However, with a looming recession and rising energy prices, President Bush did the right thing.

When the price of gasoline went through the roof last summer, we all witnessed the Clinton Administration's incredibly irresponsible accusations that big oil companies were "colluding." Price spikes occurred last summer because of the large number of the Clinton Administration's poorly implemented environmental regulations and our dependence on foreign oil supplies.

The solution to the high prices is not found in cheap political gimmicks like releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Rather, the solution relies on developing a strategic national energy policy and having highly effective and streamlined environmental regulations.

Currently, 56.6 percent of the U.S. oil needs are met by foreign sources. This presents a real energy and national security problem.

The military is equally dependent on foreign oil as the general public is. We must seek to encourage as great a domestically produced, diverse energy supply as possible—including nuclear, coal, oil, gas, and renewables.

When well thought out and reflecting consensus, environmental regulations can certainly provide benefits to the American people. But when regulations are rushed into effect without adequate thought, they are likely to do more harm than good. Congress should not let the extreme environmental group's tyranny force the American people to pay sky high prices for fuel.

Over the years, I have witnessed the environmental movement fight any and all attempts to reform and streamline environmental regulations. We are dealing with this energy crisis largely because the environmental extremists dictated our nation's energy policy for the last 8 years. A consequence that they do not want to tell the American people is a byproduct of their efforts.

If you do not do it the environmentalists way, then we see all of the commercials detailing horror stories. Well, the energy crisis it a real life horror story. A horror story, which will only get worse. If we, as a nation, do not do something about it, it will affect every aspect of everyone's life. I want all of the American people to take notice!

Let's not forget. When the price of energy rises that means the less fortunate in our society must make a decision between keeping the heat and lights on or paying for other essential needs. I am hearing from school after school that heating bills are depleting the funds that usually go to supplies and books. Though we are seeing with the rolling blackouts in California right now that it does not matter how much money you have because the energy just doesn't exist. There is a real human cost to the extreme environmental movement.

Last December, the Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration released a study on regulating CO2 emissions from utilities. The study concluded that the mandatory regulation of CO2 from utilities will cost $60-115 billion per year by 2005. The mandatory regulation of CO2 would make the price and availability of energy a national crisis-at a scale that our nation has never before experienced. Environmental regulations are a large contributor to the energy crisis in California. Before we add to the current regulatory web, our nation should look at how we can implement our current environmental regulations—more effectively and efficiently.

As a Senator and grandfather, I want to ensure the cleanest environment for our nation. I am convinced that environmental regulations can be harmonized with energy policy. Our current situation demands it.

Unlike his predecessor, President Bush cannot continue to place layer after layer of regulations without any consideration of their energy implications. The environmental community does not have to answer to the American people when energy prices go through the roof or to worry about the national security implications of greater dependence on foreign energy sources. However, the President does.

Senator VOINOVICH. I'd like to thank you for being here, and, Senator Crapo, thank you for being here.

Senator INHOFE. One last thing. I always thought when Republicans took over we'd run things better in the Senate, and yet we have two significant committees taking place at the same time now, so I guess that didn't happen.

Senator LIEBERMAN. We're going to do better when we take over. [Laughter.]

Senator VOINOVICH. On that note, we'll hear from Senator Lieberman.

OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. JOSEPH I. LIEBERMAN,

U.S. SENATOR FROM THE STATE OF CONNECTICUT

Senator LIEBERMAN. Thanks. Thanks, Mr. Chairman. Thanks very much for convening this hearing today and this series of hearings that you and I have agreed that we would do in this Subcommittee on Clean Air and particularly the interaction of our energy needs and our environmental goals.

These are complicated but urgent questions, and I think they can benefit from just the kind of open, balanced discussion that I hope we will have this morning, so I look forward to being part of this with you.

This is one of those areas where, you know, everybody in one sense is right, or, put another way, there are arguments on both sides, and the truth is that we have to find a way to both meet our energy needs and protect our environment, and we have to do it in a way that doesn't just respond to short-term pressures and problems but has long-term goals and values for our country involved.

