breathing for an hour producing so much carbon dioxide, and then you would have a number that-I mean, even some kid on TV could, look, daddy, look what they told me about this, or compared to what a diesel or one automobile or something like that.

Mr. LASHOF. I will get back to you with that. We can do that calculation, but I don't have it in my head.

[The information appears in the appendix.]

Mr. BALLENGER. I am just throwing out a whole bunch of stuff. And somebody mentioned the use of cleaner gases and recognizing that Brazil in its effort to avoid using oil as much as they possibly could, converting their sugar into ethanol, what kind of gas does burning—I mean we have got a bunch of people that we watch on sundays on TV, all these political things that are sponsored by some-Archer Daniels Midland that says we are going to save the world by burning ethanol. Since the Brazilians have done it for a couple of years—I realize they are burning their jungles down more rapidly than they are creating savings with ethanol, but does ethanol produce a hazardous carbon-type gas when you burn it in automobiles?

Mr. MINTZER. I think to give you a couple of just to respond to a couple of pieces of the puzzle you have raised. One is this piece about ethanol. One is an indicator of carbon dioxide production rates, and the third is the role of nuclear power in this picture. The story about ethanol is basically it is a variant on what Dr. Lashof was just saying to you, that is, as long as the Brazilians are growing an amount of sugarcane that captures as much carbon as is released each year, that is, they are not harvesting the forest to get the ethanol, then all they are doing is carrying the carbon atom into the atmosphere out of the tail pipes of their cars, collecting it through sugar plants, digesting the sugar plants and feeding it back into the cars.

So it is a little recycling system in that sense as long as the rates match up. That is, as long as you only produce as much as ethanol. Mr. GEJDENSON. Will the gentleman yield?

Is that the case? The amount of sugarcane that it takes to run one car-if I grow that much sugarcane, will it use up as much carbon?

Mr. MINTZER. Because the place you are getting the carbon to oxidize is from the carbon that has been fixed into the sugarcane. It depends on how far you drive the car as to how much sugarcane you have to grow.

For example, the average U.S. car driven today releases an amount of carbon dioxide in a year that is about equal to the weight of the car. Now, you would have to grow a lot of sugarcane to get that much ethanol because

Mr. GEJDENSON. Do I end up creating more carbon?

Mr. MINTZER. No. You can't create carbon. You can only—you can only

Mr. GEJDENSON. Do I have to have ever-increasing fields of sugarcane?

Mr. MINTZER. Depends on how much fuel you are trying to produce. It is a rate problem, that is, as long as you are growing

Mr. GEJDENSON. If 1 gallon of ethanol will get me 30 miles, and I need 1 acre to do that, in theory at least, the processing and everything will be taken care of in that acre.

Mr. LASHOF. I think that is the key to understanding this. If all the energy for producing the ethanol comes from the sugarcane, then you can keep that acre going indefinitely and you can keep driving your car indefinitely. The problem with the way that Archer Daniels Midland produces ethanol right now is that they heavily subsidize their production of ethanol with huge inputs of oil to run the tractors and produce the fertilizers.

So if you do a net balance on that ethanol you find that we are getting about 80 to 120 percent as much CO2 emissions per gallon as you would if you were burning gasoline. There are ways you can do it and reproduce ethanol in a renewable way, however, that is not what is being done right now.

Mr. BALLENGER. When it does burn, it does produce carbon dioxide.

Mr. MINTZER. That is right.

Mr. BALLENGER. All I know is you mentioned Mexico, that they don't have the problem yet. Somebody said that they are a developing nation and we shouldn't worry.

Mr. MINTZER. They have the problem already, pal.
Mr. BALLENGER. You can't breathe down there.

One more question, I think National Geographic or something like this, says that-and I don't know how you project the future growth of volcanic action or whatever it is, but in Mexico-it was the Philippines, somebody had a statistic that when this thing fired off over there, that it produced more carbon dioxide than you could-I don't know.

Is there I mean, we could clean up the world as far as we are concerned, but if we didn't stop the volcanic action, would we still have the same problem?

Mr. LASHOF. I think we would not have the same problem. Volcanoes do affect climate. They do not produce significant quantities of carbon dioxide, but they produce significant quantities of sulfur dioxide, which goes into the stratosphere and in the case of Mt. Pinatubo, that cloud of sulfur dioxide, which will remain in the atmosphere for about 2 years, is beginning to go out now, does cool the planet for a period of time, and interestingly, this is another test of the climate models and they have proven to be quite accurate.

