[House Hearing, 109 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
CLIMATE CHANGE TECHNOLOGY RESEARCH: DO WE NEED A ``MANHATTAN PROJECT''
FOR THE ENVIRONMENT?
=======================================================================
HEARING
before the
COMMITTEE ON
GOVERNMENT REFORM
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED NINTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
__________
SEPTEMBER 21, 2006
__________
Serial No. 109-197
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Government Reform
Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.gpoaccess.gov/congress/
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COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT REFORM
TOM DAVIS, Virginia, Chairman
CHRISTOPHER SHAYS, Connecticut HENRY A. WAXMAN, California
DAN BURTON, Indiana TOM LANTOS, California
ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN, Florida MAJOR R. OWENS, New York
JOHN M. McHUGH, New York EDOLPHUS TOWNS, New York
JOHN L. MICA, Florida PAUL E. KANJORSKI, Pennsylvania
GIL GUTKNECHT, Minnesota CAROLYN B. MALONEY, New York
MARK E. SOUDER, Indiana ELIJAH E. CUMMINGS, Maryland
STEVEN C. LaTOURETTE, Ohio DENNIS J. KUCINICH, Ohio
TODD RUSSELL PLATTS, Pennsylvania DANNY K. DAVIS, Illinois
CHRIS CANNON, Utah WM. LACY CLAY, Missouri
JOHN J. DUNCAN, Jr., Tennessee DIANE E. WATSON, California
CANDICE S. MILLER, Michigan STEPHEN F. LYNCH, Massachusetts
MICHAEL R. TURNER, Ohio CHRIS VAN HOLLEN, Maryland
DARRELL E. ISSA, California LINDA T. SANCHEZ, California
JON C. PORTER, Nevada C.A. DUTCH RUPPERSBERGER, Maryland
KENNY MARCHANT, Texas BRIAN HIGGINS, New York
LYNN A. WESTMORELAND, Georgia ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, District of
PATRICK T. McHENRY, North Carolina Columbia
CHARLES W. DENT, Pennsylvania ------
VIRGINIA FOXX, North Carolina BERNARD SANDERS, Vermont
JEAN SCHMIDT, Ohio (Independent)
BRIAN P. BILBRAY, California
David Marin, Staff Director
Lawrence Halloran, Deputy Staff Director
Benjamin Chance, Clerk
Michael Galindo, Clerk
Phil Barnett, Minority Chief of Staff/Chief Counsel
C O N T E N T S
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Page
Hearing held on September 21, 2006............................... 1
Statement of:
Eule, Stephen D., Director, Climate Change Technology
Program; and John B. Stephenson, Director, Government
Accountability Office...................................... 27
Eule, Stephen D.......................................... 27
Stephenson, John B....................................... 42
Lane, Lee, executive director, Climate Policy Center; Richard
Van Atta, senior research analyst, Institute for Defense
Analyses; Martin Hoffert, emeritus professor, New York
University; Robert Socolow, former director, Center for
Energy and Environmental Studies, Princeton University; and
Daniel Kammen, director, Renewable and Appropriate Energy
Laboratory, University of California at Berkeley........... 77
Hoffert, Martin.......................................... 124
Kammen, Daniel........................................... 156
Lane, Lee................................................ 77
Socolow, Robert.......................................... 149
Van Atta, Richard........................................ 99
Letters, statements, etc., submitted for the record by:
Cummings, Hon. Elijah E., a Representative in Congress from
the State of Maryland, prepared statement of............... 206
Davis, Chairman Tom, a Representative in Congress from the
State of Virginia, prepared statement of................... 4
Eule, Stephen D., Director, Climate Change Technology
Program, prepared statement of............................. 29
Hoffert, Martin, emeritus professor, New York University,
prepared statement of...................................... 128
Kammen, Daniel, director, Renewable and Appropriate Energy
Laboratory, University of California at Berkeley, prepared
statement of............................................... 159
Lane, Lee, executive director, Climate Policy Center,
prepared statement of...................................... 79
Maloney, Hon. Carolyn B., a Representative in Congress from
the State of New York, prepared statement of............... 22
Socolow, Robert, former director, Center for Energy and
Environmental Studies, Princeton University, prepared
statement of............................................... 151
Stephenson, John B., Director, Government Accountability
Office, prepared statement of.............................. 44
Van Atta, Richard, senior research analyst, Institute for
Defense Analyses, prepared statement of.................... 102
Waxman, Hon. Henry A., a Representative in Congress from the
State of California, prepared statement of................. 12
CLIMATE CHANGE TECHNOLOGY RESEARCH: DO WE NEED A ``MANHATTAN PROJECT''
FOR THE ENVIRONMENT?
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THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 2006
House of Representatives,
Committee on Government Reform,
Washington, DC.
The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:25 a.m., in
room 2157, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Tom Davis
(chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.
Present: Representatives Tom Davis, Shays, LaTourette,
Waxman, Lantos, Maloney, Kucinich, Clay, Watson, Van Hollen,
Higgins, Norton, Cummings, Platts, and Bilbray.
Staff present: David Marin, staff director; Larry Halloran,
deputy staff director; Jennifer Safavian, chief counsel for
oversight and investigations; Mindi Walker, professional staff
member; A. Brooke Bennett, counsel; Michael Galindo and
Benjamin Chance, clerks; Greg Dotson and Alexandra Teitz,
minority counsels; Earley Green, minority chief clerk; and Jean
Gosa, minority assistant clerk.
Chairman Tom Davis. Good morning, and welcome to today's
hearing on climate change technology. As we sit here today, the
debate over climate change science continues, but this
committee, as well as the administration and many others in
Government, already have recognized the important facts: that
global mean temperature has increased over the past century,
and that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has contributed in
some way to this warning.
With that in mind, our committee seeks to move away from
debating science to finding solutions. The purpose of today's
hearing is to learn about the Federal Government's climate
change research and development programs, specifically those
dedicated to exploratory or innovative technology. We are also
going to discuss the best ways to steer these initiatives.
Right now, the administration spends nearly $3 billion on
climate change technology research. Ostensibly, this research
falls under the umbrella of the President's climate change
technology program. The characterization of the CCTP, however,
is misleading, because the CCTP has no budgetary authority. The
billions of dollars that fund CCTP actually are dispersed
directly to Federal agencies without CCTP approval. In fact, to
date the CCTP has only received $1.5 million in program support
to supplement the creation of its strategic plan, which
outlines the current research and future priorities of the
program.
Without direct funding, CCTP does not employ full-time
staff, and both Director Stephen Eule and Deputy Director
Robert Marlay hold other positions within the Department of
Energy. Currently, CCTP employs neither administrative nor
analytical staff; it shares personnel with other offices on an
as-needed basis.
Additionally, thus far the Federal Government has yet to
engage in any exploratory or innovative technology research on
climate change. Under the current funding structure, only near
and mid-term technology research programs receive R&D dollars.
Climate clinicians that lie outside of existing technology,
such as geo-engineering and artificial photosynthesis, remain
unaddressed.
Although CCTP is capable of commenting on technology-
focused projects conducted across 13 Federal agencies under the
program, in its current state CCTP simply does not have the
authority to allocate funds for climate technology projects,
begging the questions: one, how well are we coordinating
climate change technology research? And, two, because of the
present configuration of Federal climate change technology
research, is it necessary to create a central, authorized body
to command exploratory research, an ARPA for climate change?
The Defense Advanced Projects Agency, DARPA, was created to
turn innovative technology into military capabilities. The
agency is highly regarded for its work on the Internet, high-
speed microelectronics, stealth and satellite technologies,
unmanned vehicles, and new materials, all of which produced not
only military advancement but commercial benefits, as well.
Unlike the CCTP, DARPA can segregate itself somewhat from
its governing body, the Pentagon, and remain a small and
flexible agency capable of quickly exploiting emerging
technologies and adapting to immediate military circumstances.
Conversely, CCTP remains under the strict direction of the
Cabinet-level Committee on Climate Change Science and
Technology Integration [CCSTI], reducing the likelihood it will
support novel concepts in climate technology research. Given
its strict structure and limited authority, would the CCTP be
the appropriate body to potentially manage a free-thinking and
innovative exploratory technology agency?
To date, the under-funded and administratively barren
climate change technology program has yet to sufficiently
coordinate and influence the technology research initiatives
conducted by the multiple Federal agencies under its charge,
let alone manage potential new exploratory technology research
programs such as the Climate Change Advanced Research Projects
Agency [CCARPA].
It is time to say CCARPA Diem and seize the opportunity to
take technology research to the next level by bringing CCTP to
the forefront of the U.S. climate change agenda. Or will the
full initiative of CCTP prove sufficient to guide climate
change technology research into the future? These are the
questions that we hope to begin resolving today.
The committee has invited several highly qualified
individuals to address these uncertainties. We will hear from
Dr. Stephen Eule, the Director of CCTP, on the status of
climate change technology in the United States and on his role
in overseeing climate change technology and potential budgetary
or organizational obstacles to the full implementation of a
centralized climate technology program.
We will also hear from the GAO on the ambiguity of the
appropriations to agencies with regard to climate change and
the need for more clear disclosure of the nature of climate
change research and development funding.
Also, we will explore the merits and challenges of creating
a Federal climate change exploratory technology program and
will hear from experts on DARPA about the applicability of
instituting a CCARPA for exploratory technology research and
development.
Global climate change is one of the most serious
environmental concerns of the 21st century. This committee has
taken an important step by discussing how the Federal
Government can better arm itself with technology to address
this worldwide problem.
I would like to thank all of our witnesses for their
invaluable insights in this issue.
[The prepared statement of Chairman Tom Davis follows:]
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Chairman Tom Davis. I would now like to recognize our
distinguished ranking member, Mr. Waxman, for his opening
statement.
Mr. Waxman. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Today's hearing will begin to examine what policies
Congress should consider for addressing the major threat of
global warming. We will hear from some of the Nation's leading
experts on global warming and technology. They will present
their views of how we move forward to take carbon out of the
world's economy.
I believe almost all of us agree that global warming is
occurring and action must be taken to avoid potentially
catastrophic impacts to our country and the world. Our position
reflects the scientific consensus which only a small cadre of
oil-industry-funded propagandists are still denying. But,
despite this committee's interest, it would be a serious
mistake for anyone watching this hearing to conclude that
either the administration or the Republican leadership in
Congress is willing to tackle the problem. That is why I would
like to take a moment to review the past 6 years.
President Bush and Vice President Cheney came into office
determined to radically change the Nation's energy policy, and
that is what they did. They crafted their policy with oil
companies like Exxon and Mobil and refused to meet with
consumer or environmental groups. Their plan bestowed countless
favors on oil, coal, and other polluting industries and it
abandoned the President's pledge to reduce greenhouse gas
emissions. In fact, under the plan they developed, we have
wasted precious years and exacerbated global warming.
During the last 6 years there have been many constructive
ideas put forward. For example, in July 2002 the Pugh Center on
Global Climate Change released a report on designing a climate
friendly energy policy. In July 2003, the Energy Future
Coalition released an energy plan to fight global warming and
address the political and economic security threat posed by our
dependence on oil. In January 2004, the Apollo Alliance, a
coalition of labor unions, environmental groups, and other
public interest groups proposed an energy policy to modernize
America's energy infrastructure and fight global warming. In
April 2005, the Natural Resources Defense Council released a
paper proposing an energy policy that would enhance our
national security and reduce air and water pollution while
curbing global warming and creating jobs. But these ideas to
move us forward fell on deaf ears. The Republican Congress was
simply uninterested in learning about the problem, let alone
addressing it.
In December 2004, the bipartisan National Commission on
Energy Policy released a plan to address the Nation's long-term
energy challenges, including oil dependence and global warming.
The commission was composed of Republicans and Democrats,
industry and environmentalists, and they had figured out a way
to come together, yet the chairman of the Energy and Commerce
Committee would not even hold a hearing on the plan.
Recently the administration has begun to change its
rhetoric on global warming. Unfortunately, it is only the
rhetoric that is changing. They are sticking with their policy
of denying the urgency of the problem and delaying any real
action.
That has to change. We have already lost 6 years. Mr.
Chairman, that is why our committee holding these hearings
stands out in stark contrast to what the rest of the Congress
has been doing.