It is not going to be easy, but I think we can do it, and we can do it if we share information in a mutually respectful and openminded way, and particularly if we take advantage of the singlemost significant new factor in our world today, which is technology, and the extraordinary new opportunities that technology gives us. So we have an energy system now that is substantially dependent on a source of energy, fossil fuels, which we do not control, and it creates exactly the dependence that Senator Voinovich has talked about and undercuts our own security and our own national strength, no matter how strong we are in every other way-economically and militarily.

So I think, as we go forward, we have to acknowledge-and it is painful, because it represents change and dislocation-that, one, we should try to develop and use as much of our energy resources, natural energy resources, as we have within our country-fossil fuel sources—in an environmentally protective way, but that ultimately we have to look beyond fossil fuel. While we're looking beyond, we have to make much better use of efficiency, energy efficiency, and conservation, but the next chapter of our history will involve new sources of energy.

A while back-actually, it was at the time of the Kyoto meetings on climate change. I spent a few days after the meetings in Tokyo, and I had dinner one night with an executive of Toyota Motors, and we were talking future, and he said-because, obviously, the Japanese have their own problems about how much energy they control within their resources, which is not much, so they look for outside sources or new technologies. He said Toyota has made a judgment that vehicles will be powered in the future by fuel cells. He said, "That's my prediction to you."

Now, it may happen in 10 years, it may happen in 30 years. I think at the time he said it probably would happen in 20 years. But it is going to happen, and it is going to happen because the logic of it, the efficiency of it, the cleanliness of it, if you will, the economy of it is so overpowering that it's just going to be, and the question is who is going to do it first. In fact, the Japanese are in

vesting extraordinary amount of money from within their government and their companies in fuel cell technology.

We're beginning to do that ourselves, although I think one result of hearings such as this might be to create a much bolder, more aggressive-I hesitate to use the metaphor. It is used probably too often, but it is not a bad one-a moon shot program focus for developing the energy sources through new technology of the next generation to make sure, for our own energy interests but also for our own economic interests, that we are at least a significant factor in the global marketplace for these new technologies, if not the dominant factor.

So the answer to the question is that somehow we've got to do what our constituents want us to do and our national interest suggests that we do and our national values compels us to do, which is to both meet our energy needs, to have a reliable, cost-efficient source of energy to power our economy, but also to protect our environment.

I mean, we have been dealing with this lately in this very interesting, complicated discussion, debate that we are having over the so-called effort to regulate the four pollutants from power plants. I mean, and this focuses it. Power plants produce power. They produce energy. We need energy. We need that power. Yet they are obviously also one of the major sources of air pollution in our country.

Let me just give you a few statistics. Power plants generate 24 percent of industrial nitrogen oxide emissions, 66 percent of industrial sulfur dioxide, 32 percent of mercury, and 40 percent of carbon dioxide emissions.

Remarkably, almost 80 percent of those emissions come from coal-fired power plants that were installed prior to 1977. Those pollutants contribute to serious environmental and public health problems such as smog, acid rain, climate change, and cause effects such as respiratory problems, contamination of fish and other wildlife, and even, according to some scientists, developmental abnormalities in our children.

So we have a shared interest in doing something about those, and the question is how to do it.

I was privileged last week to join with several colleagues, a bipartisan group of colleagues, including Senator Clinton, I'm proud to say, to introduce the Clean Power Act, which is a proposal that tries to build on the market-based ideas that were part of the Clean Air Act originally, the so-called “cap in trading system” to fix limits on emissions of these four pollutants.

I know they are controversial, particularly the carbon dioxide provision, which, as we know, the President supported and changed his mind on. We're going to argue about that, because I think that's a critical element in the problem of climate change that the public should and really wants us to do something about.

To me here is a real, live issue that brings together our need to have a reliable source of energy with our desire to protect the environment and our public health.

I just offer this anecdote as an example of how complicated these issues are. I sat last week with an executive of a utility company, a major utility company. This one happens to be supporting this

four-pollutant bill. While there is a tendency to say, "This four-pollutant bill is against the coal industry," this gentleman said to me that he expects that his utility and the ones that he is associated with will want to build coal-fired plants in the future, but they're not going to build them unless they have the regulatory certainty that he believes our four-pollutant bill will produce.

So I just present this the irony that the bill is seen in some ways as anti-coal, over-regulatory by its critics, and here is a man in the utility industry saying he'd like to build some more coal-fired plants because he thinks he can do it in an environmentally protective way and still have a cost advantage, but he's not going to do it unless he knows what the regulatory environment is long term because that will help him plan and make an investment with some sense of confidence about what the future will hold.

