infrastructure and actually reduce emissions. >> i appreciate that. then i would last ask you your view on the carbon capture and storage technology. when would it be available, in your opinion, on a commercial

scale? >> when we look at carbon capture in technology and the opportunities for the advancement of that, commercially, we find that there is exceptional work going on in the industry. there are pilot projects being done. and believe that in a number of years, be it five years, be it tenures, that there will perhaps be carbon capture technology applications available. however, we would also say though that the sequestration of carbon, pumping of millions and millions of tons of carbon into the ground has not been studied. we do not know the impact of that, nor do we know the requirements, the litigation around that, what happens if it burbs, so on and so forth are so there are a number of issues still from a business perspective that we need clarity around in order to fully understand the impacts of carbon capture and sequestration. >> it seems to me that, i believe and several other people

believe, in fact, the majority of people believe, that the technology isn't here on a lot of things in a renewables and other things. and it would just seem to me, and i covered this in my opening statement, that if we have all these resources and we are the only country that doesn't develop our own resources, that we are to be able to use our own resources as that bridge to wherever it goes, whatever timeframe is out in the future when the technology is there. so i appreciate very much your witnessing. thank you, madam chairman. >> thank you so much. senator whitehouse? >> thank you very much, madam chair. with respect to the observation, the ranking member just made, the technology isn't here. it strikes me that in light of our existing incentives, that is sort of a self fulfilling prophecies and.

the technology isn't here for some of these technologies because we have not met the market in the incentives and investment for their develop an. so the technology is in spain and the technology is in denmark and the technology is emerging in china, and the technology is all around the world. but i find it unsatisfactory as an ultimate answer that we would observe that the technology isn't here. that is the problem we are actually trying to solve with this piece of legislation. and i see both heads nodding and i appreciate gets. i will confess, mr. krupp, that i have been a bit of a skeptic on carbon capture and sequestration, carbon capture and storage as you call it. your testimonies is that it is ready to roll. could you elaborate a little bit on that?

make me a little more comfortable about the prospects for carbon capture and storage. >> absolutely, senator. the idea that it is ready to roll actually wasn't a phrase original to me. i was quoting an official at reduce petroleum, noting that in norway there is massive amounts of carbon capture already going on, and to your earlier point, the reason it goes on in norway is there is a price on carbon in norway. and so they are avoiding the cost of putting that in the atmosphere. this observation that you need a driver is exactly the chicken and egg problem that jeff of ge has pointed to. until there is a driver there is no reason to capture carbon. luckily, many companies are anticipating regulations in the

united states, and some companies around the world where there are already regulations are developing the technologies. mitsubishi in japan, austin and france. in west virginia, on the nation's largest coal-fired power plant, the austin company has teamed up with aep to begin installing chilled ammonia process which is already demonstrated viable in wisconsin by weak energy. so i agreed that epa will have to write regulations and find how carbon can be safely kept underground. fortunately, in the last year of the bush administration, epa began that task. and so that process is well underway. i would reassure you, senator, that our nation does burn a lot of coal. half of our electricity is generated by burning coal, and

we should leave a path open to clean up that goal from carbon dioxide, just as we have been able to clean it up from sulfur dioxide. >> and in the same way that i mentioned earlier that the existing arrangement of the government influences on the energy market is not a pure state of nature from which various equals interference, there is also not a natural state, legally, on this. the united states supreme court has determined that the law of the land that carbon is a pollutant subject to clean air act regulation.

and that really gives the epa no choice but to take appropriate action under its lawful responsibilities to regulate the emissions of carbon. and if we follow that route, which at this point is really a given, since the highest court in the land has decreed that this is what shall be, the alternative to that is really where we are trying to go with the clean energy legislation. would you agree with me that the choice is between a regulatory model that would provide for no other ounces, no input through the legislative process in any event, versus a legislative solution to get to the same result? >> i would agree, senator, the choice is between having epa regulate or having congress legislate here and there is no question in my mind that having

congress legislate a robust and flexible program can protect consumers and minimize the cost. moreover, if epa, if congress fails to legislate, then the regulatory process also includes judicial review and years of delay. which i think hurts businesses tremendously because there are many, many investment decisions about what sorts of new power plants to be built that right now are on hold. because businesses are waiting for the rules to be written, will these rules come out of congress, will they come out of epa, when they come out your so i for one will think a legislative solution is preferable. but you are right, greenhouse gases will be restricted either way. >> manager, thank you very much

for this hearing. i thank the witnesses for their participation and i think we can all agree that businesses do appreciate certainty. thank you very much. >> thank you. i think that is a very, very important. let me just thank both of you. mr. fehrman, i'm just going to put in the record that you operate in south dakota, right? >> we do. >> okay. eba calculates in south dakota a number of emissions allowances that greatly exceeded the amount of co2 emissions by utilities in that state he made it into thousand eight. in 2012, the pre-allocation is 150% of the utilities in missions. 2015 that reallocation is 144%. so midamerican customers in south dakota will not need to buy emission allowances because of receiving economic benefit to the utility rebates. do you agree with that? >> i have not seen a steady but

our customer base in south dakota electrically consists of an externally small number of customers. so that portion of your study may actually be true. a very significant impact is on our iowa customers, which we view as being in excess of 20% rate increase. so that birdwell could be true in south dakota. our population is very small their. >> but your consumers will be kept whole. as a matter of fact, your consumers, i mean, it is a difference between your shareholders and your consumers. what your consumers, some of them will actually come away with $40 into the black a year. that is important also that the study showed that the low quintile. so i think there is some confusion, i think, between your discussion about your consumers versus your shareholders. i also wanted, you said something, i just want to make sure i heard you right, mr. fehrman. i think you said that even if you get enough allowances to

