One of the charges that has, in the past, been leveled against those who have advocated a strong environmental policy such as the one required to address global warming is that economic growth and environmentalism cannot coexist. I couldn't disagree more strongly. I strongly believe that a sustainable and environmental future is economically imperative. We must think about the long-term nature of the environment we pass down to our children. And, simultaneously, we must also concern ourselves with the present welfare of our country. Investment in environmental technology is one way to reach this goal.

As President Clinton noted in his Earth Day speech, there will be, by the end of this decade, a $300 billion market for environmental technologies; and the United States must capture as much of that market, and the tens of thousands of jobs it will create, as possible. This in an area in which the United States can and must continue to be a leader. We must continue to build our technological markets both at home and abroad.

These are the kinds of programs that this administration will support in our efforts to address climate change.

As adopted, the Climate Convention is but one piece of the international policy framework that can help us redirect our thinking. The task before us is to the take the next step. I look forward to working with you as we move ahead. The administration welcomes your input, support, and your involvement throughout this process. Thank you very much. And I hope that my full statement will, Mr. Chairman, be included in the record. And I look forward to getting into discussions with you and members of the committee.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Wirth appears in the appendix.] Mr. GEJDENSON. Thank you.

And again let me express not just for this committee but for other Members of the House-and I am sure as well for the Senate that your appointment has given us great confidence in the administration's seriousness towards addressing these issues.

I would like to focus on two areas to begin with, and both of which you have touched on. The first is how important this is from a survival point of view.

I remember discussions on Nuclear Winter by Professor Sagan and others that only a 1- to 3-degree change in ambient year-round temperature would destroy much of the grain growing areas in the United States today. Those regions would be able to produce the grain that feeds a large portion of the world. Therefore, what we do here, while it does provide significant opportunities and is important simply from an environmental perspective and the quality of life issues, also contains an element of survival. If we are lax in our concern for the environment, we could see much of the world's productive land laid to waste.

It seems to me that the United States has a great opportunity to help ourselves, and the world as well, to gain economically.

In Massachusetts, the utilities are now looking at purchasing additional power. However, they are not using the traditional bidding process where several major companies are asked to build a 600or 1,000-megawatt cool, nuclear, or gas plant, and then try to subsequently figure out the problems with it. Rather, they look at all the options so that to find the best means possible to produce 1,000

megawatts of power through conservation while maintaining environmental standards. They do not necessarily clean up every last bit that comes out of the smoke stack, but they do augment the type of clean-up conducted naturally by the tropical rain forests. So they are looking at nontraditional options.

Beyond that, of course, the many clean-up systems which the States, for years, have demanded of industry are actually methods that could be transplanted across the globe.

Is the administration looking at that end of it through the responsibilities of your Department? Or would it be more in the jurisdiction of the Commerce Department to try to find ways to spread this technology that would obviously benefit both the developing world and American manufacturers?

Mr. WIRTH. Clearly the Commerce Department has the lead role in promoting the export of U.S. technologies. We all together realize how enormously important and promising this is.

One has to only look at China. They have a rapidly growing economy. The Chinese gross national product is 7 percent per capita as that of the United States of America. It is growing rapidly. Where are they going to get fuel for that economy? Clearly right now they are going to depend upon their coal reserves, which are effectively very high sulfur, dirty brown coal.

The Chinese have come to realize that they have some major environmental problems coming along with that, and there are opportunities to work with the Chinese on clean technologies and ones that are more cost effective are significant.

The Japanese have recognized this market. In Agenda 21, which the Japanese have put together a remarkable document talking about opportunities in the 21st century in which, Mr. Chairman, they refer to the environmental technologies in the 21st century as being as promising for the Japanese economy as consumer electronics and automobiles were in the 20th century. That is a pretty stark contrast. And here is an economy that looks long term, effectively long term and, I think, provides, again, a kind of a challenge to us that we want to be prepared to pursue.

This administration is dedicated to that task. You know how much Senator Gore, now Vice President Gore, has put into this. And there is a push on this on a steady basis.

Mr. GEJDENSON. I think it is terrific what you are doing. There is no question from my perspective that the economic opportunity is there.

I was talking to a physicist who was meeting with some of the corporate entities from Japan recently, and there was one man sitting in the corner of the room and he said to him, "What is your job?" And he said, "My job is to see what is coming between 2010 and 2020." And at first he thought he was joking, and he said, "Whose job is that between now and 2010?" And he said, "That is somebody else's job."

They are taking the long-term view. And it is clear that if it is the Pacific Rim or China, as these emerging economies start to gain wealth, they are going to want a better standard of living and want to end the pollution that has often been scarring their environments.

And the country that positions itself with the right technology and focus and marketing and international trust on the issue is going to be the country that capitalizes on cleaning up the global environment. And I applaud you for your efforts.

Mr. WIRTH. If I might, Mr. Chairman, one footnote to your statement related to New England Electric-one of the really progressive and leading companies in the United States, under the leadership of the late Sam Huntington and Mr. Rowe. Mr. Rowe called the other day concerned about what we can do about environmental technology and how we might be able to take advantage of it. It was terrific.

He recognizes that cutting edge that is out there and recognizes the partnership that we must forge between the public and the private sector and said we are here and we would like to help. It is a perfect illustration of what you are talking about happening in your own backyard.

Mr. GEJDENSON. And I think we all have to go through the change. I was in the State House and utilities talked about getting into the business of weatherization and making homes and industries more energy efficient. It seemed like one more opportunity to build into the rate base. But in many ways, these corporate structures are best suited to take an overall best return to investment for new energy. And in the real world, often conservation is the most inexpensive way to add new power rather than building new facilities.

Mr. WIRTH. I hope you voted yes on all of those measures in the Connecticut State Legislature.

