On the first side, we have a lot of research to do on how much, how fast, and where. We don't know that yet. It is an imperfect science in terms of trying to figure out the regional or local impacts of this. And that means that we ought to have a continuing research effort that becomes much more sophisticated and much more difficult at the same time.

Mr. FINGERHUT. What is your level of confidence in our current efforts? And are we doing the right thing? Are the right agencies involved? Are we directing the research in the appropriate way?

Or ought we be taking a new look at our research efforts, again on the front end of this problem as opposed to the policy implications side?

Mr. WIRTH. My own belief is that we are doing a pretty good job. And it might be a good idea to come back at some point to assess how well-there was a lot of money being put into this in the late 1980's our research dollars are being spent.

I remember there was a lot of competition in the Congress as to who was going to put what amendment in an appropriation bill and what research establishment was going to get the funding, and would this be done at the university level or in government laboratories.

The administration is conducting an investigation into our policies involving greenhouse gases, and we will be able to get a better sense as to how effective a lot of this research has been. And maybe some of it should be better coordinated.

There is always that possibility-and I am sure that a prod from you all doesn't hurt on that to make sure that the taxpayers' dollars are being spent as well as possible.

Mr. FINGERHUT. One of the frustrations for me on the policy side of this in terms of helping other country and moving toward energy efficient manufacturing, I think you mentioned China as a rapidly growing economy, is that we have the question of: Is it going to be a completely, coal-based economy; and are they going to be contributing significantly to the climate change problem?

I come from a heavy industrial area, northeast Ohio; and we need to invest in updating our manufacturing base. And at the same time, we need to make sure that the rest of the world has an environmentally sound manufacturing base.

How are we going to balance the competing demands of wanting to update, unfortunately, the older manufacturing base in the United States and wanting to make sure that our developing, competitive, manufacturing bases are environmentally sound?

I am afraid that we are going to, frankly, kick start an environmentally sound and more efficient way for our competitors without assisting, at the same level, our domestic manufacturing base.

Mr. WIRTH. I don't think those are mutually exclusive by any means, and I think they are in some ways apples and oranges.

If we did, like in the 1970's and 1980's, sharply increase our investment domestically in more energy-efficient technologies, the manufacturing base in Ohio is probably 50 percent more energy efficient than it was in 1953. We have a long way to go. We are half as energy efficient as the Germans or the Japanese per unit of gross national product. We are enormously wasteful of energy.

What we have to do in the United States is to price energy appropriately and to make sure that we are understanding and taking into account as much of the full cost of energy as possible.

And this internalizing of costs, making sure that that is part of the process, is a constant quest by us all and certainly part of good accounting and good long-term strategies. That is going to help everybody.

And that is happening in this country. The market is driving a good deal of that. And I think your industries are finding, I will bet you, that almost every industry in our country, the person in charge of energy is probably a very senior person in the company. Twenty years ago, that was probably an assistant manager of the plant and they were not looking at energy because we weren't costing it.

We have become much more efficient and we want to continue to do so. Our efforts industrially and in the research that is done in the Federal Government ought to be linking with the private sector as much as possible to help us achieve greater efficiencies.

The energy bill of last year was another, albeit modest, step in the right direction. The situation related to the Chinese-or a situation we know better, the Russians, is one in which, if we can point out to them where major savings can be made, they can, in large part, pay for themselves.

If the Chinese are installing more energy-efficient technologies that are going to dramatically increase the way in which they use their own energy, that means that there are dollars left over to reinvest in those very energy efficiencies.

We see that in Russia right now working with Russian industry on natural gas and natural gas pipelines, in the flaming of natural gas, enormous amounts of energy is wasted.

Oil is probably a more egregious example, an enormous waste of fuel that could, in turn, pay for the process of modernizing and setting it up. It is a very different kind of a situation there. We have wastes which are more sophisticated and difficult to get a handle on in the United States, unlike what it was 20 years ago when it was pretty easy to get a lot of savings rapidly.