meet your caps, you have to keep buying more allowances. i don't think that is accurate. >> no, what i said was there is a portion of cost which applies to meeting the compliance target. so if your actual emissions are above the cap in 2012, for instance, there is a cost to actually bring those emissions down to the cap. either through the purchase of allowances h. >> or offset. >> or investing in less carbon such as renewables. you also, however, have to buy allowances from your very first time of carbon that you emit to get up to the total cap level. so in this case, unlike the acid rain program, you have to buy allowances to not only come down to the limit, but come up to the limit as well. that is a fundamental difference between this program and the

acid rain program, which i think this committee should really try to understand and study so that as exceptionally as a working program as a so2 is, this is not the answer to program. >> well, i just want to say, mr. fehrman, i really understand your concern, but i just want you to think through this. you are either going to have to deal with the epa in a command-and-control situation where you have no ability to offset the costs that you are going to be hit with in order to protect our kids from pollution. i mean, that is just what is at. or you can work with us on a bill that will soften the blow to everyone involved. and i just would like to say that it is hard for me to understand. i know that the organization

that you belong to, the edison electric institute does support waxman-markey bill and i would put in the record the names of all the electric utilities and energy companies, manufactured, corporate businesses, farm and agriculture communities, who all support the waxman-markey bill. now, we are working on a. we are looking at ways to make it better. we are looking at ways to make it more friendly to the consumer and soften the blow and all the rest of it. and we will do that and we will have our bill ready when we get back. but i hope you will work with us, sir, rather than just stand up there and say no to everything. because i think from your testimony, where i see you going, it is for the status quo. but the problem for you is, the status quo is about to change. once that finding comes into

play, there will not be any choice but for us to say we have to protect our families. and we will not have the flexibility. we will try and we will do whatever we can, but this kind of a bill is going to give us -- and i think it will make your life far more predictable, your consumers will be kept whole. and you know, we want to work with you. and if you have any specific issues or problems, please come and talk to us about it because i just don't see how you benefit, when i see you, your company, your consumers, your shareholders, by just saying let's not do anything or just go to hard cap. i don't think it will help you. >> when you look at our testimony, and i very much appreciate your comments, when you look at our testimony i think you'll find that we have, number one, no opposition to reducing co2. so i want to make that crystal clear. we absolutely agree that we can

reduce co2. in fact, we absolutely agree that we can reduce it in a manner similar to what is in waxman-markey bill secondly, if you read my testimony, we have offered alternatives both on a hard cap and secondly on alternatives that would make the trading compliment work better and level the playing field and move the inequities that are in the bill currently. that is our fundamental issue is that the way the bill is currently set up, it severely penalizes midwest utilities. and we are not alone in this concern. thirdly, and again in my testimony, we want to work with you. we have set in our testimony we will, we would appreciate workshops. there are people out there we know who have different views on this than we. but we fundamentally believe that we can arrive at a solution that takes waxman markey, and through the work of the senate

can actually deliver similar results at a lower cost to our consumer. >> okay. what we are extremely interested in working with you on that, and we will do so. the last point i want to make is to get back to mr. krupp because i think he has seen all over the country some of the pluses moving forward. and the other point i make is, what the status quo does is, you know, states are going to move out on their own. you know, the western governors, we have the mayors all involved. we have the northeast of reggie. we've got the epa. so you have everybody moving without certainty. but i want to talk to you about my state stay, just put this in the record. we are all going to a horrible recession period, and my state is very hit -- hit very hard by housing downturn.

and just starting to come back. in the last few years, and i'm going to get this right, between 1998 and 2007, california's clean energy economy has been driven by significant investment to get attracted more than six-point $5 billion in venture capital in the past three years alone. so we have six-point $5 billion invested in the last three years alone, and it is the result of they say public policies and financial incentives for clean energy development, and energy efficiencies to renewable portfolio energy efficient standards. and we also have a plan for california's green building, a goal for public buildings to be 20% more energy-efficient like 2015 -- by 2015. that go along with save our

state $120 million annual. we have seen 125,390 jobs created in this between 1998 and 2007. 10209 new businesses formed in california. by 2007 from 1998. and again, just the last three years, 6.5 billion of venture capital would be understanding from the venture capital community that they would invest more, the prediction is they would invest more in clean energy jobs in the future than they did in the high-tech communications revolution. so it is extraordinary. john doerr has so stated. we have seen between 1999 and 2008 in california, 1401 new patents. so the unleashing of entrepreneurship is incredible. and it has happened because california move forward and set of standards on this carbon.

and i just think we can all prosper. so i want to thank the two of you. thank you very, very much. we shouldn't fear the future because of the future, if we do this right, as our president has said, if we do this reform right, we will see a whole new platform for economic growth going out into this into. we will go to copenhagen. we will be a leader, and i think america is a place where, you know, entrepreneurship needs to be unleashed and these financial incentives, that is just going to unleash it. and i agree, i think it was senator merkley who said some of these date in the future that we are assuming we will meet, they are just going, we will whiz by. in other words, we'll get to where we need to go long before the 2030, 2050, because of this great entrepreneurship and the skills that we have in our country with our people and our

workers. so thank you both very, very much, and of course this conversation continues on and i look forward to working with both of you as we move forward. thank you. . .