Today we are going to hear about the administration's 100-
year strategic plan. The name is impressive, but inside the
covers the plan has no time line for actions, no goals for what
we need to achieve. Thinking about technology research and
development is very important, but by itself it will do nothing
to solve the problem.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Hon. Henry A. Waxman follows:]
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Chairman Tom Davis. Thank you, Mr. Waxman.
Do other Members wish to speak? Mr. Shays.
Mr. Shays. Thank you. Mr. Chairman, thank you for holding
this hearing.
We are failing to deal with this problem not because of
Republicans; we are failing to deal with this problem because
there is not a bipartisan effort to move forward on this issue,
and it goes back a long ways. It goes back to when President
Clinton was President and he negotiated Kyoto and there was a
bipartisan resolution in the Senate that passed 100 percent. It
said don't leave India and China out of Kyoto. They left India
and China out of Kyoto. The treaty was negotiated. It was
brought before us and President Clinton never ever submitted it
to Congress because he only had five or six supporters in the
entire Senate.
It is fascinating to me. I wish this President had
submitted it so all the Senators who criticize him now would
have been faced with voting for it, because at the time they
weren't going to support it.
There is a bipartisan effort to kill what is so logically
something we should do: making better use of the energy we
have. Minivans, SUVs, and trucks should get the same mileage as
cars, but the dean of the House, Mr. Dingell, in a bipartisan
effort with other Members who represent the automobile
manufacturers, not the oil industry, labor unions who oppose
getting minivans, SUVs, and trucks to get the same mileage as
cars opposed it. That is our problem.
We can make it a partisan issue and it is great for an
election, but it is not the truth. The truth is we need to work
together, Republicans and Democrats, to solve what is a huge
problem.
I introduced a bill with Maurice Hinchey supported by the
League of Conservation Voters--not a very partisan group, I
would say. The purpose is to get minivans, SUVs, and trucks to
get the same mileage as cars, to take out of the energy bill
that I voted against, to take out the dollars and tax write-
offs that were going to the fossil fuel industry and put it
into alternative fuels.
That bill remains to be supported by Members on both sides
of the aisle. It is bipartisan. It would move the agenda
forward. But because we have decided that this is a tough
election year and we are going to target certain Members, we
are going to tell Members on the other side of the aisle they
are going to be told by their leadership not to cosponsor
legislation supported by any Member who is targeted.
So when we get all of this political garbage that you are
going to hear from Members about how this is a partisan issue,
when we can get beyond that and we can get the election done
with, I hope Nancy Pelosi will, as my own leadership, say that
we need to work together instead of the Democrats going further
to the left and Republicans going further to the right.
Hopefully we will start to hear Members on both sides of
the aisle start to be bipartisan again, talk bipartisan, and
stop trying to make such a serious issue a partisan issue when
it isn't.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Tom Davis. Thank you very much.
Mr. Lantos.
Mr. Lantos. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I want to
thank you and Ranking Member Waxman for your leadership on this
issue.
My approach to this whole subject stems from my possession
as the ranking Democrat on the House International Relations
Committee and the ramifications of our energy policy or lack of
energy policy on our international position. I will have a word
or two to say about that later.
I have been disappointed and dismayed by this
administration's position on climate change. Despite
overwhelming scientific evidence that global warming is taking
place, the administration has basically removed itself from the
international conversation and worked to stifle Government
scientists. This is willful ignorance about the severe
challenges and strengths that will be placed on future
generations by the results of climate change.
Coupled with an alarming lack of foresight for the national
security implications these effects will have on our world, the
administration's policies have significantly weakened our
efforts toward the solution of this problem.
The science on the issue is incontrovertible and the need
to respond is immediate. The actions taken by the President and
this Congress thus far have been woefully inadequate. It is my
hope that this hearing just might be the straw that breaks the
camel's back against the misinformation campaign engineered by
some key energy companies which have sown seeds of doubt and
have slowed a legitimate debate to occur.
Our Nation's reliance on foreign oil, which is my principal
concern, means that we are providing the enemies of freedom
with the resources to oppose the United States or even to wage
war against us. If you heard last night Chavez at the United
Nations in New York you know exactly what I am talking about.
But whether it is Chavez, Ahmadinejad of Tehran, Putin in
Moscow, or the Wahabis in Saudi Arabia, the amplified voice of
these forces of anti-democracy and anti-freedom must be
enormously enlarged by virtue of their incredible oil income
which they have gained largely as a result of our policies.
The United States is a leader in scientific research and
technological discovery and we have witnessed the extraordinary
results of what happens when our Nation harnesses this
intellectual resource with the Manhattan Project, which made us
the first project to harness the energy of the atom, or the
Apollo Project that put an American on the moon.
The most abundant source of new energy, Mr. Chairman, is
conservation. Although we must provide the impetus for research
and development into new technologies, the most immediate and
effective means of reducing our reliance on current fuel
sources is to be intelligent about cutting back on their use.
That is not a matter of creating new technologies but making
people more conscious of existing ways to reduce energy waste.
The time has come for America to rise up and face the
challenge of relieving itself from its dependency on carbon-
based energy and the pollutants that come with it. We need to
reach beyond our current energy policy and achieve this goal
through a nationwide effort combining both conservation efforts
and increases in research and development of alternate energy
sources.
Mr. Chairman, while this hearing is ostensibly about
American Government policy and the need for a nationwide
project to make America a carbon neutral nation, let me speak
for a moment on the international relations aspect of this
project and the imperative need for us to reach out to the
global community on this issue.
We must re-engage the international community in order to
seek successful solutions and best practices. The
interconnection of international energy policy and the effects
on climate change will only continue to increase in the years
ahead.
I hope that our President and our Congress can have the
vision of a Roosevelt or a Kennedy to see over the horizon. We
need to lead the American people to work together to unshackle
us from our dependency on foreign energy and to preserve the
environment for the sake of those who will inherit this world
from us.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Tom Davis. Thank you very much.
Are there other Members who wish to make opening
statements? Yes, ma'am, Ms. Watson.
Ms. Watson. Mr. Chairman, thank you so much for convening
today's hearing. I commend your timeliness on the issue
pertaining to energy policy.
This hearing explicitly highlights the administration's
research and development activities, or lack thereof, on
technologies to address global warming and the administration's
strategy on addressing global warming. I am haunted by the fact
that the year before last, when we attended a conference in
Cutter, there was someone from the Department of Commerce that
made the idea of global warming into a myth. It was a Dr. Lash.
Just recently we got into quite a warm discussion after his
remarks, because it said to the world that we were
hallucinating if we thought global warming was a real thing.
Just recently he ended up in the newspapers as one who killed
his 12 year old son and himself. I saw indications of a hot-
headed approach there in Cutter.
Energy is essential to the American lifestyle. The United
States has only 2 percent of the world's oil reserves, but
accounts for 25 percent of the world's energy demand. Of the
global supply, we consume 43 percent of motor gasoline, 25
percent of crude petroleum, 25 percent of natural gas, and 26
percent of electricity. Currently, American demand for all
these commodities is rising dramatically, while climate change
is on the rise, as well.
On the production side of the issue, the generation and
delivery of energy is a serious challenge. Procurement of
energy is a challenge of engineering, a challenge of planning,
and a challenge that evokes the most serious aspects of our
foreign policy. Moreover, energy is a key factor in the
environmental challenges we face in modern America and in the
world. Reliance on fossil fuels causes serious air and water
pollution and it is the source of constant pressure to exploit
our last precious wildlands.
As the petroleum demand intensifies, Americans will remain
exposed to the environmental cost and the harmful public health
impacts associated with the dependence on oil. Global warming
is occurring at a rapid pace today, and the consensus of the
worldwide scientific community is that it will accelerate
during the 21st century.
Global warming and our related energy policies also raise
national security concerns. One such concern is the prospect of
international destabilization caused by the consequences of
global warming such as the loss of land area of the loss of
water resources.
Mr. Chairman, I have stated in previous hearings, we have a
chance to start again to create adequate climate change
research and development that can help our world in the future,
so I look forward to today's hearing and I look forward to
hearing from the witnesses and I think that you are beginning
and we are beginning to play a vital role on environmental
safety in our world.
Thank you so much.
Chairman Tom Davis. Thank you very much.
Mr. Bilbray.
Mr. Bilbray. Yes, Mr. Chairman. I want to thank you for
holding this hearing and want to publicly thank you for letting
me participate on this committee for the rest of this session.
Mr. Chairman, you may know but other Members may not know
that I had the privilege of serving for 6 years on the State
Air Resources Board for the State of California. I was very
proud to participate in that agency because California has the
distinction of having an agency that has done more to reduce
emissions than any agency anywhere else in the world. The Air
Resources Board in California is second to none. It has led on
many, many issues, as the ranking member will remind us, many
times, both in his presentations and his writings.
But one of the reasons why that agency has been so
successful in the past and I am sure will be successful in the
future, the Air Resources Board in California does not allow
partisan bickering to stand between getting to the answer. They
don't allow the fact of posturing to be the primary motivation
there. I have been very, very pleased to work with Democrats
and Republicans in that body. But I have to tell you, since
coming to Congress and leaving that body, I have been
frustrated with the fact that science gets put on a back burner
in Washington all too often for partisan fighting, but at the
same time people don't want to look at the fact that the guilt
rests on both sides of the political aisle.
I was very frustrated with my first term in Congress here
when I saw that the Clinton administration talked a lot about
global warming, a lot about this issue on emissions. At the
same time, the only policy I saw really being pushed at that
time was the decommissioning of zero emission generators such
as hydroelectric and nuclear. I saw an obsession with the
destruction of zero emission generators without any identifying
where the alternative power was going to come from without
contributing to the global warming and the emissions issue.
So I am very excited to be able to say that there are
opportunities here. I hope that we join together. I have been
frustrated with the discussion that global warming and Kyoto
are somehow tied together. I do not see how any of us can take
care of the global warming without working together, but I also
do not see how we are going to justify any global warming
policy that exempts the Third World, and especially China. I
see that Kyoto was a non-starter, and we should have been brave
enough to be able to recognize that there is a problem out
there but the answer that was being proposed was not an answer
to the problem.
I hope to be able to take some of the experience I have
been able to bring from California and hopefully work with both
sides of the aisle to try to address this issue, but I think
that we need to stop finding barriers to getting to answers and
quit finding excuses just to fight about it.
Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I yield back my time.
Chairman Tom Davis. Mrs. Maloney.
Mrs. Maloney. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would like
permission to place my remarks in the record----
Chairman Tom Davis. Without objection, so ordered.
Mrs. Maloney [continuing]. And just ask to be associated
with the comments of Mr. Waxman and Mr. Lantos and Ms. Watson.
I think Ranking Member Lantos' statement of the danger this
poses in the world community and in our search for peace was
very relevant.
Ms. Watson, you talked about how many skeptics are out
there that have kept saying that it is not a problem. I
appreciate the comment on the other side of the aisle that
science too long has been put on the back burner. Scientists
have been telling us for a long time that this is one of the
gravest challenges that we confront, and there have been many
skeptics, such as the one she described from the Commerce
Department, that have made light of this very serious
challenge.
I would like to place in the record this photograph of the
Arctic climate impact assessment of 2004. It shows the extent
of the surface ice melting in Greenland between 1992 and 2002.
They say one picture is worth a thousand words. It truly shows
that we are losing the snow in Greenland, and other photographs
of the Antarctic, even Florida, shows a very changing coastline
with the multi-meter rises in sea level. This is a very serious
problem.
I congratulate former Vice President Al Gore on his book An
Inconvenient Truth and the movie The Inconvenient Truth. It was
inspiring for me to see a documentary literally have people
standing in lines waiting to get in to see it. I think he
helped beyond a shadow of a doubt to close the mouths of the
skeptics whom I think are just people who don't want to do
anything.
I welcome this hearing today on global warming technology
and research, but say that there is so much that we could do
besides research right now, such as put a cap on CAFE
standards, such as: switching from coal and oil to natural gas;
increasing efficiency of energy in use and buildings,
transportation, and industry; transition to a lower energy
intensity mix of economic activities.