Jim Hansen of the NASA Goddard Institute of Space Science in New York predicted that as a result of that volcano, global temperatures would be reduced by about half a degree centigrade and that is about what we have observed. But that goes on for a period of 2 or 3 years.

The grave difficulty and the urgency of dealing with the carbon dioxide problem is the carbon dioxide that we take out of fossil fuels and move into the atmosphere will stay there for a very long period of time, for decades to centuries, so that we can have various temporary effects which may influence the climate and produce what is really noise in our attempt to see the signal from global warming. All that time we are accumulating a quantity of

carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that will take a long time, indeed, to remove.

Mr. MINTZER. Could we get back to the nuclear issue?

Mr. GEJDENSON. Sure.

Mr. BALLENGER. I hate to run on you but I just got a note. I am terribly sorry.

Mr. GEJDENSON. You can answer the question for the record. Mr. MINTZER. Nuclear power does produce energy with minimal amount of carbon dioxide. In the United States, we enrich our nuclear fuel by burning coal to fire the 12 plants at Oaks Ridge. So in the United States, enrichment is a significant source of carbon dioxide in the nuclear fuel cycle. If we made our nuclear fuel, as the French do, in breeder reactors, we wouldn't have that problem. But more importantly, the question you raised is what is the role of nuclear in a strategy to reduce the risks of rapid climate change and I would argue to you that fundamentally we ought to be guided by, even in this case, by market mechanisms, that nuclear power is contributing to our energy picture and will continue to contribute to it for decades to come, but before we launch a major expansion of nuclear power, we should let it compete on a level playing field on the basis of its full fuel cycle costs with the other alternatives that are currently available to this country for generating the energy that we need, and so.

Mr. BALLENGER. If we add that 2 cents a year to the price of gas, pretty soon we get up to the point where nuclear energy will be cheaper.

Mr. MINTZER. It depends on how we account for the long-term cost of emission and waste disposal for long-life nuclear waste, and what I am suggesting to you

Mr. BALLENGER. I recognize that

Mr. MINTZER [continuing]. As Mr. Hemphill indicated, was that we do the accounting on the basis of the fuel, fuel cycle and we are honest about where we put in money and where we put in subsidize. We shouldn't subsidize renewals any more than we have currently subsidized nuclear. We should let them compete on a level playing field in the market.

Mr. GEJDENSON. Before we go to Mrs. Meyers, she represents an area of large corn production. At what point are corn farmers unemployed? Is it a half of degree that moves the corn growing area north enough so Kansas is more like the Sahara, or does it take a degree? She wants to know how much time she has before she should start trying to convert from corn to something else.

Mrs. MEYERS. I didn't know you were worried about me and I am very grateful.

Mr. GEJDENSON. I always worry about you because you are such a good member of the committee. Is there a way to calculate that, what it takes to move our big grain belt north, I guess?

Mr. MINTZER. This draws us, first of all, to the issue of the fundamental of lingering uncertainty in the science, that we can't tell on the basis of the models we now have what the precise regional distribution of effects is likely to be from a given global warming. The models and data are excellent in giving us a sense of what the change in the average global surface temperature will be, but whether it will be for a given rise of temperature half a degree

warmer in Kansas, three-quarters of a degree warmer or 3 degrees warmer in Kansas, we can't now tell.

But it isn't just the rise in the average temperature that is going to effect the viability of corn growing in Kansas. I would suggest to you that it is also the likelihood of spells of unusual hot weather during the tasseling time that the corn is on the stalk. And so if we go through a transition period that increases the likelihood that you will have 10 days over 90 degrees during the tasseling period, even if the annual average doesn't go up that much, you can lose significant fractions of the corn crop.

But there is a further complication in the uncertainties that bedevil us and that is that even harder to predict than the change in regional temperatures is the regional distribution of precipitation, and because our models are so crude right now, we can't tell whether the rainfall that is traditional in Kansas is going to move to west Texas or is going to stay in Kansas at this point and we won't be able to for a considerable amount of time. We know that if the world warms by, say, 2 to 5 degrees, on average 7 percent more range or 5 to 7 percent more precipitation will fall worldwide.