>> remarks by author robert spencer who directs the blog called jihad watch followed by kate obenschein. they spoke of the conservative student of the young america foundation. this is about two hours. >> good morning. my name is blair daily, i am an intern at young america foundation. this is an organization dedicated to advancing the conservative movement on college campuseses. we would like to take advantage of the resources provided by young america foundation, please contact us by phone at 800-usa-1776, or on the internet at www.yaf.org. aaron next speaker is robert

spencer. this man has been a courageous voice for the truth about the enemy who struck us on september 11th, 2001. he is a director of jihad watch, which monitors the threat around the globe. a very good resource for information on this topic. mr. spencer began studying islamic theology and history in 1980. thirty years later he has written hundreds and hundreds of articles as well as eight books on the subject. two of these books are best sellers, the truth about muhammed and politically incorrect guide to islam and the crusades. which debunks such politically correct myths as the koran teaches tolerance and peace, and the crusades were an unprovoked attack on the islamic world.

next month he will be releasing his next book, the complete infidel's guide to the koran, should be an excellent resource. it is obvious he is an expert in his field and as such has led seminars on islam and the hot for many sectors of the u.s. intelligence community including the united states central command. mr. spencer is uncompromising in his determination to make the truth known about this real and dangerous threat to the existence of the american way. please warmly welcome mr. roberts spencer. [applause] >> have you heard the good news? the war on terror is over. i missed the parade. actually, i wonder who won. anyway, it is over. barack obama administration

announced yesterday that there was no more war on terror. in case you missed it, it is all done. the united states government is no longer going to speak about terrorism in connection with attacks by islamic jihad arrests on the unitthe united states pe institutions. there are so many struggles in arabic, many of which are noble, that, said the government spokesman who was talking about this, it would only be to give legitimacy to, what do you call them, to those people, it would give them legitimacy if you call

them jihadists. there are number of problems with this, and one of them is, that means the only people who will be calling them jihadists r. the g audi's themselves. why does this matter? why does it matter what we call the that or if the war on terror is over or if we speak about it. and ancient principle of warfare you may have heard, in order to defeat an enemy, you have to understand that enemy, you have to know who the is, you have to know why he is doing what he is doing, you have to know what he hopes to accomplish, and if you do not understand those things, you have no chance of victory, it is all over.

and so, the first thing the united states government ought to have done on september 11th, 2001, and ought to have been doing before that, because 9/11 was not the first attack by these people on the united states personnel or institutions, the first thing the united states government should have done was to examine the speeches and the writings of the perpetrators and their allies, and come to some understanding of who they are, why they are doing what they're doing, and what they hope to accomplish. this was not done. eight years later this is still not being done. not only has it not been done, and there's even less prospect of ever being done now that the obama administration has declared war on terror over and jihad out of bounds as a point

of discussion, but also, the fact is, that the islamic jihadists have undertaken a large-scale initiative over a period of many years to achieve precisely this goal. if anybody was a victor in the obama administration's announcement yesterday, it was the forces of the global jihadists. the stealth jihad is an initiative to advance the agenda of the terrorists by non terrorist means. everybody knows there are terrorists, everybody knows they flew the plane into the billing on 9/11 and the pentagon and so on. what were they trying to accomplish? many fewer people know that. if you look at the riding of osama bin laden and people like him, it becomes very clear that what they wanted to do was weak in the united states and but they still hope to do is ultimately destroy the united

states, and ultimately replace the free constitutional rule that we enjoy in the united states with islamic law. islamic law institutionalizes discrimination against women, discrimination against non muslims and extinguishes the freedom of speech, the freedom of conscience and other things. this is the vision of islamic law that they are actively working to replace the u.s. constitution with. that initiative is advanced by terrorist acts because those terrorist acts, they take our money, they take our time, they take our resources, they weaken us. there are also many other groups that are working to achieve the same goal, the imposition of islamic law over the united states, over western europe and over our allies that they are advancing it by means that have nothing to do with terrorist attacks and one of the primary ways they're trying to advance this goal is by making it out of

bounds, ruling it out of bounds, something beyond the limits of polite society, speak about the islamic motivation, in general the motives and goals of the jihadists, because the motives and goals of the jihadists always go back to islam. if you read what they say, if you study their writings and teachings and actions, they are always going back to islam, they're saying we're doing this because the islamic religion teaches us to wage war against unbelievers in order to bring them under the rule of the islamic social order. they're very clear about this. but then there's a funny thing. a slate of hand trek, a kind of thing that is worthy of the most talented muses -- magician in the world, the trick is the organization of the islamic conference, 57 muslim governments around the world,

the largest voting bloc in the nations, is undertake an international initiative that the united nations and elsewhere, pressure western governments to criminalize what they call islamic phobia, criticism of islam. criticism of islam by their definition is speaking about the motives and goals of the terrorists, because the terrorists always refer to islam to explain what they're doing. some of the islamic jihadists say things like this -- the muslim brotherhood, which is an international organization that is active in the united states at a key part of the stealth jihad movement, the non terrorist attack to impose islamic law, the muslim brotherhood is from an internal brotherhood document, must understand their work in america is a kind of grand teton in the eliminating and destroying western civilization from