There are so many actions that we could take right now to
address this, so I urge my colleagues not only to be looking at
technology and research but looking at technical possibilities
that we can take right now to reduce energy intensity and
carbon intensity on our planet. I truly believe it is the most
important issue facing us for the future of our country and the
health of our planet, so I thank you for this hearing and would
like to place in the record these papers.
[The prepared statement of Hon. Carolyn B. Maloney
follows:]
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Chairman Tom Davis. Without objection they will be placed
in the record. Thank you, Mrs. Maloney.
Mr. Kucinich.
Mr. Kucinich. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
The title of this hearing is Climate Change Technology
Research: Do we need a Manhattan Project for the Environment? I
would respectfully suggest this is kind of an unfortunate title
for this particular hearing. The Manhattan Project harnessed
the scientific genius of America for a purely destructive
purpose, the building of nuclear weapon, under conditions of
assorted history of human experimentation and spawned a nuclear
industry which drove up utility rates and gave us nuclear waste
forever. Nuclear weapons now constitute a threat to the
survival of our entire planet, and certainly, as Jonathan
Schell pointed out in his book, Fate of the Earth, a threat to
the common global environment.
Now, if we are talking about saving the planet, maybe we
should come up with an analogy that is not so obviously
contradictory. Asking whether we need a Manhattan Project for
the environment begs the question don't we already have one.
Everything about our energy policies are destabilizing. Oil
runs our politics, bringing with it not only the injurious
effects of climate change but war, environmental ruin, economic
decline, manipulation of prices, oil politics are visiting us
right now on the eve of an election. You see the prices
dropping at the pump trying to lull the public to sleep about
the game that is being played by the oil companies in
cooperation with the administration.
Global warming? Until recently, scientists for hire were
ready to discount the result of our destructive energy policies
and urging administrations to refuse to participate in the
Kyoto Climate Change Treaty. I would agree with the colleague
that we ought to talk to China, but wouldn't it be good if we
had trade agreements that held environmental quality principles
as one of the bases for international trade.
Mr. Chairman, I have to submit for the record here a study
of the Manhattan Project called the New and Secret World of
Human Experimentation. I also have my statement, which calls
for new direction with respect to sustainable energy choices
like wind, solar, ocean, geothermal, and with a call for
investment to match the intention of changing our energy
policies. We really ought to change the title of the hearing
though.
Thank you.
Chairman Tom Davis. Thank you. Maybe we ought to call it a
Marshall plan. Do you like that better?
Mr. Kucinich. You know, yes, like rebuilding after a war.
Yes, that is a great idea.
Chairman Tom Davis. OK.
Next, Mr. Van Hollen.
Mr. Van Hollen. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you for
holding this hearing, and to Ranking Member Waxman for his
leadership on this very important issue.
I agree with statements made by my colleagues really some
on both sides of aisle here with respect to the importance of
moving forward in a bipartisan manner, but to do that we are
going to have to make decisions based on science and based on
the facts.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but everyone is
not entitled to their own set of facts. Unfortunately, here in
political Washington people seem to think that they can make up
the facts as well as making up the policy. There is an absolute
scientific consensus that global warming is real and that there
is an important human contribution to the problem, and so,
though we have settled science and settled facts on that
question, we continue to have a lack of political leadership on
this very important issue.
We continue to have, for example, the chairman of the
Environment and Public Works on the Senate side say that the
whole global warming issue is the greatest hoax ever
perpetuated on the American people. We had a Member of the
House on the Science Committee in a hearing yesterday saying
that the whole thing was made up, as well. Even the President
of the United States, when he talks about this issue as he did
in July in People Magazine, sort of said there is an open
question with respect to whether or not there was a human
component to the global warming question. He said it was a
question of debate.
So, until the political leadership in Washington begins to
deal with the facts, we are not going to be able to move
forward. We can have disagreements with respect to what the
best policy is, but we need our political leadership to begin
to take responsibility for accepting what the scientific
community has told us with respect to this very important
issue, and then we need to move forward, and we need to move
forward quickly, and we need to stop passing energy legislation
that continues to provide big subsidies to the oil and gas
industry and channel those funds instead into renewable energy
and energy efficiency areas.
So I welcome the comments on both sides of the aisle about
the need to move forward on a bipartisan basis on this issue,
but, unfortunately, we have on the one hand people who continue
to misrepresent the facts with respect to the science, and
unfortunately the reality of the situation is the legislation
that is passed out of the Congress has not demonstrated that
people have come to grips with the reality of the science on
this issue.
I hope we will begin to turn that situation around and
begin to have policy coming out of here and political
leadership that matches the facts with respect to this very
important issue.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Tom Davis. Thank you, Mr. Van Hollen.
If there are no more opening statements, we will now
proceed to our first panel. We have Dr. Stephen Eule, the
Director of Climate Change Technology Program, and Mr. John
Stephenson, the director of Government Accountability Office.
Thank you for bearing with us through our markup and
opening statements.
[Witnesses sworn.]
Chairman Tom Davis. Mr. Eule, we will start with you. Thank
you for being with us.
STATEMENTS OF STEPHEN D. EULE, DIRECTOR, CLIMATE CHANGE
TECHNOLOGY PROGRAM; AND JOHN B. STEPHENSON, DIRECTOR,
GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABILITY OFFICE
STATEMENT OF STEPHEN D. EULE
Mr. Eule. Thank you, Chairman Davis, Ranking Member Waxman,
and members of the committee. Thank you for the opportunity to
appear before you today to discuss the climate change
technology program and its strategic plan, which was released
yesterday.
The administration believes that the most effective way to
meet the challenge of climate change is through an agenda that
promotes economic growth, provides energy security, reduces
pollution, and mitigates greenhouse gases. To meet these goals,
the administration has established a comprehensive approach,
major elements of which include policies and measures to slow
the growth in greenhouse gas emissions, advancing climate
change science, accelerating technology development, and
promoting international collaboration.
Since fiscal year 2001 the Federal Government has devoted
nearly $29 billion to climate change programs. In 2002,
President Bush set a goal to reduce the Nation's greenhouse gas
intensity--that is, emissions per unit of economic output--by
18 percent by 2012. To this end, the administration has
implemented about 60 Federal programs, and recent data suggests
we are well on our way toward meeting the President's goal.
While acting to slow the growth of greenhouse gas emissions
in the near term, the United States is laying a strong
scientific and technological foundation. In 2002, two multi-
agency programs were established to coordinate Federal climate
science and technology R&D activities, the climate change
science program [CCSP], and the climate change technology
program [CCTP].
CCSP is an inter-agency planning and coordinating entity
charged with investigating natural and human-induced changes in
the Earth's global environmental system, monitoring
understanding of predicting global change, and providing a
sound scientific basis for decisionmaking.
CCTP, which was authorized in the Energy Policy Act of
2005, was formed to coordinate and prioritize the Federal
Government's investment in climate-related technology, which
was nearly $3 billion in fiscal year 2006, and to further the
President's national climate change technology initiative
[NCCTI].
Ten R&D agencies participate in CCTP. The program's
principal aim is to accelerate the development and lower the
cost of advanced technologies that reduce, avoid, or sequester
greenhouse gases. CCTP strives for a diversified Federal R&D
portfolio that will help reduce technology risk and improve the
prospects that such technologies can be adopted in the
marketplace.
In August 2005, CCTP issued its vision and framework for
strategy and planning, which provided broad guidance for the
program, and shortly thereafter released its draft strategic
plan for public review. More than 250 comments were received
and considered.
This revised strategic plan articulates a vision of the
role for advanced technology in addressing climate change,
establishes strategic direction, guiding principles, outlines
approaches to achieve CCTP's strategic goals, and identifies a
series of next steps. The six CCTP goals are: reducing
emissions from energy use and infrastructure, reducing
emissions from energy supply, capturing and sequestering carbon
dioxide, reducing emissions of non-carbon-dioxide greenhouse
gases, measuring and monitoring emissions, and bolstering the
contributions of basic science.
The strategic plan defines a clear and promising role for
advanced technologies for the near, the mid, and the long-term;
outlines a processes and establishes criteria for setting
priorities, such as those in NCCTI; and provides details of the
current climate change technology portfolio, with links to
individual technology road maps.
CCTP's portfolio includes realigned activities, as well as
new initiatives, such as the President's advanced energy and
hydrogen fuel initiatives, carbon sequestration, and future
gen.
CCTP agencies also periodically conduct portfolio reviews
to assess the ability of these programs to meet CCTP goals and
to identify gaps and opportunities. In addition, CCTP uses
scenario analyses to assess the potential climate change
benefits of different technology mixes over the century on a
global scale and across a range of uncertainties. When
comparing the costs of achieving different greenhouse gas
constraints, the cost savings for the advanced technology cases
were 60 percent or more.
The administration believes that well-designed multi-
lateral collaborations can leverage resources and quicken
technology development. The International Partnership for the
Hydrogen Economy, Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum,
Generation Four International Forum, Methane to Markets--all
U.S. initiatives--and the ITER Fusion Project provide vehicles
for international collaboration to advance these technologies.
The new Global Nuclear Energy Partnership seeks to develop a
worldwide consensus on approaches to expand safe use of zero
emission nuclear power.
Of course, through the Asian Pacific Partnership the United
States is working with Australia, China, India, Japan, and
South Korea to accelerate the uptake of clean technologies in
this rapidly growing region of the world.
The United States has embarked on an ambitious undertaking
to advance climate change technologies. CCTP's strategic plan,
the first of its kind produced by any government, sets out an
overall strategy to guide these efforts and provides a long-
term planning context in which the nature of both the
challenges and the opportunities for advanced technologies are
considered.
I thank you for your kind attention. I will, of course, be
delighted to answer any questions you may have.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Eule follows:]
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Chairman Tom Davis. Thank you very much.
Mr. Stephenson.
STATEMENT OF JOHN B. STEPHENSON
Mr. Stephenson. Mr. Chairman, thank you for inviting GAO to
testify today on our report issued last year regarding Federal
funding for climate research.
As you know, in 1992 the United States ratified the U.N.
Framework Convention on Climate Change, which has as its
objective the stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in
the Earth's atmosphere but does not impose specific goals or
timetables forlimiting emissions. Since that time, 14 Federal
agencies have provided billions of dollars for climate change
activities.
OMB, at the direction of Congress, annually reports on
expenditures for these activities in four broad categories:
one, science, which includes research and monitoring to better
understand climate change; two, technology, which is the
subject of today's hearing, which includes the research,
development, and deployment of technologies to reduce
greenhouse gas emissions or increase energy efficiency; three,
international assistance, which helps developing countries to
address climate change; and, four, tax expenditures which are
Federal income tax provisions that grant preferential tax
treatment to encourage emission reductions such as renewable
energy uses.
The climate change science program, which is a multi-agency
coordination body, also reports on the science portion of these
expenditures.
In analyzing overall Federal climate change funding, we
found that OMB and CCSP reported that climate change budget
authority more than doubled from $2.4 billion in 1993 to $5.1
billion in 2004, with almost all of this increase in terms of
real or inflation-adjusted terms occurring in technology;
however, it was difficult for us to determine if this was real
or a definitional increase because of numerous changes in
reporting format from year to year without adequate
explanation.
We found that in some cases OMB and/or CCSP added new
accounts not previously included and expanded the definitions
of some accounts to include more activities. For example, $152
million NASA research program to reduce emissions in aircraft
was included for the first time in 2003. In addition, we found
that over 50 percent of the increase in technology funding
between 2002 and 2003 was the result of DOE expanding the
definition of two accounts to include over $500 million in
nuclear research. OMB explained this difference by stating that
the prior administration did not consider nuclear programs to
be part of its activities related to climate change, but that
the current administration does, as explained in yesterday's
released strategic plan on climate change technology.
Also, the merging of direct research, that specifically for
climate change, and indirect research, that research primarily
for another purpose with residual benefits in climate change,
in the 2002 through 2004 reports in our opinion made the
reports more confusing and less useful. For example, this
merging, in effect, caused carbon sequestration research, a
direct activity, and grants to help low-income families
weatherize their homes, an indirect activity, appear in the
same technology reporting category at the summary level.
In our report, we, among other things, recommended that OMB
and CCSP use the same format for presenting data in its annual
reports, explain changes in report content or format when they
are introduced, and provide and maintain a crosswalk comparing
new and old report structures. OMB and CCSP generally agreed
with our recommendations and have tried to incorporate them
into this year's climate change expenditure reports.