But because of the way in which these nonlinear systems are coupled, we can't tell whether that will mean more intense storms in Kansas, more rain over the whole year, or just no rain when you need it during the critical periods of the corn growing cycle.

Mrs. MEYERS. I do appreciate that. I have read things in the past that indicate that it takes a very slight change in temperature to affect the Midwest agricultural region very severely, and so I am glad you clarified that. We certainly don't want that to happen, because when you were describing this use of ethanol, I had visions of Kansas being the new Saudi Arabia.

I would like to ask all of you, I think I can probably guess what your answer will be, and all of you have alluded to it somewhat in your testimony, but I would like you all to comment on the Btu tax that has been suggested by the President and what the impact of that will be.

Mr. LASHOF. I think that the Btu tax, as part of the overall package that the President has recommended, makes a good deal of sense, it has the one advantage compared with other taxes, and nobody likes to pay taxes if they can help it, that in addition to helping to fight the deficit, it will have some effect in reducing pollution and in particular in reducing global warming. The tax itself is quite modest.

It is about a 4 to 8 percent increase in the average price of energy at the consumer level. It will have, therefore, modest benefits in terms of increasing efficiency, but they are nonetheless real.

I think the other important point, though, about the way in which the package is put together is that the traditional problem, traditional reason why we have had difficulty passing energy taxes or pollution taxes of various kinds has been that taken by themselves, they tend to be regressive economically, and I think that the Clinton administration has done an extremely good job of putting together a package where you have an energy tax introduced at the same time as other measures in the Tax Code, most notably the earned income tax credit and the higher rates on the wealthiest taxpayers that make the Tax Code as a whole, more progressive.

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Mrs. MEYERS. I think the problem that this tax may have, is that it seems to effect different regions in different ways. Kansas, and the Midwest generally, are very large, not densely populated States, so that people have to do a lot of driving to market or to get to a hospital. They are also very energy-intensive States because of farming, and also those states have a hard winter.

Now, those are the three factors that determine how an energy tax will affect a State. Large less densely populated States; energyintensive States; and States with a fairly hard winter, are going to find this-I think-a very difficult tax to deal with.

Those who don't have all three of those factors may not find this tax so difficult to deal with.

Mr. LASHOF. Well, I think that any kind of tax that you put forward will affect different regions in different ways. This tax is very broad-based in its design. It affects all types of energy consumption and, in fact, the bulk of the revenues will not be collected directly from people who are using energy in their home, but, in fact, it will be incorporated in the price of products which is then sold all around the country.

So the price of corn may go up a little bit and it would be incorrect to assume that all of the costs, say, of running tractors and buying fertilizer in Kansas is a tax that ultimately is paid by people who live in Kansas. In fact, much of that will be incorporated in the price of products and meat that is sold around the country, so it is actually spread out, and when you do the distribution, this tax has been shown to be quite, quite even. I am not saying that there is no differentials, but it is quite uniform around the country. Mr. GEJDENSON. If the gentlelady will yield, I think one of the reasons the administration chose the Btu tax is that it does, while no perfect tax in this area exists as far as equally distributing the burden, that this one comes closest to not creating regional disasters, even though the carbon tax would be far more beneficial environmentally. There are certainly economic regions of the country that would be devastated by the carbon tax.

The oil import fee would hit the Northeast in certain areas and there was the feeling that the Btu tax would spread it most evenly. Mr. BARRODY. Mr. Gejdenson, may I?

First, generally, on the question of the Btu tax.

Mr. GEJDENSON. You are not feeling lonely at that end of the table, are you?

Mr. BARRODY. No, I feel honored to be in this company, sir. The Global Climate Coalition has long taken the position consistently that we would be opposed to any tax increase for energy to try to force changes and, we would say, dislocations on the economy for global climate purposes. We have not, since the proposal is still relatively new-let me say what we have done first.

We have, therefore, consistently opposed the imposition of a carbon tax. The Btu tax is a relatively new proposal from our perspective. We have not, therefore, formally decided on the question yet, and I think it is fair to say it is primarily devoted as a part of the President's program more to revenue concerns than anything else. But having said that, and reminding you that I am also on the staff of the National Association of Manufacturers, I would call to your attention and would share with you subsequently and with