within, and sabotaging its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and the lot of religion is made victorious over all other religions which is ultimately not a religious statement that all but a political one because the law religion as they understand it as a political extension, political manifestation that they are working to bring here. when the muslim brotherhood said they were engaged in a kind of grand the odd in eliminating and destroying western civilization from within, the organization of the islamic conference said nothing and did nothing. however, when other people, not muslim, anti-terrorist analysts began to quote the muslim brotherhood, saying that they wanted to destroy western civilization from within, that was an act of hatred, that was

bigotry and racism. that is the magician's trick that has been done here. there is a politician in the netherlands who is a very heroic individual who has published a film, produced a film which you should look up on the internet if you have not seen it, 15 minutes of your life well spent. fitna is a very simple film which quote passages of the koran and shows muslim preachers preaching about those passages of the koran and exporting violence against nonbelievers. it shows muslims blowing things up as a result of that teaching. very simple. if there is any hate speech involved it is the 8 preachers who are filmed in this tour featured in this, saying you have to wage war, fight against the jews and christians, destroy them, sleigh them wherever you

find them and so on. however, geert wilders was criticized and is being prosecuted for hate speech in the netherlands. widely criticized all over europe and all over the world tour, i am not making this up, linking islam with terrorism. you have to follow this very carefully. geert wilders did not link islam with terrorism, the islamic preachers in his film linked islam with terrorism and he reported on it. that is a very crucial distinction. he is explaining how they link islam with terrorism in saying that free people who believe in free speech, free people to believe somebody who changes his religion should not be murdered as a result of that change, free people who believe men and women not to enjoy equality of rights before the law, free people who believe that not muslims ought to enjoy the same rights in a

society with muslims, they oppose those 8 preachers. but the whole thing is denied to advance the agenda of imposing islamic law over the west and islamic law forbids not muslims to criticize islam on pain of death. consider that if the organization of the islamic conference is able successfully to shift the focus and pretend that people like geert wilders and others like him who are linking islam with terrorism, that that is an act of bigotry and hatred, what will be the result? obviously the result will be that people like you and me will be afraid to speak about the ways in which islamic jihadists use islam in order to gain recruits among peaceful muslims to motivate terror, to exhort people to commit terrorist acts and advance the jihad in other ways against the u.s.. people will be afraid to do that

because they know not only will they be branded a bigot and racist and everything else, but could bring criminal charges in the future if the lic gets its way. so what has the obama administration just done? we are not going to talk about jihad, we are not going to talk about islam, we're not going to talk about the war on terror. who is the victor? is the winner? when that kind of thing is done? the only winner is the international forces that are working to make it impossible for people to speak about the islamic jihad threat. if the united states government voluntarily abdicate its responsibility to explain and understand the motives and goals of those who want to kill us, those motives and goals will advance unimpeded. the people who believe in those motives and goals will be able

to advance without scrutiny, and knowing fully confident that their opponents in the u.s. government don't understand them, don't know why they're doing what they're doing and have no way to stop them, because you cannot formulate a coherent way to resist these people unless you understand what they're up to. so what has happened in the last couple of days is actually quite momentous, much more momentous than it might have appeared on the face of things, because this is not just a matter of terminology nomenclature, not just a matter of strategy. even some of the obama administration spokesman said we just gave legitimacy in the islamic world to these islamic groups if we say they are jihad because they are not legitimate jihad, it is a twisting and hijacking of a peaceful religion and so on. that proceeds from two, cs, one is that anyone in the islamic world understands islam based on what the u.s. government says about it.

it is inconceivable that pious muslims who believe in islam will not get his understanding of islam from islamic authorities but will go to those who run the u.s. government and get the understanding of islam from there. it is not a strategic game to say we won't speak about the odd because that will give them legitimacy. there has never been any indication that the jihad groups gain legitimacy from our speaking honestly about them in the first place. also, the islamic jihad groups are able to point to court teachings of the islamic religion that mandate war against nonbelievers, and they claim themselves the mantle of being the representatives of true islam on the basis of being able to invoke those teachings. the united states government deciding to ignore all that, is not going to do anything but allow them to continue to advance without our responding to their challenge adequately,

because once again you cannot defeat an enemy that you do not understand. so there is, in short, a concerted effort to restrict the freedom of speech, particularly in regard to the events of the global jihad. that is an effort being forwarded primarily by the organization of the islamic conference, which is the largest organization at the un, 57 states, 56 states in the palestinian -- if they decide something and they vote together they can basically get what they want at the un. what have they done at the un? they have in able to pass a resolution that said islamfob ought to decriminalize and all member states of the united nations ought to pass laws to make it a criminal offense to

speak critically of islam. people criticize christianity all the time and no one minds but when one happens to notice that the islamic jihadists use the teachings of islam to justify their actions, suddenly this is a great act of hatred and bigotry. i hope you see this plate of hand, i hope you see the magician's trick very clearly, but our freedom of speech is in grave danger. you can see wait a minute, hold on a minute, we have a first amendment here. you have heard of that. we have the first amendment, that there will be no law infringing the freedom of speech and that has been defended again and again, even in terms of knox's opinion. if you are saying, spencer, that the un wants to criminalize this

opinion, wants to make it impossible for us to speak about the motives and goals of our enemy, you got no worries because the first amendment will keep that from ever coming to the united states. i wish that were so. and i don't think that it is alarmist, however, to note a few things. in the first place, hate crime laws, the obama/biden administration has clearly come out in favor of tough new hate crime laws. what is a crime? if i come down off of the podium and slug this guy, that is a crime. if i call in a nasty name when i slug him, that is a crime. is exactly the same thing, he sings just as bad if i hit him, but it is a crime if itings jus, but it is a crime if i call him a name. no one here would defend using racial slurs and getting into gutter talk and there's no defense for that at all.