However, OMB told us during the course of our work that the
short time line required by Congress for completing that report
within 60 days of the budget submission limits its ability to
fully analyze data submitted by agencies. As a result, OMB must
rely on funding estimates quickly developed by each agency in
order to produce the report within a specified time.
It seemed to us that the fact that we don't yet have a
clear explanation and understanding of the Federal Government's
$5 billion annual investment climate change portfolio and the
fact that it is built from the bottom up instead of the top
down is very relevant to the purposes of this hearing. We at
GAO are strong proponents of setting goals, measuring
performance against those goals, and reporting publicly on
progress.
We believe that this framework is the cornerstone of good
program management and sound investment decisions. Although we
have not formally reviewed either the CCSP or the CCTP
strategic plans, we believe that as an implementation of these
plans move forward there needs to be clearly articulated
relationship between the Government's $5 billion investment
portfolio and the goals of both programs. In addition, there
needs to be a mechanism to ensure that agency investment
decisions directly relate to the goals and priorities expressed
in the plans.
Mr. Chairman, that concludes the summary of my statement
and I will be happy to answer any questions that you or members
of the committees may have.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Stephenson follows:]
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Chairman Tom Davis. Let me start quickly. What I will do is
get to questions, Mr. Waxman, and then we are going to have to
recess to go over for three votes.
Mr. Eule, the Federal Government spends about $3 billion on
climate change technology research. Isn't that about it? Which
I might add is the same amount of money that British business
mogul Richard Branson on Thursday announced, $3 billion that he
was going to put in personally to combat global warming over
the next decade. But does CCTP play any role in determining how
those funds are used?
Mr. Eule. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Yes, good question. We
have set up a process in the strategic plan. We have a process
in the strategic plan and some mechanisms to do that. CCTP has
a series of working groups, each of which is matched to one of
the strategic goals in the plan, so we have a working group on
reducing emissions and--
Chairman Tom Davis. So you are advisory, but you play a
role? Is that it?
Mr. Eule. We are advisory. We have working groups that are
the people that actually have influence on agency budgets. We
also have outside experts come in and provide advice. And we
also work through the management structure that the
administration set up through the Cabinet-level committee on
climate change science and technology integration and, more
directly, through the box under that we call the blue box,
which is the deputy level structure.
Chairman Tom Davis. But the plan that was released
yesterday does not provide clear criteria for determining which
program to fund, when to fund them, or how much funding to
provide; isn't that right?
Mr. Eule. It provides a process to do that.
Chairman Tom Davis. Right. Not a plan, but a process. Who
has the ultimate power to determine that?
Mr. Eule. The agency--
Chairman Tom Davis. You have a process, but ultimately who
has the say-so? I mean, you get input into it, but CCTP is not
the ultimate decisionmaker, right?
Mr. Eule. No, CCTP isn't designed to be the ultimate
arbitrator; it is designed to coordinate and to help prioritize
the budgets that the agencies produce, with input, obviously,
from the Executive Office of the President.
Chairman Tom Davis. Do you think it would be helpful to
have like an ARPA for climate change?
Mr. Eule. Well, I think the Department's position on ARPA
is clear. We think it would take funds away from other
programs. But I think in the case of climate change what you
have to consider is that climate change isn't just about
energy. Energy is a big part of that, obviously. About four-
fifths of all greenhouse gas emissions are energy related. But
there are other aspects of climate change technology, and
expertise is in other agencies. For example, our expertise on
non-CO2 gas is at the Environmental Protection Agency. Our
expertise on measuring and monitoring is in NASA. Basic
research, Department of Energy.
Chairman Tom Davis. I guess the ultimate question is, on an
issue of this magnitude are we better off having this expertise
dispersed across different agencies with no sole authority, or
are you better off having it under one roof with a strong focus
and decisionmaking tree that is clear-cut? I think right now it
tends to be rather process oriented.
Mr. Eule. Well, we think in the strategic plan we have set
out a process that can do that, and we have set out some goals,
long-term goals that will provide that. So I think we are
satisfied with the plan that we have. We think it is a good
structure, one that is workable through the management
structure that the administration has developed.
Chairman Tom Davis. Mr. Stephenson, how much exploratory
technology and research is being conducted by the Federal
Government?
Mr. Stephenson. I don't know the answer in total.
Chairman Tom Davis. OK. Can you get back to us on that?
Mr. Stephenson. Yes, I will.
Chairman Tom Davis. We want to put something in the record.
How does the administration identify spending on climate
change related R&D?
Mr. Stephenson. It is a matter of looking at the individual
agency budget submissions and accounts and rolling them up. I
think the press release yesterday from the Department of Energy
announcing the release of the plan summarizes it best in that
it says that the plan organizes, not directs, not manages, but
organizes roughly $3 billion in Federal spending.
Chairman Tom Davis. Do they differentiate between direct
spending, such as polar ice cap research versus indirect
spending, which would be, like, R&D with just kind of an
ancillary climate change benefit?
Mr. Stephenson. No. There are no clear definitions to
distinguish between direct and indirect climate change funding.
It all gets merged at the summary level in the reporting.
Chairman Tom Davis. How comfortable are you with OMB's
overall climate funding trends? It seems to me there are a lot
of questions whether OMB's data is comparable over time.
Mr. Stephenson. It was very hard for us to tell whether the
increases were due to inclusion of new programs or redefinition
of existing programs, so we can't answer that question
concretely, although most of the real increase, as I said,
occurred in the technology portion of the climate change
report.
Chairman Tom Davis. Has OMB agreed to all of your
substantive recommendations, or have they just agreed to the
suggested changes to report content format?
Mr. Stephenson. They have essentially agreed with all of
the recommendations, although we haven't looked at this year's
report to see how effectively they have been implemented. Our
recommendations were more to get additional clarity and
explanation in the reports so that they are more useful.
Chairman Tom Davis. OK.
Mr. Waxman.
Mr. Waxman. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Eule, in a hearing on climate change in July, Mr.
Connaughton, the chairman of the President's Council on
Environmental Quality, insisted that the administration is
taking meaningful action to address global warming, and you
have tried to make the same argument here today.
There are some basic facts we must recognize if we want to
avoid dangerous global warming. One, we can't avoid dangerous
global warming unless we sharply cut emissions of global
warming pollution. Two, sharp cuts in emissions require
significant changes in energy production, energy use,
deforestation, and other activities.
Three, as eminent climate scientists such as NASA's Dr.
James Hansen keep telling us, we must start now. We have about
a 10-year window to start controlling emissions and we need to
achieve large reductions by 2050 or the planet will be locked
into irreversible dangerous global warming. Four, as the single
largest emitter of global warming pollution and the wealthiest
country in the world, this isn't going to happen without U.S.
leadership.
The administration's climate change goal allows U.S.
emissions to rise by 14 percent by 2012. Achieving that goal
just locks us in more to do later. To be blunt, the
administration's claim of meaningful action are simply
nonsense, and the so-called CCTP strategic plan is simply a
longer version of the same story--lots of talk but no action
and no results.
Mr. Eule, the ultimate goal we must achieve is to stabilize
the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at a safe
level. Does your plan set a goal, any goal, for stabilizing the
level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere?
Mr. Eule. The plan does not set a level. It was never
intended to be a mitigation plan. It was always intended to be
a strategic plan to develop cost-effective options that could,
over the long run, contribute to mitigating climate change.
Mr. Waxman. In fact, your range of stabilization levels
include very high levels that would allow devastating global
warming to occur, such as temperatures that would melt
Greenland, raise sea levels by 20 feet. If we don't pick a goal
and the right goal, we may be aiming for disaster.
You say your plan is not to achieve a goal but to give some
ideas for technology. In order to achieve stabilization we need
to reduce our emissions. Does your plan set any quantified goal
or timing for reducing U.S. emissions of global warming
pollution?
Mr. Eule. The plan in the summary chapter, chapter 10, does
lay out some broad overall goals for the mitigation potentials
that we think the technologies in the program could achieve. We
have looked at these potentials not only in terms of the amount
of carbon or amount of greenhouse gases they could mitigate,
but also in terms of the timing of these technologies, when
they would be available. So while we don't set a goal, we have
done scenarios analyses to look at different technology mixes
and see how they could contribute to mitigating greenhouse gas
emissions across a range of different scenarios.
Mr. Waxman. Well, as I see it you have a 100-year plan with
no goal for where we want to end up and no time line for
getting there. The plan also fails to address how we will get
these new technologies into the marketplace. If people don't
use the technologies, we are not going to avoid any greenhouse
gas pollution.
Mr. Eule, I want to ask about the scenarios modeled in this
report. The report relies on modeling to determine when the
technologies could be deployed, and, even though you don't
mention this in the report, that modeling assumes that there is
a price on emissions that drives the use of these technologies;
is that right?
Mr. Eule. It doesn't assume a price, it assumes carbon
constraints.
Mr. Waxman. Well, even though your plan assumes that
something beyond research is necessary for these technologies
to be adopted, the Bush administration continues to strongly
oppose any policy that would actually constrain emissions. The
CBO pointed out in their report that research and development
alone won't be cost effective or any way effective to reduce
global warming. Dr. Kammen will testify today technologies do
not adopt themselves.
There aren't any clear action items in your plan to
implement, but even if it was faithfully followed over the
coming decades, global warming pollution would continue to rise
dramatically and global warming would reach dangerous,
irreversible levels. A so-called strategic plan that utterly
fails to address the problem isn't strategic, and I have to
tell you it is not much of a plan, either.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Bilbray [presiding]. Thank you. We are going to have to
adjourn until the end of this vote. The chairman said he will
return immediately after that.
[Recess.]
Chairman Tom Davis [presiding]. Thank you for bearing with
us. We had hoped to get you through.
Mr. Bilbray.
Mr. Bilbray. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
This question can be for either one of you: I was sort of
taken by a comment by one of the Members, about the issue of
transferring generation facilities from heavy oil and coal over
to natural gases being a net benefit, but that doesn't reflect
a consideration of a new facet of this whole issue that we are
not talking very much about. The issue that I would like to
ask: are you including in your strategies consideration for
global dimming? And is global dimming being accepted as being
one of the thresholds we need to consider when we are talking
about global change issues?
Mr. Stephenson. That is really a DOE issue.
Mr. Eule. Are you talking geo-engineering?
Mr. Bilbray. No. I am talking about the effect of
particulates on the global warming issue and the benefits of
particulates and what is called global dimming, the shadowing
effect.
Mr. Eule. I think that would be an area of research that
would probably be done under the climate change science
probably but not the climate change technology.
Mr. Bilbray. OK.
Mr. Eule. If I could get to your issue about coal
switching, fuel switching from coal to natural gas, when we
look at these technologies, the administration's climate change
plan also looks at energy security and air pollution and
climate change, so we combine the two. We look at it in a
context, so, I think from an energy security issue, simple fuel
switching from coal to natural gas, you also have to ask the
question what impact is that going to have on your energy
security, as well. So I think what we do was we take a more
holistic approach in how we approach these technologies and
start to consider these other factors.
Mr. Bilbray. OK. An editorial note; North America still has
substantial natural gas reserves. This is a big issue.
Mr. Eule. It does, yes.
Mr. Bilbray. The other issue is, are we including--and I
don't know if it is your department or should be the next
panel--the issue of bioconversion and how much we are focusing
on genetic alteration in our biofuel strategy. Arrangement we
specifically including in our strategy the concept that we may
want to be talking about bacterium and enzymes that have been
genetically altered to be able to produce not only the fuel we
want but also in a manner that is cost effective.
Mr. Eule. Absolutely. The Department of Energy has just
announced recently that it was seeking $250 million to fund
some centers that would look at those sorts of issues, using
biotechnology not only to improve the feed stocks but also
using biotechnology to improve the conversion process.
Currently we make ethanol from cornstarch, essentially, the
sugars that are in the ear of the corn. We are working now on
what you call a cellulosic technology where we construct these
from other parts of the plant. We think our Office of Science
is working it out. We think there is tremendous potential in
biotechnology to make that process much more efficient and thus
make bio-refining much more cost effective, so it is something
we are looking at very closely.