These are critically important, as I say, complicated matters. They are not inherently partisan. They ought not to be partisan. I hope, Mr. Chairman, that, perhaps through the light that we will shed on them in this hearing and others that we will hold, we can find common ground to go forward and present not just for ourselves, but particularly for our children and grandchildren, a strong, reliable source of energy and a cleaner and healthier planet.

I thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I look forward to these hearings. We've got two great witnesses here-Ms. McGinty and Ms. Stuntz-and others to follow, and I look forward to their testimony.

Senator VOINOVICH. Thank you, Senator Lieberman.

The subcommittee has been operating by the early bird rule, and Senator Corzine was next in line, and Senator Crapo was here, and, Senator Clinton, you are on.

OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON, U.S. SENATOR FROM THE STATE OF NEW YORK

Senator CLINTON. I'm the only bird left. Thank you so much, Mr. Chairman. I really want to commend both the chairman and Senator Lieberman for holding this hearing today and trying to get to the difficult questions that both the chairman and Senator Lieberman just referred to with respect to the interaction of environmental and energy policy. I'm delighted to have our witnesses here and I look forward to hearing from both of you, and I am particularly glad to see Ms. McGinty back from India and other farflung adventures.

This hearing is exceptionally timely, perhaps more than anyone would have realized, given the events of the last week. Before I continue to speak about the substance of the hearing, itself, I'd like to just take a minute to express my extreme disappointment with another action taken by the new Administration yesterday.

You know, we've all heard about the President's charm offensive, but when it come to the environment and public health it sometimes appears as though his Administration is on a harm offensive. Yesterday it was arsenic and about face. We've seen the intention of this Administration to roll back an important new drinking water standard for arsenic, a known human carcinogen. The standard would have followed the recommendations of the National

Academy of Sciences. It would have brought us in line with standards elsewhere in the world. I think it is regrettable that we would turn our backs on an effort to update a standard which has not been revised in almost 60 years.

Rather than rolling back health standards, we should be rolling up our sleeves and investing in our nation's water infrastructure so that drinking water can be as clean and safe as possible.

I know that meeting our nation's water infrastructure needs is something we will be looking at in the committee, and I hope it will be an issue that we can address legislatively in this Congress, because when it comes to the environment and health, whether it is the air we breathe or the water we drink, there really shouldn't be any bigger or more important priority to us as representatives of people, and I feel the same way when it comes to the issue we are here today to discuss.

The answer to meeting our nation's energy challenges should not be to lower the bar with respect to air quality, but to look for ways that together we can make it cost effective and efficient for us to meet the appropriate standards.

The Federal Government should be working to help industry meet the bar by investing in research and development; by providing incentives for more energy-efficient appliances, homes, offices; providing incidents for the production and use of renewable energy sources and other clean sources of energy; and taking the additional steps necessary to ensure reliable and affordable power, whether it is by establishing regional transmission organizations or other measures.

Yesterday I met with a number of New York's winners of the EPA Energy Star Award, and I was so impressed with their individual stories. The energy conservation and efficiency achievements and actual monetary savings realized by these winners are on-theground proof that these kinds of efforts and investments actually do work and are one of the ways we can really bridge the dilemma that both the chairman and Senator Lieberman addressed.

For example, in Kingston, New York, in the school district there, a community located in the Hudson Valley, because of Federal and State incentives and assistance, the school district replaced windows, installed new boilers, made other energy-efficient upgrades, and ended up saving more than $395,000 last year-money that can be reinvested in education programs.

Verizon Company also in New York has made a commitment to buy energy-efficient products, communicate with employees, use more fuel cells, because they recognize, as you said, Senator Lieberman, that this is something that will save money and it is a technology that should be in wider use.

There are stories like that all over America, and yet I'm told that in the President's budget programs like this in both EPA and the Department of Energy will be either eliminated or severely cut back, which I think is exactly the wrong direction for us to be going in.

We ought to be taking a look at effective cost-saving programs that will help us deal with our energy needs in an environmentally sustainable way and investing in such programs, and that goes along with our major concern of this hearing of ensuring that peo