the problem is how do you define that? it is very elastic and ultimately it becomes a tool in the hands of the powerful in order to silence those who dissent from their policies. because you see the people in power can be fine anything they want to estate and it is beyond racial slurs or obnoxious talk into political dissent. if you think that can't happen, no for example that the organization of the islamic conference has been spearheading efforts for years now to classify honest talk about the islamic motives and the islamic goals of the islamic terrorists, in their own words, to classify that as he speaks on the part of counterterror analysts when they quote it. that is why geert wilders is in trouble. if what he's doing by reporting on islamic 8 preachers as a speech in its of all the leaks heat speakers themselves are not

committing hate speech, if you can bring hate crime laws in to the united states that will inevitably bring hate speech into a because that is how you decide what the crime, what is just an ordinary run-of-the-mill crime. you bring a speech laws into the united states, you are introducing the crucial expansion -- exception to the first amendment, and a pliant supreme court could very easily, i don't think it is hard to imagine a supreme court ruling that certain kinds of hate speech are not protected by the first amendment. if honest talk about the islamic jihad is a speech, then we are mute and defenseless before our enemies. you can't beat an enemy we don't understand and we will refuse to talk about or know why he is doing what he's doing, it can't be done. you think this can't happen? let me tell you another detail, one of the first things barack obama did after he became

president was right a letter to the secretary-general of the organization of the islamic conference and he said i know we can work together. i think we have a glorious future together, this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. and he invited him to the white house and he came recently, a few weeks ago. and he said you ought to appoint, mr. president, a special liaison from the white house to the islamic communities, and barack obama said yes, sir, and he did, he appointed -- the appointment was announced while he was in the white house. significance of that is he seems to be very anxious to do the lic's bidding. and the lic is very anxious to restrict free speech about the islamic jihad. and the obama administration is very anxious to bring hate crime laws into the united states.

it is not hard to see where we could be in another couple of years. this is a real threat. so the main thing i wish to leave with you this morning is that it is an indispensable foundation of a free society to have the possibility of dissent, and is extraordinarily unpopular, it is out of favor in the administration, it is out of favor in the state department, is out of favor in the mainstream media, only a few places like this where we are right now, that the honest truth about the islamic the odd and the motives and goals of the jihad terroristerrorists can ev.

omar ahmed, head of the council on islamic federation, said the muslim audience in 1998 without knowing a reporter was president. he said islam isn't in america to be equal to any other faith become dominant. the koran should be the highest authority in america and islam the only accepted religion on earth. i ask you to envision the kind of society that would come to the united states if omar ahmed got his wish. if we do not fight and stand up for our freedom, there is nothing more certain than that we will lose them. [applause] that is not the end but very close. the reality is current -- that would have been a good ending, you are right.

next time. the society that they want to see here, all you have to do is look at the international news and see what such a society would be. you can look at the fact that in iraq, indonesia, malaysia, nigeria and elsewhere, women who are not even muslims have been threatened with death for refusing to cover their hair with a scarf. you have the absolute criminalization, people talk about islam can be reformed, anything can be reformed, anything can change, let me tell you story briefly about a muslim reformer who offered a new understanding of the koran that would neutralize its silent passages and emphasize its peaceful ones that he was executed for heresy by the sudanese government in 1985. if the he speech and the hate

speech laws and freedom of -- that kind of thing, we could be seeing here. it seems preposterous, it seems outlandish but we had -- we have a government right now who is very hospitable to this kind of point of view. this is the kind of society that we are facing, and this is what we have to stand up and defend now, or there is no doubt that this effort will continue unimpeded. so it is absolutely imperative for all of you, wherever you are and with whatever resources you have, to draw attention to the attacks on the freedom of speech that are going on from the organization of the islamic conference, draw attention to the geert wilders case, draw attention to other attempts to restrict honest speech about islam and jihad and draw attention to the disastrous elements of the obama administration's policy in refusing to speak honestly or

analyze or understand our enemies. to situation is very grave and there's nothing more certain that when we come back in a year, if i see you then, we will be able to say we have already seem the bitter fruits of these policies. but you are the ones who have the power, wherever you are, whatever way you can, to stand up and begin to resist now. if you do not, every minute, the islamic jihad is nonetheless advancing. they are working hard and we have to stand up and resist and maintain ourselves as a free people or we will no longer be a free people. thank you. [applause]

>> yes, sir? [inaudible] >> can you hear me? >> yes. >> i am an army cadet, ucla. we all know over the course of the last couple years we have seen much greater sex in iraq this much greater success in iraq thanks to the surge, a large portion of that success rests on the fact we have worth successfully with moderate muslims. weekend just to exterminate populations. >> i can't just to exterminate

populations. >> i am not saying that. do we run the risk of alienating that population by taking party line stands? >> we don't run a legitimate risk by speaking the truth of doing anything that would cause damage. i don't think fantasy based policymaking is ever wise. [applause] if it is true that the koran, the islamic tradition and islamic law and mohammad all teach warfare against unbelievers and it is true, it is true that muslims are acting upon those things, if it is also true that there are other muslims who actually oppose those efforts and are willing to work with the united states, i can't see how they could possibly be defended in a legitimate way if we speak honestly about those elements,

if we really oppose them, we would not be angry at that kind of talk but they would welcome it as reformers. oven rack applause] >> i suppose my question will go a bit off of the previous -- i was wondering if given two different perspectives, i have seen articulated by general mccarthy, skepticism of islam because of its corrupt ability, for something like jennifer bryson who has actually done studies for the military concerning the military possibly being in the united states interests to find and steady islam and the more mainstream reformists view of it.