Mr. Bilbray. The issue of getting away from virgin products
and going to ``conversion'' of trash products I think has just
been grossly underestimated how important that is to make it
work. A lot of people forget that gasoline was a trash product.
It was a leftover trash from kerosene production. That is the
only reason why we are driving around with gasoline now, not
because gasoline was a secret formula that was developed
somewhere down the line.
Mr. Eule. A couple of years ago USDA and DOE did a joint
study called the Billion Ton Study to take a look at the amount
of biomass that is available in the United States, and it came
to the conclusion there was about 1.3 billion tons of biomass
available in the United States annually on a sustainable basis.
That is a huge resource, so if we can develop a cellulosic
technology to tap into that resource we can significantly
reduce the amount of gasoline that we use in our transportation
fuels, for example.
Mr. Bilbray. Go from that to the other end of the spectrum,
the adaptation technology and theories or whatever. We have
been getting reports that basically the Federal Government is
walking away from adaptation concepts or technology. Where are
we going with the whole concept of that other end of the
spectrum?
Mr. Eule. Adaptation?
Mr. Bilbray. Yes.
Mr. Eule. Adaptation is an issue that is handled in a
number of agencies. CCSP, for example, climate change science
program, does take a look at adaptation. Really what we need to
help us with adaptation is regional level models that have much
more specificity than they do now. We have made a great deal of
progress in those models. More needs to be done.
But there are some what we call synthesis and exception
products coming out of the climate change science program. They
are looking at those sorts of issues. One that has relevance
for the Department of Energy is a synthesis and exception
product on the impact of climate change on energy production
and use. So those sorts of things are being considered through
the climate change science program. EPA has programs, as well
as the Department of Interior and others.
Mr. Bilbray. Mr. Chairman, I apologize, but there is one
very simple but very big question I have that I don't think our
colleagues on the other side of the aisle will bring up. Is
there one major industrial nation in the world that has
substantially reduced greenhouse gases? And, if there is, what
technology did they use to do it?
Mr. Eule. That is an excellent question and the answer
quite simply is no. We have taken a look at data that EPA
reports to the U.N. Framework Convention, other countries
report this data, as well, and if you take a look at the
numbers for 2000 to 2004 emissions growth in the United States
was 1.3 percent at a time when the economy grew by about 9.5
percent and population expanded by about 4 percent. The EU 15,
which is essentially Western Europe, their emissions grew by
2.4 percent, so they performed worse than the United States. So
I don't bring that up to denigrate all the things that are
going on in the EU. They are all helpful. But it just goes to
point out that no country is significantly cutting its
emissions at this point.
Mr. Bilbray. Who do you think is doing the best?
Mr. Eule. Well, I have a chart here. I could look. The
Japanese are doing quite well. But, you know, we have heard a
lot about cap in trade. I would point out the Japanese are
doing well but they don't have a cap in trade policy in place.
The Canadians don't have a cap in trade and they are not doing
as well as the United States. So there is a mix but everybody
is pretty much in the same place as far as emissions go.
Mr. Bilbray. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Tom Davis. I want to thank this panel. Thank you
very much. This has been very helpful for us as we move
forward. Thank you.
We will take a minute break and get our next panel.
We have our next panel: Mr. Lee Lane, the executive
director of the Climate Policy Center; Mr. Richard Van Atta,
the senior research analyst at the Institute for Defense
Analyses; Dr. Martin Hoffert, emeritus professor, New York
University; Robert Socolow, the former director, Center for
Energy and Environmental Studies at Princeton University; and
Dr. Daniel Kammen, the director of Renewable and Appropriate
Energy Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley.
It is our policy to swear you in.
Dr. Van Atta, your daughter is where now in school?
Mr. Van Atta. UVA.
Chairman Tom Davis. Excellent.
Mr. Van Atta. Thank you.
Chairman Tom Davis. Excellent.
Mr. Van Atta. Your remarks about Jeb Stuart are very well
taken.
Chairman Tom Davis. I knew you would appreciate it.
Mr. Van Atta. It is a wonderful model for people to look at
in terms of how a school has been resuscitated and turned into
a model.
Chairman Tom Davis. Yes. Excellent.
Mr. Van Atta. It is a real asset for our area.
Chairman Tom Davis. Well, I had two through there. One,
Shelley, is at William and Mary, and Pamela is at Swarthmore,
so they have done well.
[Witnesses sworn.]
Chairman Tom Davis. Mr. Lane, we will start with you and we
will move on down. There is a light in front of you that is
green when it starts, then it turns orange after 4 minutes and
red after 5, but we are going to try to keep within that
because your entire statement is part of the record. Thank you.
STATEMENTS OF LEE LANE, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, CLIMATE POLICY
CENTER; RICHARD VAN ATTA, SENIOR RESEARCH ANALYST, INSTITUTE
FOR DEFENSE ANALYSES; MARTIN HOFFERT, EMERITUS PROFESSOR, NEW
YORK UNIVERSITY; ROBERT SOCOLOW, FORMER DIRECTOR, CENTER FOR
ENERGY AND ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY; AND
DANIEL KAMMEN, DIRECTOR, RENEWABLE AND APPROPRIATE ENERGY
LABORATORY, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY
STATEMENT OF LEE LANE
Mr. Lane. Thanks a lot. I really appreciate the opportunity
to appear here this afternoon, and I also really want to thank
both you and the committee, as a whole, for conducting this
hearing. I think this subject is one of tremendous importance.
One of the attachments to my written statement is an editorial
from the current issue of the Journal of Nature pointing out
the enormous importance of government-funded R&D as a potential
source of solutions to the problem of climate change.
As soon as we recognize that we really need government-
funded R&D, in particular, it raises the question that the
record of the Federal Government on energy R&D has been
distinctly mixed, and so we really face a serious set of
questions about how to do R&D to solve our climate problems in
such a way that it actually is likely to get the results that
we are looking for. It is a very hard, very big problem,
climate change, as you know, so it is a very difficult problem
and I think you are really to be commended for asking some of
the questions about how to organize an R&D effort in such a way
that it really works.
We have a very distinguished panel of experts here and they
are going to discuss, I think, several of them, some of the
more global aspects of the issue of how to do R&D, but I wanted
to open my remarks by focusing on what I think are three pretty
simple initial steps that could really get us started, things
that are not necessarily global in nature but things that
would, if we could do them, would really have an impact in
enhancing the cost effectiveness of our Federal climate-related
R&D effort.
The first of those, which is described in attachment B in
my statement, would be to create a focused exploratory research
program directed at finding new climate technology solutions.
Several of us, four very distinguished scientists, including
Dr. Hoffert and several others, and me, who is not a scientist
at all, put together this straw man proposal describing a
possible way of organizing an exploratory R&D program aimed at
climate solutions.
I think that the two problems that such a program could
solve are, first, that it could reduce the rigidity of the
Federal climate change technology program. Bureaucracies tend
to perpetuate themselves. All bureaucracies do that. It makes
them rigid. It makes them slow to change. The program as we
have designed it would go outside of the bureaucracy to open up
the search for new ideas just as broadly as possible, and
hopefully in doing that would encourage the flow of new ideas
into our R&D portfolio.
The second thing it would do would be to counteract some of
the tendency toward risk averseness, toward over-caution in the
current portfolio of the climate change technology program.
This is a problem that has been noted by some of DOE's own
reviews of the climate change technology program.
We think that the proposal we have sketched out offers a
possible way of counteracting both of those problems with the
existing program. Our proposal for doing this--and there are
other ways you could do it, but our proposal is to create an
autonomous, not-for-profit Government-funded corporation to
organize the exploratory R&D effort. We think it is better to
create a corporation outside of the DOE in order to make sure
that we don't simply perpetuate the same problems that exist
within the existing organization.
Your opening remarks alluded to one of my other key points
here, which is the need for expanding the R&D portfolio of DOE
to include geo-engineering and adaptation in the CCTP. I think
those are extremely important points. We could find ourselves
with nasty surprises, and it would be much better to have done
the research on those things beforehand.
I guess the third thing I will say, just in closing, is
that it really is important to give DOE the planning staff of
CCTP the resources that they need to do a better job of
planning in the future. They have actually done, I think,
yeoman's service given their resource limitations, and if we
want them to do better we have to give them the resources to do
that.
I conclude by just saying again I think that this hearing
is enormously valuable. I thank you very much for your
initiative in organizing it, and certainly the Climate Policy
Center will do whatever we can to be helpful.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Lane follows:]
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Chairman Tom Davis. Thank you very much. That is very
helpful.
Dr. Van Atta, welcome and thank you.
STATEMENT OF RICHARD VAN ATTA
Mr. Van Atta. I am not an energy specialist. My background
is Defense and Defense research. I spent a fair amount of my
career looking at emerging technologies and how they are made
to emerge, and I teach a class at Georgetown on emerging
technologies and security, and I emphasize the fact that
emerging technologies are made to emerge. The question is the
processes and the means by which you do that.
DARPA is a unique example of an entity that was created
with that purpose in mind, and I think it is important to look
at it in terms of why it succeeded and what made it succeed. In
my testimony, which I will read portions of here, I emphasize
that the research that DARPA does is unique and different, and
is purposefully so. The organization, itself, is designed
explicitly to allow it to do this unique and different type of
research, and it has cultural features within its organization
and management style that allow it to do that.
In the testimony I talk about the DARPA model and I also
ask the question of which DARPA model, because DARPA has done
many things in many different ways. It has been adaptive. It is
very malleable. One cannot just say there is a DARPA and that
we are going to take that and implant it some place else. You
have to understand what it took to make it do what it could do
and why it was able to change in those very effective ways. So
it evolved over time and it has many successes, and those
successes, in fact, were different because they were dealing
with different problems.
We have to understand the way in which those successes were
made and what it took to make those successful, and I will talk
about a couple of examples of that.
DARPA's program managers are the core. They are, in fact,
almost individual entrepreneurs. They are encouraged to
challenge existing approaches. In the case of Defense, for war
fighting and to seek results rather than just explore ideas. In
addition to supporting technology and the components of the
technology development, DARPA has also funded integration of
large-scale systems demonstrations to look into what we would
call disruptive capabilities.
There is a high-risk, high-payoff motif for DARPA that is a
set of organizational and operational characteristics that
include its relatively small size, its lean, non-bureaucratic
structure, its focus on potentially change-state technologies,
its highly flexible and adaptive research programs, but what is
most important at the outset is that, in contrast to the
existing Defense research environment, ARPA was manifestly
different. It did not have labs. It does not focus on existing
requirements. It is separate from any operational organization
elements. What is explicit is that its charter is to be
different so it could do fundamentally different things that
had not been done in a research environment.
So when one looks at an energy ARPA or climate change ARPA,
the question is what are the things that it is trying to do
that are different and how do you set up an organization to do
that.
DARPA was established as a research and development
organization to assure the United States maintained the lead in
the state-of-the-art technology for military requirements and
prevent technology surprise. As one then looks at the
characteristics of how it did that, first of all it was
independent of other organizations.
Second of all, it is lean and agile. It was risk-taking and
tolerant of failure, open to learning. You have to have a
specific kind of research environment and organizational
structure and a way in which your link to the rest of the
organization will allow you to do that.
The program managers are, in fact, the technical champions
who conceive their own programs and have to then sell those
programs within the DARPA environment. The coin of the realm in
DARPA is promising ideas. Gaining notion is not that the idea
is well proven, but that it has high prospects for making a
difference on the problem they are trying to solve. So you have
to have an organization and culture that focuses on those kinds
of innovations and those kind of directions.
In my testimony I talk a lot about DARPA's successes, and I
don't have time to go into those here, but I will give you some
key what I consider to be elements of that success.
First of all, focus on creating surprise, creating
difference, not avoiding them.
Second, build what I call communities of change state
advocates. One of the key things that is unique to DARPA is it
doesn't create and do its own research, it incentivizes and
creates a community of people to do that. If one talks about
the current structure of DOE in the national labs, they do
their own work with their own capabilities within their own
operations. What DARPA did is it found the people who could do
that. It developed the community. It found the new ideas out
there and brought them together in a coherent manner.
The third element is to find challenges, develop solution
concepts, and then demonstrate them. We can show examples of
that in my testimony.
