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. 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 ef

fort 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 re

sources.

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 nonstarter, 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.