bryson is a conservative, and a conservative think tank, and if you feel there's any plausibility to that kind of compromise or even if there is common ground, i don't think there could possibly beat -- >> there is no basis for common ground without knowing where we are setting our foot, without understanding what we are dealing with lee. in the first place there has been a lot of talk, i am not ceased -- speaking about jennifer bryson or anyone in particular the there's an awful lot of talk among conservatives and others about moderate muslims and moderate islam. without really understanding, without ever having a clear definition of what would constitute a moderate. so you have outlandish things like that book who speaks for islam, essentially an international gallup poll determining the attitudes and assumptions that prevail in the

islamic world, they classify as moderates those who think the jews are behind 9/11 and america deserve what it got. the united states government pursued a policy since 9/11 -- the problem is that completely ignores the stealth jihad i was referring to, there are groups trying to advance the islamic agenda but by peaceful means. the violent peaceful distinction is useless because precisely that there are these groups that exist, you have someone like omar ahmad saying we want the koran to be the only law of the land even though omar ahmad will never blow anything up, i consider that under the oath of office that barack obama took as president of the united states to preserve, protect and defend

the constitution of the united states, he should see the movement to make the koran the only law of the land as the threat to that and ought to apply existing sedition laws to it but omar ahmad is classified as a moderate and so are others like him. in theory, it seems to me that the could work with real moderate muslims, but we have to define our terms carefully and the only way to do that is to speak honestly and say the koran does say fight against even the jews and christians until they pay this tax with willing submission and feel themselves sub viewed which has always been understood in islamic law as meaning to subjugate his status for a non muslim, and this institutionalizes discrimination against them. we know that mom, did to wage war against and believers and all these international islamic movemen

this. million come of the spiritualize understanding of the things that make them behind, the you advocate coexistence a free society that does not institute any religious law as the law of the land? in a society like ours where we have the non establishment of religion? if we can get an affirmation of that, i am happy to work with a guy like that. those questions are never even asked because of political correctness and ignorance and because of the disinformation campaign. >> thank you. >> oriental and african studies in london. we have a major problem in the middle east where all of the movements, all islamists -- we have a major problem of do we either support medieval regimes

that suppress islamists or do we support democracy and risk having the islamists win? what is your solution to that? >> you are absolutely right. the islamic terrorists have been characterized as a tiny minority of extremists who are repudiated by the vast majority of muslims worldwide, in reality whenever there has been relatively free elections in the islamic world in recent years, the people that want to see islamic law imposed in the most eckert -- draconian way come out the winners. there are a large majority for that. supporting democracy as such ends up supporting the imposition of islamic law and these institutionalize discrimination that it involves. we have seen that in iraq and afghanistan as well as in gaza and elsewhere. so the question becomes the alternative, in iraq and afghanistan, the united states opted to allow for the imposition of islamic law and

the installation of sharia as the highest law of the land, as stipulated in the iraqi and afghan constitution's. that is one method. at the same time united states is doing the opposite and contradictory thing by supporting the regime in egypt and the secularists in pakistan, they are working against the imposition of islamic law, at least in its full force in egypt and pakistan. neither choice is good, and it would seem to me that in the larger sense, if we are committed primarily to the defense of the united states and our allies, we don't really need to be funding these regimes at all and don't need to be spending money on which is stupid and suicidal. we have given billions of dollars to the pakistani since 9/11 to fight terrorism and they have turned around and given that money, a large part of it, to those terrorists they're

supposed to be fighting. this has been documented even in the new york times. why do we keep giving money to them? barack obama's response to the revelation was we have to give them more money so they can find the terrorists. if i beat myself on the head with a mallet and say gee, it hurts, i guess i will be my head on the head with a mallet even more, it is ridiculous. this is the situation we are in, we should stop all aid to those countries and we should reformulate, i am not saying these in terms of cut and run from a military standpoint, but reformulate our goals and our deployment in those countries so are we are restricting jihad activity and making sure jihadists groups cannot plan, cannot train, cannot carry out their plans, the idea of trying to establish democracy in those countries only leads to more islamic law which leads to more jihad against the west.

thank you. >> thank you for speaking to us. you mentioned in the netherlands, the party for freedom, they put forward a comprehensive plan to stop islam in the netherlands which includes labeling 5 of parts of the koran as he'd speech, putting imitations on islamic immigration, what do you think of their program for the netherlands and what price if any should we be looking to implement in the united states? >> when you talk about restricting parts of the koran as he'd speech, i am against all spayed -- hate speech laws. we have freedom of speech and that ought to be freedom of speech, the idea that bad ideas are chased out by better ones, not by repression. [applause] geert wilders ought to be supported by all of us to every