Finally, I would say if one were to ask the question what
were the key things about climate change that relate to DARPA
and the DARPA model, the first thing I would say is you have to
understand the imperative that drove the creation of DARPA in
terms of national security, the Sputnik issue, and ask the
question: do we have the same imperative and understanding of
imperative to make an ARPA-like organization work elsewhere?
You also have to have the understanding that it will work
because of the protection, oversight, and interest of the
Secretary of Defense and even the President to make it happen.
Without that, just naming something ARPA will not solve your
problem for you.
Finally, I would say you need to deal with not only
leadership support but the issue of congressional oversight.
ARPA has benefited from the fact it has a simple oversight
structure, it is not being managed by multiple congressional
committees simultaneously, and with that kind of multiple
meddling you are not going to get anywhere. You have to deal
with existing lab structure. An ARPA-like organization cannot
succeed if, in fact, it was supposed to support and integrate
all those labs and use that as its basis of success, and then
they have to deal with the incumbent business interests.
One of the key things, examples of DARPA, was how it
created information technology capability despite the fact that
IBM dominated all of the information technology development at
the time that it created that very successful program, but it
did it by not having to directly address but create
alternatives to those incumbent capabilities.
So my suggestion is that there is value in an ARPA energy
that could be created, but if you are going to do that you have
to understand that first of all you need to have that
galvanized focus, you need to have an approach that is allowed
to be independent, and it has to have top-level leadership if
it is going to succeed.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Van Atta follows:]
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Chairman Tom Davis. Thank you very much.
Dr. Hoffert, thanks for being here.
STATEMENT OF MARTIN HOFFERT
Mr. Hoffert. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. You may have to bear
with me. I have a bit of a cold.
What I would like to do is outline some of the specific
attributes of the climate energy problem that make it a
candidate for ARPA or DARPA-like R&D, but I would also like to
distinguish between several contexts which are being used
interchangeably.
A Manhattan Project or an Apollo Program Project is not the
same as a DARPA-type organization, and neither is an
exploratory research program, so let me just discuss what I
think is the objective problem, the objective climate energy
problem.
What we are faced with is a kind of existential challenge
to our high-technology civilization. Almost universally all the
countries of the world are in favor of continued economic
growth, roughly at 2 or 3 percent a year. That is built into
all of the models. At the same time, those of us who have
worked on the climate problem--and that includes myself.
I have worked on this for almost 30 years. I was, in fact,
a colleague of Jim Hansen's at the Institute for Space Studies
back in the 1970's. We have, over time, evolved a pretty good
understanding quantitatively of this issue, and if we were to
say that we don't want the planet to warm more than 2 or 2\1/2\
degrees, which might lead to irreversible melting of the ice
caps, and at the same time require that economic growth
continue at 2 or 3 percent a year--and that seems to be what
everyone wants to do--that imposes mathematical constraints on
not only the amount of emissions that we would be allowed to
emit but on the amount of energy that we would have to either
produce by alternate energy technologies that don't emit CO2 or
energy demand reducing technologies that would give us the same
end products but with less input.
We have written several papers on this. The first paper we
wrote was in 1998 where we first floated the idea of an Apollo
or a Manhattan Project for energy. The week after that paper
appeared in Nature, the editorial writers of Nature said this
is really a bad idea because we know that the Jimmy Carter
energy program had a lot of boondoggles, it wasn't really
effective, and researcher is no substitute for political
action. I want to come back to that in a minute, but because it
is so important I must be sure that I say this at the beginning
and don't forget.
There is a perception in some quarters that research can be
used as an alternative to prompt implementation of things that
we know how to do right now. I want to as strongly as possible
say that is not the case. I favor a metaphor, a sort of World
War II type metaphor. I think the problem we are facing is at
least as challenging as winning the second world war.
We didn't stop fighting the second World War while the
Manhattan Project was going on. We did the Manhattan Project,
but by the time the war ended it did deliver a remarkable piece
of technology that managed to change the shape of the world for
the next 50 years, for better or for worse.
So I think that, although I won't refer to this any more,
it is very clear that whatever we do on the R&D front has to be
done in parallel with implementing everything that we have on
the shelf right now.
Having said that, let me go to some specific problems that
I think could benefit from an intense R&D of--I believe that
the DARPA model might be very valuable in some of these
problems.
What do we actually have in the coffers now to provide the
levels of energy that we need to run the world, which is
something like 300 to 400 percent of the energy that we are
using right now? In order to stabilize at 2 degrees warming or
less, we are going to have to have some energy source X if we
are going to do it with supply that can provide between 100--or
a combination of sources--between 100 and 300 percent of all
the energy that we use now without putting CO2 in the
atmosphere.
To put this into context, Fermi's first nuclear reactor in
1942 was farther in time than 2050 is from us, and roughly 5
percent of our primary power comes from nuclear power. So
whatever this energy source is, it will have to grow something
like 20 to 60 times faster than the last revolutionary energy
source we had.
That is an immense challenge, if you put it in that
framework. There are other ways of stating it. My colleague Rob
Socolow uses the metaphor of wedges. But it is a major, major
job and it is not going to get done, in my opinion, unless we
have a targeted program to develop three classes of technology,
each one of which has a number of variants.
The first class is coal, with carbon sequestration or
carbon capture. There is a lot of coal, and if it weren't for
global warming this would really be a problem for the 22nd
century or beyond. We can make synthetic fuels out of coal, but
CO2 and the climate problem has moved it to the agenda where we
have to start working on this right now. In fact, 850 new coal-
fired power plants are being built right now by the United
States, China, and India, and the emissions from those plants
are going to overwhelm Kyoto emission reductions by a factor of
five.
The U.S.'s response to climate change, as put forth by
Negotiator Harlan Watson at the recent round of Kyoto
discussions in Montreal, was something called future gen, where
DOE is going to build a plant that will make hydrogen and
electricity from coal gassification. We don't even have a
location for that plant, and the contribution that we can
expect from that technology is very small compared to what we
are already doing. So, although coal is important, we are
rapidly building precisely the wrong infrastructure marching in
the wrong direction, tying up capital for 50 to 75 years.
The second general category are safe or so-called green
nuclear reactors. Nuclear power has come a long way, although
we haven't in this country built a new reactor for at least 30
years. We need to come to grips with the issue of what it would
take to generate nuclear power sustainably, and it is not clear
that once the reactor is burning the U235 isotope can do it.
That is less than 5 percent of natural uranium. There are
alternative ideas that involve breeders that may involve using
folium. Those were always parts of the discussion back in the
1970's, but the institutional memory of that has dimmed, and I
believe we are far too modest in our plans for nuclear and
could really use some innovative ideas to drive us toward a
sustainable energy source.
The third category and the one that I am most identified
with and favor the most is renewable energy, primarily solar
and wind energy. These energy sources are low intensity,
intermittent, and widely distributed. If we wanted to use these
sources, if we wanted to get, let's say, one-third of our
primary power from renewables, one-third from green nukes, and
one-third from coal sequestration, we really need to invent and
deploy entirely new systems for transmitting and storing this
energy. Indeed, the transmission and the storage of the
renewable energy may become the cost pacer in the
implementation of renewable energy beyond the point where
renewables can penetrate as a niche market. I think that is
another area that could benefit from a DARPA-like program.
This emphasis on technology, which in no way should be
construed as an alternative to prompt action, I also think is a
way that we might entrain a bipartisan support for this. I had
the pleasure yesterday of appearing before a different
committee, the House Committee on Science, and Congressman
Rohrabacher was there and made some remarks to the effect that
he doesn't accept the theory of global warming, which I know,
and that was fine.
But I also know Congressman Rohrabacher to be a proponent
of space solar power, solar power satellites where one collects
solar energy in Earth orbit and beams it to the Earth. He has
given many talks in conferences on this that I have attended.
On this score, we are technologically simpatico. I think it
would be very important to have an R&D program in space solar
power. After all, the world is spending $13 billion to build an
experimental thermonuclear reactor that isn't even going to
generate any power.
There is essentially zero funding for space solar power
right now, although we did have a program in the 1970's. It is
another discussion, but the one problem is that, if that
technology or other related technologies like global super-
conducting transmission lines, auto gyros that might be
suspended in the upper troposphere which have the potential of
providing all the electricity on Earth are not being supported
because there is no champion within the Government agencies,
particularly the Department of Energy. How are we ever going to
start working on those ideas?
I think that I would imagine a sequence of events in which
we might start with a relatively modest exploratory research
technology program that would examine the feasibility of these
ideas and start looking into experiments to test them. That
might be eventually correlated with an ARPA-E program and, if
it looks like it is very promising, it might transfer
eventually to the Department of Energy.
I don't think I have very much time left but I have one
more point that I think is vitally important. Many Americans
believe that the job of the Department of Energy is to develop
alternative energy sources that would be sustainable and allow
us to live harmoniously with nature and yet retain our high-
tech civilization. That is not the job, as you well know. DOE
has two jobs, one is called stockpile stewardship, which means
to make sure that the nuclear weapons we have will actually
work if we ever had to use them, and the other is toxic waste
cleanup. I put it to the committee that the Department of
Energy, itself, should be reorganized. This is not such a far-
out idea.
As you may well know, NASA has recently been reorganized
and tasked with the mission of going back to the moon and going
to Mars, perhaps without adequate funding but certainly heads
rolled and there were internal reorganizations. I don't bring
this up because I necessarily agree with that direction. In
fact, I am quite unhappy about the loss of monitoring programs
from space that have applicability to climate change. But I
bring it up because it is not impossible for a Government
agency to be reorganized and to be retasked, and I cannot think
of a more important task for this century, a more important
organizing principle than developing sustainable energy sources
in harmony with natural ecosystems.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Hoffert follows:]
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Chairman Tom Davis. Thank you very much.
Dr. Socolow, thank you for being with us.
STATEMENT OF ROBERT SOCOLOW
Mr. Socolow. Chairman Davis, ladies and gentlemen, I have
titled my remarks One Hand Clapping. You have heard a very
strong case for moving forcefully forward with technological
responses that address climate change. We need early deployment
of technologies that we already know are matched to the job and
we need long-term research to expand the list of options.
Congressional action is critical in both areas. To accelerate
the deployment of the technological strategies whose promise is
already clearly identified, requires price signals for carbon.
To raise the energy R&D effort to a new level requires greatly
expanded, durable funding of research with a long time horizon.
To do one without the other, that is like one hand clapping.
I want to share with you work that I have done over the
past 2 years with my ecologist colleague Steve Pacala that has
added coherence to discussions of climate policy. Please look
at the figure on the screen. This, by the way, is in the
Scientific American in September 2006, the current issue. The
upward trajectory envisions 50 years of inaction while carbon
dioxide emissions double, followed by aggressive action to hold
global emissions constant for the following 50 years. Following
the upward trajectory, the world will find it difficult to
avoid tripling the preindustrial carbon dioxide concentration
and a rise in the average surface temperature of roughly 5
degrees celsius.
The lower trajectory, the blue one, envisions immediate
action to hold global emissions constant, followed in half a
century by a second aggressive program to reduce global
emissions roughly in half. Following the lower trajectory will
enable the world to beat doubling--that is, to keep the
concentration below twice its preindustrial concentration--with
a rise of roughly 3 degrees.
The stabilization triangle is that orange and yellow area
between the two trajectories. You can see that it is divided
into seven stabilization wedges. A stabilization wedge is a
strategy that produces a reduction of 1 billion tons of carbon
and global carbon dioxide emissions 50 years from now relative
to what would happen in the absence of attention to climate
problem.
The size of the world's job for the next 50 years is to
achieve seven wedges, if we can live with a 3 degree
temperature increase. If we want to stay below 2 degrees
celsius, more wedges will be needed.
I note that the climate change technology plan published
yesterday, if you look at 2055, also has exactly seven wedges.
They have 16 minus 9 instead of 14 minus 7, but there is a
complete agreement about the scale of the job that is
associated with avoiding a 3 degree temperature rise between
the DOE and our own analysis.
In a world in 2056 that emits the same amount of carbon as
today, the United States will emit less CO2 than today, and the
trajectory that we will need to follow from here to there must
depart from its expected business-as-usual trajectory
immediately and must peak in about a decade, and global
emissions would peak soon after.