Mr. GEJDENSON. I think I did.

Mr. Roth.

Mr. ROTH. Senator, I had five questions for you, but I want to dovetail into the question that was just asked.

I don't mean to be alarmist or go off on the deep end, and maybe this is showing how far I have come-a conservative asking you to keep me from going off on the deep end-but scientists have been talking about a new black plague that is going to be coming. It is not a disease but a worldwide outbreak of health problems because of the environment.

I was interested, in Newsweek this week, "How Safe Is Our Food" and so on. And I am interested-I am curious, what is your position of our Government?

Are you focusing in on these problems, to keep Congress apprised of what is going on?

Mr. WIRTH. I have a portfolio that is broad and deep, but food problems are not listed among them. However, we are, you know, very concerned about the impact which various environmental considerations certainly can have as Congressman Gejdenson was mentioning in his opening remarks.

We also have some very significant questions related to food supply. You remember that Mr. Borlaug, the father of the Green Revolution, when he received a Nobel prize in 1971 or 1972, he said what the Green Revolution has done is to give us a 30-year window to catch up and really work on population stabilization and the related environmental problems.

I think it is probably fair to say that 20 of those 30 years have gone by. And we have not made nearly the kind of progress that we are going to have to make.

If you project this down the line, not to be Malthusian in that fashion, but if we look at what we learned about the science of food supplies and the integrity of our reserves and the need for reserves at a time when we are going to have weather crises, we have ahead of us very, very, very significant problems.

Mr. ROTH. Do you think these futurists who are talking about this black plague, do you think that they are too alarmist?

Mr. WIRTH. I haven't read that Newsweek article, so I can't speak to that article, but a lot of people talking about global climate change, as you know Congressman Roth, were accusing scientists of being alarmist when they were first discussing these issues 15 years ago.

And now I think the preponderance of the evidence clearly indicates that the amount of greenhouse forcing gases going to the atmosphere has sharply increased. And knowing everything that we know now, that it, therefore, follows that the chances are very good that the atmosphere is going to warm significantly. And, therefore, what we ought to be doing now is intervening at a time when it is still cost effective and maybe no cost for us to intervene.

Let's not wait until we get to the crisis. When we get to the crisis and crash measures-it is more difficult to deal with somebody after they get sick than protecting them and keeping them well.

Mr. ROTH. I am interested in food safety in our country, and I do feel that we need international standards and we need diplomatic effort in this area on safety standards.

The chairman is also interested in dairy products coming into this country. And I was amazed when we did our study to see the contamination of dairy products coming into this country. I do feel that we have got to have some initiative in this area, because it is not going to be enough for just us to do a good job; other countries have to do likewise.

Mr. WIRTH. I think we would all agree that there is a major international cooperative agenda that must be taken. And the United States, as the remaining superpower in the post-cold war era, has a responsibility to lead. And the world is asking us to lead on so many of these issues.

Mr. ROTH. Most of the attention on the greenhouse gas emissions has focused on carbon emissions and from cars and power plants and the like.

But methane, however, is another greenhouse gas that is generated by landfills. I see so many of these landfills around the country, and I experience what people have been telling me about them.

What types of steps can the United States take to reduce the emissions of these types of gases? What is your thinking on that? Mr. WIRTH. We may not want to reduce the emissions. We may want to figure out how to use the emissions.

In southern Colorado, I visited last summer a landfill that is being mined by the public service company of Colorado capturing the methane that is coming out of the landfill and pumping that into the system of the public service company. Now, this is a no

cost source for them. The cost is not in the methane itself. The cost is in the capturing and the distribution system. And it was worth it to the public service company to do so.

This was an experiment. It was working out for them, and now they plan to approach a lot of other landfills at the same time. We now have the technology to take this kind of a step. Methane is a very real problem. But as we view that as a problem, we can also view it as an opportunity.

Mr. GEJDENSON. Will the gentleman yield?

In Connecticut we manufacture fuel cells that are used at least in several test sites. Also, the government has begun, in sites where you don't have access to a distribution system, to collect the methane, run it through the fuel cell and distribute the energy through the electrical grid.

So there are a number of ways to capture and use this energy, and it is something that can have some economic benefit both in the manufacturing end of new systems as well as in the gas. Mr. Fingerhut.

Mr. FINGERHUT. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

First of all, Mr. Wirth, as a new Member of this committee, it is my first chance to tell you how much I have admired from afar, your work in the Senate on public-private initiatives and environmental policy. And I think you have helped us get into a new age of environmental policymaking in this country which is something that we desperately need.

Mr. WIRTH. Thank you, sir. I think we share a similar educational institution as well.

Mr. FINGERHUT. That is, I hope, to your credit.

I hope that I am not going to ask you something that we have already covered. The first subject in your prepared testimony was on the issue of the scientific basis for this evidence for these conclusions.

And I am wondering what you think we need to be doing as the U.S. Government, now, in continuing to develop the scientific basis?

How much time and money ought we be spending on just determining whether there is a global climate change problem and the extent of it? Or how much should we be shifting our dollars and efforts into the resolution, the problem-solving phase?

Mr. WIRTH. Well, we still have a good deal to learn; although, it is not a frontier science anymore. It might have been a dozen years ago, as in the discussion I just had with Congressman Roth, at which point it was something new and people didn't understand it.

Now, with new satellite technologies and the very sharp progress in atmospheric science and a major research effort in the last decade, I think our understanding of greenhouse gas concentrations has gone up very, very sharply.

What we don't know in a lot of atmospheric science is the impact of a lot of this. We know that the gases are going up; and we can extrapolate to assume that if there are more greenhouse forcing gases in the atmosphere, therefore, everything that we know would suggest that the atmosphere is going to get warmer.

That suggests the second part: What public policy initiatives do we take?