extent we can. he has called for a banning of the koran in the netherlands, it is a very different context, in the first place, because they do ban books in the netherlands and he has noted that they have banned mine kampf, adolf hitler's book, which is certainly he speech. if you're going to ban it, you have to be consistent about it, as the koran exerts warfare against and believers and the oppression of them, if the dutch government is going to be consistent, it ought to that it as well. i understand the logic of that position but i'm grateful we are not in that situation here. i understand his position but i don't support bringing it here because we don't have laws like that and we shouldn't. europe is wrong to have them. secondly, in terms of immigration, the great difficulty is this. there are millions of muslims who are not waging jihad against

the west. that is an undisputed affect. it is also an unspeakable fact that the islamic jihad groups treat those muslims as a large recruiting tool and they go into muslim communities and appealed to them on the basis of being true islam, pure muslims which is how they present themselves. if you want to get to the tremendous and of the religion you have to go with us. six young men in new york planned on fighting with al qaeda against american troops, how is it some young men who grew up in new york in a very secular environment ended of doing that? a saudi recruiter came and appealed to them and said you are living in sin, drinking alcohol, doing these other thing and are against islam, islam doesn't have a confessional booth.

the best way to make sure good deeds out do the bad ones is to do a very good deed and law hamas, the profit of islam, said the best deal you can do is jihad. the best way to redress their balance and getting to the good graces of god was to wage jihad. he appealed to their islamic understanding and islamic loyalties, which they had even though their secular muslims. no one would have thought they would pose a threat to the united states. we have to look at that realistically. when we bring in these people from muslim countries, there's no effort made whatsoever to determine their loyalty, to determine their perspectives. if we are not going to restrict immigration, which would be prudent for national-security standpoint but so fraught with other issues, if we are not going to do that, we should at least make it very clear that any agitation for any element of sharia in united states is grounds for deportation. that is the first step. [applause]

>> the most ironic way possible, my mutt husband is muslim. what can we say to the useful idiots in the west, many of whom i find are christian, who have bought into essentially the islamic lie that christians, jews and muslims all warships same god? >> one would wonder in the first place, what is the point of pointing that out? what is the person to points it out trying to say? if christians, jews and muslims worship the same god, then what does that mean? islamic jihadists are not waging war to subjugate us under the rule of islamic law? it is apples and oranges, it doesn't follow. even if we did more to same god, there is still this jihadists an supremacist imperative within islam. second, it is a clouded issue

because we worship the god of the same name. the arabic speaking christians with whom i am in daily contact use the word allah for god, they mean the god of the bible, not the god of the koran. this confuses some people who speak of this as the god of islam. it is more complicated than that. if you read the koran and you read the bible there is no doubt that they are not the same guy. you have in the koran, many repeated, insistence assertions that all law has no sun, and it is an insult to the transcendent majesty of god to say that he has a son. in the new testament you have the contrary assertion that anybody who does not have a son does not have the father. those two things cannot both be true. they might both be false that they cannot both be true. from a logical standpoint, it is clear that we do not all

abortions the same god. >> thank you. >> these days i am beginning to think we cannot rely primarily on bullets to defeat radical jihadists because it seems to turn them into martyrs and stir them harder. i begin to think we should do the more clandestine approach lights in jesting pop culture into their society to sort of deradicalize them. >> it is already happening. there's an interesting thesis being advanced by some others, i strongly disagree with this, but it is the flip side of what you are saying. some people have suggested the whole islamic jihad was caused

by britney spears. that essentially the introduction of the american pop culture in all its run a city morality into the islamic world made these moral and straitlaced people lashed out by taking down the twin towers. that is preposterous in many ways, most notably because the jihad was going on long before american pop culture was rotten. one of the 4 most theorists of the modern-day jihad, a twentieth century e egyptian, live in the united states, in colorado for two years in the 40s, and he went to a church social where there was a little dance going on, and he was so scandalized by this dancing that he wrote a very revealing document about how absolutely immoral and broaden american popular culture was and it was important to wage jihad against it. that was doris day he was upset about. imagine what he would think of

cresting at -- christine aguilera. in the first place, the claim that the west is immoral has always been a staple of jihadists discourse even since the crusades. it is not the reason they are fighting us. but ultimately the strategy proposed is in full swing at it ultimately doesn't work, i am sorry to say. one final anecdotal evidence to illustrate how it doesn't work is the kidnapping of charles glass, who is an american journalist who in the late a.d.s, for some unaccountable reason, decided it would be really neat to walk from antioch in southern turkey to cairo in egypt. along the way, predictably, in lebanon, he was kidnapped by his. while he was being held by these guys, young men holding these big rifles on him, would ask him questions like do you think american girls would find me

attractive? favor into pop culture but that did not stop them from waging jihad. >> i am a student at the university of cambridge with a specialty in judaism and islam. my question is about women's rights, talking about discrimination against women in the koran. increasing number of scholars in egypt, discussing that islam is actually egalitarian at heart, but to to destroying islam for women. >> i hope they convince everybody in the muslim world but i don't have much hope of that. i am sure the fourth chapter of the koran, in verse 34, says good women are obedient. as for those who are not,

spitting at a little bit, give them a warning, send them to separate beds, and beat them. the cause beat them in arabic has been recently translated as send them away. unfortunately, every, without exception, every translation of the koran into english by muslims and non muslims, every last one up until this new translation has beat them or some variant. obviously muslim men take that seriously as a mandate since it is a topic of great discussion in various islamic forums, and islamic television shows in egypt and saudi arabia and elsewhere, when exactly can you beat your wife and how hard, and with what implement and so on? spousal abuse takes place in all cultures but only in islam does it have died at the mess --