You must not underestimate the size of the policy
intervention required to turn U.S. emissions downward. A too-
low price for carbon dioxide emissions will lead industries and
consumers to treat these expenses as routine costs of business.
The required price schedule for CO2 emissions must induce
fundamental changes in the energy system beginning within a
decade or less. We figure out how much we have to spend by how
much will create action.
Pacala and I estimate that the price needed to jump-start
this transmission is in the ballpark of $100 to $200 per ton of
carbon, that is to say $25 to $50 per ton of CO2. Arrangements,
for example, would make it cheaper for new coal plants to
capture and store CO2 rather than to vent it. Based on its
carbon content, $100 per ton of carbon is $12 a barrel of oil,
$60 a ton of coal, $0.25 a gallon of gasoline, and $0.02 per
kilowatt hour for electricity made from coal.
Policy-induced scale-up of existing technology can only
succeed if accompanied by R&D to squeeze down costs and to
solve the problems that inevitably accompany widespread
deployment. Along with such programmatic R&D, we will also need
another kind of research program that we are talking about
here, more blue sky, a program able to capture the imagination
and the loyalty of the world's best scientists and engineers
like the Manhattan Project and the Apollo program. Both of
those historic programs provided dependable research support,
which is a necessary condition to induce the most productive
scientists and engineers, to reorient their research careers,
and to induce the most ambitious students to adopt these
retooling scientists and engineers as their mentors.
But energy research must be international and must heavily
involve the private sector. Those are two characteristics that
the Apollo program and the Manhattan program did not share.
I repeat my main message: we need a serious expansion of
high-risk R&D, but not only R&D. As Marty Hoffert also said. We
also need policy that elicits carbon responsive investments by
industry and carbon-saving practices on the part of consumers.
R&D in the absence of near-term technology-forcing policy is
like one hand clapping.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Socolow follows:]
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Chairman Tom Davis. Thank you very much.
Dr. Kammen.
STATEMENT OF DANIEL KAMMEN
Mr. Kammen. Chairman Davis, thank you very much for the
opportunity to speak today.
[Slide presentation.]
Mr. Kammen. If we could move to the next slide, I share
many of the points in common with the two previous speakers. I
would like to highlight a number of what I think are the key
issues of a serious approach to this problem.
The first is a major commitment to energy. Leadership and
sustainability is needed. It is long overdue and it would
benefit this country. There is a global lack of leadership in
this area. We would profit financially, as well as
environmentally, by taking on that role.
Energy environmental sustainability is a marathon. It is
not a sprint. Like in a marathon, where your worst of many
miles times can dramatically affect your performance, cutting
the funding and cutting support on a given year critically cuts
programs that are otherwise successful. The best graduate
students leave fields. The best researchers leave fields.
Companies don't see it as a serious effort if funding levels
fluctuate up or down dramatically, so having a sustained, long-
term program that is much wider than just DOE is going to be
critical to make this happen.
We have the scientific and technological foundation not
necessarily to get us all of the way there but to make major
inroads, and we learn by doing. We must start that process in a
much more aggressive way than the CCTP even lays out the
beginning of. I would submit that the next serious stage is to
do what the CCTP has looked at within DOE in a much broader way
across not only other Federal agencies but also with those
States and those foreign governments that are making serious
inroads here. That was largely lacking in the process.
The benefits of investing in innovation are well documented
by the world's economists. They are significant. They reach
across many sectors of the economy. If we did this in the
energy sector, the so-called clean tech area, we would see
those benefits.
Innovation leads to more innovation, whereas stagnation
does not. We need to invest and we need to make clear signals
where we want to get to.
Finally, the point that Congressman Waxman so kindly made,
and that is technologies do not adopt themselves. Programs that
are technology-only focused will not succeed in this area. A
critical difference not yet discussed with the differences
between a DOE program is that there was essentially a single
client for DOE efforts. Our clients here are companies, homes,
utilities in the United States and around the world. It is not
the same thing as having a single client, the Secretary of
Defense, and sending a project forward. We need a broad
strategy that marries in a sustained way energy R&D with
efforts to bring technologies into the market. That is a
critical step.
On the next slide I highlight two things. One is the oft-
reported growing U.S. emissions in carbon. If we move ahead,
that is our business-as-usual trajectory, depressing as it is.
You will notice the next point forward shows not only where the
administration's target, the so-called reduction in energy
intensity, which in my view is a false and misleading way to
lead out the strategy. Nature does not care how much we change
our energy intensity; nature cares how much we reduce our
loading of the environment with carbon. We need to have a
target that is absolute and not a target that is a function of
a percentage growth rate change.
I highlight this with the Kyoto protocol target and a red
line indicating what California has adopted through a series of
measures, Assembly Bill 1493, Assembly Bill 32, Senate Bill 1,
the million solar roofs measure that has near-term targets that
we know are achievable. We believe we can do and we know how to
do 20 to 25 percent reductions in the State, and we have heard
excellent comments from Congressman Bill Ray about how the
California Air Resources Board tasked to do that has done it in
the past.
The rest of the path we do not know how to do. The parts of
this line to bring our emissions down in this later part of the
picture we do not have a recipe for, but to look for single-
technology solutions, very expensive individual programs,
without building out the first part of the curve is not to
learn from the process of technology, innovation, and
development that has been successful in many other areas.
Run the marathon through here and determine your strengths
down here. Do not delay until you think you have the magic
bullet to get you down to the target.
If you advance the slide one more time you will see a
target is dramatic. If you can advance one more slide, the
stabilization regime is down here. It is an 80 percent
reduction. It is a large, overall process. Notice there is a
gap, as Dr. Socolow calls it, a wedge here. If you go to the
next slide there is a remarkable experience in the United
States. The top lines show the overall increase in electricity
use per person in the United States. The lower lines show the
California and New York experiences.
If we advance the slide, you will notice there is a
remarkable wedge of energy efficiency savings. That was not
envisioned and developed by a one-stop, one magic energy
efficiency technology. It was a combination of better light
bulbs, water heaters, standards for buildings, shading homes,
etc. It was a cumulative process, the same sort of process we
can expect to see if we invest significantly in energy
efficiency in renewables as we do in energy efficiency.
If we move to the next slide, we are seeing now in the
world of ethanol, whether it is ethanol made from corn or
ethanol made from cellulose, a dramatic increase in ethanol
production and use, and many States are adopting more and more
aggressive ethanol targets, and our lab has been involved in
that process through a fairly high-profile paper in this area.
This is an effort of increasing R&D and market
opportunities at the same time. We must look for those in both
areas, not just R&D, not just markets, but those working in
concert.
If we jump ahead a few more slides, this unfortunately is
our current situation. The top line shows Federal energy R&D,
the $3 billion number we heard before, the number here, and the
black line below it shows private sector R&D. We have a mis-
match of private sector spending in this area. In fact, this
does not have to be the pattern.
If we look at the next slide, in the area of health care
private sector R&D has been increasing for several decades,
while in the energy sector it has been decreasing. A friend and
colleague of mine, a former assistant secretary in DOE, noted
sadly that this means that we will be alive to see the folly of
our lack of investment in the energy sector.
I conclude with the fairly simple but clear set of comments
on the last slide, and that is this committee, with a largely
bipartisan interest in these areas, has demonstrated that we
are able to raise our expectations and raise our standards for
investment in this area, that clean energy can be an area of
tremendous innovation for the economy, an area that we would
export to the world and benefit from. If we support States that
enact aggressive policies such as the New England States, the
mid-Atlantic States, California, some of the northwest States
that are adopting renewable energy content requirements for
their power, we can assist those areas undertaking experiments
that we all want to see happen to determine which policies are
the most effective and not wait for a magic bullet, single-
size-fits-all, DOD-mimicked solution.
I would like to note, as well, if we jump to the next
feature, that over the last 3 years we have observed a carbon
tax of roughly $270 per ton in the run-up in gasoline prices.
None of that has effectively gone into clean-tech R&D. We have
paid this out of our pockets with that money going overseas
without capturing it, as Dr. Socolow said, with a significant
carbon tax. I recommend a much more modest initial tax to gain
experience with the process, but that is exactly how we need to
start to send the right signals to industry that we are serious
about it, that we expect performance, and that we will award
the performance in this area.
I would like to again thank you for the chance to speak,
and I urge us to take advantage of the opportunity to be the
environmental leader that the United States is currently not
doing relative to a number of other nations. It is our
opportunity and our challenge to take on that leadership.
Thank you very much.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Kammen follows:]
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Chairman Tom Davis. I want to thank all of you for your
testimony.
The first question you always ask is, regardless of what
California or the United States does, if everybody doesn't act
together, particularly with the emerging nations, you know, you
are penalizing yourself economically in not getting the same
kind of results, but it starts here. I mean, all we can talk
about in Congress is what we can do.
Mr. Van Atta, let me just ask you. You stated in your
testimony that ARPA's success is dependent upon a galvanized
structure and direct oversight. Where do you think a climate
change ARPA could be housed?
Mr. Van Atta. Well, the most natural place would be the
Department of Energy, but I would agree with others that
probably not this Department of Energy. We have to find a way
of having an imperative that is focusing on the energy and
climate issues. If you chartered the Department of Energy to do
that as its primary mission and the Secretary had that as the
primary mission from the President, then an organization like
this would be well housed there. If it is not that, then it
would not succeed.
Chairman Tom Davis. And right now, I mean, the report right
now, there are no lines of authority anywhere. You have all
these task forces and everything else. You know, my experience
in government is that this is not the way to get anything done.
Mr. Lane, what would a CCRPA be able to do that the CCTP
doesn't have the capacity for right now?
Mr. Lane. Well, I think if you organized it the way that
our paper proposed to organize it, which is to say as a not-
for-profit government-financed but independent corporation, I
think it would be insulated from the bureaucratic pressures for
not very daring, not very breakthrough oriented technology that
I fear characterizes part of the current DOE portfolio. I don't
want to exaggerate that, but I think it all depends on
insulating the entity doing the exploratory research to be able
to operate the way Dr. Van Atta describes DARPA as operating. I
don't think you can do that within the existing institution, so
our proposal of a corporation was a way of trying to get around
that.
Chairman Tom Davis. Let me ask this. I come at it from a
more political perspective, because that is the way I have come
up through the ranks. I don't have a Ph.D in physics. I am a
lawyer by training. But we find out when you put FEMA in
Homeland Security it is competing for dollars with prevention
dollars in Homeland Security and it gets starved. We found this
in other agencies. The Federal Information Security Management
Act without information security gets starved when you put it
in competing with everything else.
Making it a priority, that is one of the reasons, you know,
you talk about Cabinet-level positions to make it priorities
where it is not competing for precious dollars, discretionary
dollars or anything. That is why I like the concept of an ARPA
of some kind where you get the focus. I am just afraid, despite
some good intentions of some people across the bureaucracy and
even the administration, the way it is set up today I just
don't see how we get from here to there. I guess that is the
major concern.
Let me just ask if anybody else has any thoughts on that.
Mr. Hoffert, do you have any thoughts on that?
Mr. Hoffert. Well, I mean, there are things that you can do
immediately in the exploratory R&D program that we proposed.
There is not a lot of money. It is not a lot of money. I think
we were asking on the order of $30 million. What it would do is
it would be a first stage of analyzing what kind of ideas are
out there that aren't really being captured by the present
Department of Energy structure where you don't have a champion.
It is something that could be done now.
Now, eventually, as I said in my statement, I really think
the Department of Energy has to be restructured and given a
mission. That is a very high-level decision. It is probably a
Presidential decision. If you ask me what I would wish for, I
would wish that, in time for the next Presidential elections,
that both major political parties would realize that this is a
vital interest of the United States, it is vitally important to
U.S. policy and to the world. If you ask me, I think it is more
important than terrorism and we would be having public debates
about it and both parties, from whatever their ideological
perspectives, would attempt to have a real energy policy, not
just pork and reshuffling. I think that is important. That is
something you guys can do.
Chairman Tom Davis. We can, but let me just tell you this
place, once you get this thing to the mish-mash between the
House and the Senate and Members with their employment
opportunities in their State it gets bogged down. It really has
to start at the top. I am just telling you. I mean, I think all
of us here have good will in trying to tackle this, but trying
to get it through the mish-mash makes it very, very difficult.
But you are right. I mean, I agree with you. It is a
serious problem. We ought to be talking more about this. We
ought to have an honest debate. There are differences of
opinion about how we proceed, not just procedurally but what
some of the functions are, and we don't even know
scientifically everything we need to know in terms of what some
of the options are. I think we agree it ought to be a priority.
Anyone else want to add anything on that?
Mr. Kammen. I agree that this needs to be a Cabinet-level
position in time, but perhaps for a little bit different
reasons, and that is that the benefits that would accrue to
Commerce, to Agriculture, to Energy, to Defense come up in
different settings in different conversations, and you discover
that there is a security benefit by bringing down your oil.
Mr. Socolow and I sit on a Defense Science Board looking at
these issues right now. Commerce discovers that there is an
unmet international need for importing high-efficiency power
plants, not because of greenhouse gas issues, because they are
more efficient and less costly to operate in the long term.
These are all technological areas where U.S. companies are well
set up to innovate but they are not doing their share, A,
because they don't see the Federal leadership on this; B,
because the Federal dollars flowing in are simply too small to
tickle enough of those interests, much different than we see,
for example, in NIH, where private sector funding in the health
field is far ahead of the public funding, so the public can
fill a role and fill gaps. That is what a better mission would
be here, and that would require the sort of inclination that
the Cabinet-level would hold.
The benefits to our economy are very large. California is
already adding up the tens of thousands of jobs that we expect
to pull into the State because of the greenhouse gas
requirements. Those are things that the United States could
also capture as a peace or a green dividend by taking this on
at that very highest Presidential cabinet level.
Chairman Tom Davis. You think it is helping the economy in
California?
Mr. Kammen. It is documented. We have studies from
universities, from private sectors----
Chairman Tom Davis. I would love to see that.
Mr. Kammen [continuing]. In and out of State. I would love
to send the copies along. The estimates are that to meet the
AB32 greenhouse gas standards California will generate about
50,000 new jobs, largely high-tech, in-State jobs.
Chairman Tom Davis. Because the general rap on California
is it is a job killer. I will keep an open mind. I am
interested to see it. I come from a District with a 2 percent
unemployment rate out here in northern Virginia, but I would be
eager to see that.
Mr. Waxman.
Thank you all very much.
Mr. Waxman. I also want to thank all of the panelists. One
of the things you may not be aware of is that the hearings are
carried on the internal television coverage within the House,
so I was away but I was able to watch your testimony and to
read it, of course, from the statements that you submitted.
Dr. Socolow, the administration's plan is to put off action
on global warming for years to come. They continue to fund some
research, but they would leave concrete action to address
global warming to future administrations. They seem to think
there is little meaningful action we can take now.
You have done considerable work examining what technologies
are available today. Can you explain more about what you call
stabilization wedges and give us some examples of available
technologies that could be deployed to fight global warming?
Mr. Socolow. I don't think there are many people in the
administration who would agree with everything I am about to
say, and it really infuses the climate change technology plan.
I called it One Hand Clapping. The program there makes no sense
unless, alongside it, there is a motivation for early action,
for trying things out.
I will take the example of carbon capture and storage at
coal plants. We shouldn't be building any coal plants from here
on that don't further the goal of carbon capturing storage in
all of them and keep as short as possible the transition from
some of them to all of them. The DOE has a program on carbon
capture and storage, a wonderful one, one of the best in the
world. They, themselves, know that it makes no sense unless
there is a carbon policy that goes with it, so we are not even
going to get the taxpayers' benefit of the R&D without the
associated program. This is widely understood. This is not a
Democrat and Republican thing.
Inefficiency technologies, again, the DOE has had a
perfectly simple program and substantially pushing the R&D
element of efficiency, but we could have tougher appliance
standards across so many sectors and move these things out. The
R&D goes hand in hand with the policies.
In renewables, again, we have an incoherent renewables
program as far as I can tell. If we had stronger signals that
were broadly posed in terms of carbon price, for example, you
would have better sorting out of the alternatives.
We listed 15 wedges, each of which is a gigantic challenge
worldwide to reach a point where you are contributing 15
percent to the whole job 50 years from now. Each of these is a
campaign. That is another word I like to use, a campaign or a
strategy. It has to be globally coordinated. The United States
is emitting one-quarter of the emissions today. We have
technological leadership. We are slowing everybody else down by
our inaction, which is another dangerous thing.
We will bring the world along if we join, and we will
conjoin along renewables, efficiency, and fossil fuel
technologies in a very important way.
Mr. Waxman. Thank you very much.
Dr. Kammen, we are proud of California for the leadership
that our State has shown in this whole area. To me, I strongly
believe in States experimenting, but this is an area where we
need Federal leadership. Maybe California's actions will spur
it.
You have testified that the administration's climate change
technology program's strategic plan is seriously flawed. You
state that the goal it seeks to attain is too modest. I would
appreciate it if you could elaborate on that. And, moreover, if
the administration were to achieve its so-called emission
intensity target, would we have any confidence that we have
meaningfully tackled global warming?
Mr. Kammen. Let me start with your second question first.
The answer is absolutely not. The emissions intensity target,
as I said before, has no basis in the natural world. It doesn't
address the fundamental question that we are putting in too
much carbon, so we have to have an absolute target here, one
that is measurable and quantifiable. California, as you know,
has set up a carbon registry so that companies and
municipalities track their emissions and look at them not on an
intensity basis, which is a sliding scale based on how much you
are growing, but based on overall emissions levels.
And the most interesting first conclusion from that is that
just by monitoring you discover some of the areas. I liken it
to the frequent flyer effect. If you start to collect frequent
flyer miles you want to spend them. Companies that tally up
their numbers and discover they are saving this much, they
could save more, want a market to sell those credits. That is
what California's AB32 has in place. It has a market mechanism
that extends across the economy and outside, because all
electricity sold into California will be subject.
I know of six coal-fired power plant plans that were on the
table to be built in the mountain States to sell to California
that have now been shelved as a result of what California has
done.
So the reach is impressive. You are right, we do need to
have this go beyond not just California and the west but it has
to extend to all countries.
I do not believe there is a benefit, however, in waiting to
act until we get this. Those municipalities, countries that
export and have developed the best technologies will have the
opportunity to export them for a variety of efficiency gains,
and that really is the benefit that we are seeing in
Scandinavia. We see parts of Germany and Spain doing the same
thing, and Japan and California and New England. The Reggie
Coalition is also taking an aggressive role in that. That is
where the economic benefit lies.
Mr. Waxman. Thank you very much.
Chairman Tom Davis. Mr. Van Hollen.
Mr. Van Hollen. Thank you. Mr. Chairman, I want to thank
all of the witnesses for your testimony. As Dr. Kammen said in
his testimony, what we are measuring here against in terms of
reductions is what has to be accomplished for the purpose of
reducing the negative impacts of global warming, the human
contribution to that to whatever level we feel is sustainable
in terms of our own needs. The administration, when they talk
about just reducing the rate of increase, that may not be
enough if you are not reducing the rate of increase by the
amount necessary to achieve the goals that we want.
I also, although I am from the State of Maryland, I want to
commend the State of California for its leadership on this
issue and moving forward. I think you have already spoken to
some of the immediate economic consequences in terms of
decisions that are being made by coal-fired plants not just in
California but outside of California.
This is really a question for any of the witnesses. Because
we have had testimony from various administration officials and
you have heard their technology plan--there is no dispute about
the need to invest in technology and renewable energy and
energy efficiency. I mean, on a bipartisan basis people can
agree and we should do it on an urgent basis and I think we
should increase dramatically our investment in there. Where
there seems to be disagreement, which is what Dr. Socolow
really called the other hand for clapping, in other words, it
is the need to invest in technology, but you really need that
market forcing mechanism. You need to bring them both together.
That is where there has been no political will. That is why the
California legislation is important. That is where the
administration has nothing to offer so far.
So I guess my question for any of the panelists here, if
you just take the administration's plan with respect to what
they want to invest in technology and renewable energy, what
kind of reductions, if any, are we going to see? And what is
the gap between the reductions we will achieve if we just do
everything they say as compared to where we need to be?
Mr. Hoffert. I just want to make a personal observation. I
live on Long Island, on Great Neck Long Island in New York, a
suburb of New York City. Our family has signed up for green
energy. We get electric power from upstate New York. We don't
actually get the electrons. It is basically an offset, but we
have to pay extra for that.
Now, Long Island, where I live has a nuclear power plant
called Shoreham that cost $6 billion. There are only 3 million
people. That means every man, woman, and child is paying $2,000
for a power plant that is never going to produce any kilowatt
hours. Most of the people don't even know that is happening,
and that is one of the reasons we have a very high rate base.
And then, when wind power becomes available, we have to pay in
addition to that.
I think there is a really big problem of educating people
so that they really understand where their utility bills go and
how decisions that are made ultimately impact on them. I think
there is also certainly a role for the Federal Government in
making it financially desirable to do something like getting
your power from green power, even though it means importing it.
There is also a lot that can be done with hybrid cars. I
heard Dan talking about that earlier. Probably the most
effective near-term thing that could be done to reduce our
imported oil, in conjunction with biofuels like ethanol, which
I might have some problems with, but the combination of plug-in
hybrids and ethanol is very desirable. You can't buy a car like
that.
I mean, I have a hybrid. I am not happy with it. It turns
out I bought this Lexus hybrid before it was available on the
market and the fuel economy is nowhere near what I was hoping
it would be, but there are a lot of issues like that that I
believe there is a role for incentives by the Federal
Government that could really make a difference to the average
person.
Mr. Kammen. I'd be happy to. I'd actually like to defend
the Department of Energy here. I believe that the language in
the mission statements that are in the CCTP were really a
product of a little bit of an earlier era, and that the sense
of that document is what are a set of individual stovepipe
policies that are attractive. Many of the individual things in
the report are quite interesting, but what I think we have
heard broadly across the board here and what I heard actually
from the Members and their comments is that an integrated
strategy is needed.
Until you have the integrated strategy, in my opinion, with
aggressive R&D, aggressive market policies, and a carbon tax
you are not going to get the kind of document out of a tasked
agency to do so, so I really think it is, and I would love to
see a sense of the committee statement, a memo coming out
saying we believe the following is in the national interest and
this is what we should push for.
It is those sorts of sentiments coming back to a Department
of Energy, a restructured one or not, that will allow us to say
what is our goal. In my opinion the goal is the 80 percent
reduction in greenhouse gases, but over a very manageable
period of time--a big challenge, but a manageable period of
time, five decades or so. When those political statements come
out, I think that the DOE can actually move itself quite far in
the direction they want.
Mr. Van Hollen. Thank you.
Chairman Tom Davis. I think that the committee will try to
work some bipartisan language on this. One of reasons we are
holding the hearings is to establish a pretty solid link. Most
Members understand there is a problem and are concerned about
the way it is being addressed. It is not necessarily the goal,
but just how you implement it. Where's the priorities?
Dr. Socolow, we have just a second because I have a Cabinet
Secretary waiting in the back. Go ahead.
Mr. Socolow. I just wanted to say that there is a time
warp, I think, too, in the way in which we are all looking at
this problem. The climate scientists have raised the level of
the alarm. I live among them in my own office. They can't
believe we are going to take the risks of going above doubling
the CO2 concentration. There isn't any urgency if we live with
three times. So we have to keep reminding ourselves that there
is a message coming from the science community, and as far as
how much carbon we can put in for a given level, that is a
completely agreed-upon area with very small uncertainties.
Chairman Tom Davis. Thank you.
Did you want to make one last comment?
Mr. Van Hollen. I agree with you, Mr. Chairman. It would be
important to get a sense of the Congress in terms of what goal
we are trying to achieve, but the other half of that, of
course, is how we get to the goal. I think, as I understand the
testimony, just investment in R&D, alone, won't accomplish
that. Is that fair?
Mr. Socolow. Absolutely correct.
Chairman Tom Davis. We agree. That is one of the reasons we
are doing it.
Thank you all very much. It has been very helpful for us.
The hearing is adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 1:20 p.m., the committee was adjourned.]
[The prepared statement of Hon. Elijah E. Cummings
follows:]
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