divine sanction. i said we applaud the effort to mitigate that. if it advances under false pretenses by pretending over says something other than what it says or pretending islam is egalitarian when the koran says very plainly in the same message that men are superior to women and are above them authority, i don't think it has much chance of convincing many muslims because they know what the koran says. that is where the problem lies. it is easy to convince non muslims who don't know anything about islam that is egalitarian and peaceful and wonderful. it is a lot harder to convince the muslims who are acting as if it isn't. >> jordan arms from rhodes college. thank you very much for taking time to come out and speak to us. my question was regarding radical islam as political or religious ideology. i am asking this because at my college, one of the things we studied when we took western

history and philosophy was the koran. we studied the spread of islam, and we read different verses of the koran, that both preach violence and tolerance, paradoxically, at the same time. i was wondering, what are your thoughts, if it is a political ideology, we have people like osama bin laden, al qaeda and other terrorist groups, that teach -- twist the words of the koran and give it to the general populace as fact. i just wanted to know if you consider it to the political more than religious. >> islam is a political and religious ideology and always has been. it is very telling that the calendar year and in the islamic calendar is not the year that mohammad became a profit, not the year he was born, not the year he died, not anything you

might expect, but only, it is when islam became a state, when it became a political polity and mohammad became a military and political leader. that is very telling. the islamic state, up until 1924, was always considered to be an essential element of islam in the world, and islamic polemicist and apologists throughout history have criticized the west for the sacred secular distinction and have said that islam as up comprehensive unity, that unity is manifested in effect it is political as well as religious. taking them at their word, it is both. as far as the peaceful and tolerant verses of the koran, the best way to understand that is to go to the islamic sources. if you go to law, the's first biographer, he explains that the koran has three stages of development, in its teachings on unbelievers and warfare. the first is tolerance, the

second is defensive warfare, the feared is offensive warfare to impose the law of islam. he is saying that the offensive warfare is the final stage and supersedes the of the two stages, so there are tolerant passages in the koran but they no longer have applicable force for ms. love's. the offensive warfare passages do. that is not me talking. this is the key distinction, the islamphobia, is that hate speech? it is a ninth century islamic scholar and,'s first biographer. every school of islamic law, current and in the world today, teaches the same thing. when you say al qaeda and hamas twist and hijacked islam, i have not been able to substantiate that claim by anything that i see in islamic teaching. i don't see any school of jurisprudence that does not teach warfare against unbelievers and arrested the nation, i don't see any sect of

islam that does not teach warfare against unbelievers and the subjugation except for those who are considered carrot sticks for precisely that reason. i see all these islamic scholars for our history same filing passes supersede the tolerant ones. when i see osama bin laden and up costs -- say whether pure muslims it is of to the muslim to decide the question of who are the true and pure muslims, but they certainly have a case that convinces many muslims of the rightness of their cause. this is the great difficulty that we have. i don't think pretending it is anything otherwise or trying to sugarcoat the reality is going to get us anywhere. we have to start with reality and formulate policy accordingly. >> thank you very much. [applause] >> victory fleiss, spin to university, thank you for being here. why is the administration acting cowardly and refusing to acknowledge the threat for what it is?

they haven't noticed that this is the united states, we have the resources to handle any threat that comes our way. >> barack obama, from the evidence of his speech to the muslim world in cairo, on june 4th, announced when he became president he was going to make a major speech to the islamic world, he gave it in cairo on june 4th and he said several things that were very telling. one was he gave three reasons for the conflict between the west and the islamic world. all of them were our fault. he said the islamic world is mad at us because of colonialism, the colonial period, because of the cold war in which the muslim countries were essentially pawns between the u.s. and the soviet union and the rottenness of american pop culture. he never mentioned the possibility that they might hate us for reasons of their own that have nothing to do with what we have done or not done or can do in the future. but barack obama is proceeding

along the assumption that this is all our fault and they hate us for things that we have done and if we just change we are doing, then they will love us. he is in for a rude awakening. there is no talking to the man about this. thank you very much. [applause] >> thank you very much, mr. spencer. at this point, i would like to remind speakers like robert spencer another prominent conservative speakers are available throughout young america foundation campus lecture program, to speak on your own campus. please contact us at yaf.org, or 1-800-usa-1776. mr. spencer will be on hand to sign copies of his books sell jihad. we will be moving to our next speaker.

i would like to ask maurice spencer to come up and introduce her. >> good morning, ladies and gentlemen. i am an internet young america's foundation. young america's foundation has concerned speakers as karl rove and ben stein and many other speakers available to the book for events at universities and if you'd like more information concerning these speakers for more information pertaining to young america's foundation, visit our web site at www.y www.yaf.org or call 1-800-972-1776. when i began my work at the foundation a couple months ago i hoped i could do that which i am doing, meeting and learning from the best conservative lines our

nation has to offer. however, to my surprise and pleasure i found a much more personal level of interaction with a great conservative was possible. when i wrote my first staff meeting. eyewitness case obeschein. at thought about all the programs where i had seen her. the media frenzy surrounding case is well deserved given her history of involvement within our movement. from 2004 to 2006 he says as sharesone of the republican party of virginia where she tirelessly fought against a legitimate tax increases and battled the iraq cellaring gross in the state's influence in the lives of america's citizens. intellectual prowess has been showcased in a book touted by rush limbaugh himself entitled great american conservative women. it is fitting that her work should be included in such a collection of literature as this text given that she is an unyielding supporter of young women