Mr. FINGERHUT. I thank you for your comments. I again want to applaud you and encourage you in your efforts in the administration. I think we are heading in the right direction, but we need to be aware both, frankly, of the problems of perception and the problems of reality. Given the competing views of industrial policy we must make sure that we have a sufficient emphasis on our domestic industries as we are also trying to address this around the world.

Mr. WIRTH. Energy policy is such a big piece of this and remains so. And we in the United States, as awkward as it is and difficult as it is, we have to continue to think about energy policy and the implications of energy policy.

The startling figure that comes to me: We are half as energy efficient as our two major competitors. We are spending $400 billion a year on energy in the United States. If we were spending $200 billion instead of $400 billion, and the magnitudes are about in that area, think about what we, in turn, would have overall in our economy.

Mr. FINGERHUT. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. GEJDENSON. Mr. Fingerhut's issues and the one that you are discussing, technology, make life easier. When I was visiting Israel in the early 1970's, we got to an apartment building that had six floors. At the bottom floor, there was a switch that turned the lights on, but only long enough to get to the third floor. Then there was another switch that got you to the top floor, but then it went out again as well.

In the new offices that have been redone in the Capitol-C-5, I think one of the rooms has the switch that, as you walk in, turns the light on. Although this is probably not the most efficient energy saver, with devices such as this switch, you no longer have to depend on a human remembering to turn the light on or off. It goes on automatically; and if there is no body motion in the room, it shuts off.

One of my frustrations in the last year has been seeing the American auto industry argue against energy efficiency standards for American automobiles, forgetting their own experience in the 1970's when Americans wanted to buy big cars right up to the day that the gas lines started. You would think that the American auto industry would be pushing for a higher fleet average so that they would have a product marketable both at home and around the world. If America had more fuel-efficient automobiles, we would be more competitive internationally.

Mr. FINGERHUT. Mr. Chairman, are you suggesting that we have hot air activated elevators in the Capitol?

Mr. GEJDENSON. That would be something for a freshman class to discuss.

The Clinton administration is faced with a number of policy options related to the energy efficiency issues we have just discussed: renewable energy, energy sector R&D, energy taxes, technology transfer, and mass transportation.

I understand from discussions that we have had that the White House will be leading that effort.

Would you care to elaborate on where we are going?

Mr. WIRTH. There will soon be announced a comprehensive program on this front, Mr. Chairman. It is extremely important, as we have learned, as I suggested earlier, from the National Action Plan set up by the previous administration, what was good about that, what wasn't good about that.

There were scores of public comments that came in on that process. We have learned a lot about the technology, the computer modeling; and all of that will be a part of a very broad and comprehensive plan.

It is also our intent, Mr. Chairman, to include the outside world as much as possible. This administration has tried to engage the private sector and the nongovernmental sector as much as we possibly can in all of the activities related to our work on environmental issues and global climate change. And that will continue in this instance as well. We have much to learn from those on the outside. And, after all, they are American citizens too; and they ought to be part of this process, both to do the job at home, as Congressman Roth has suggested, and to build coalitions around the world.

Mr. GEJDENSON. Let me ask you two final questions, then I think one of our colleagues has a few more. After that I believe we will be finished.

We have touched on this issue before, but I think some recurring arguments are that the data is not factual enough, the models are not good enough, and the estimates of what is going on and how it is affecting the world are not strong enough. As a result, all your models have been thrown out after an extended period of time.

Are we shooting in the dark too much? Do we need to do more work on modeling and more research on what is happening globally?

Do you feel confident that the data and the models being used provide an adequate basis for the policy decisions and the resulting expenditures requested of us?

Mr. WIRTH. I believe there is enough certainty to know that the level of greenhouse gases is increasing dramatically.

To extrapolate from that, that temperatures probably will become greater and that if we intervene now in a sensible fashion, we can come up with cost-effective strategies that can begin us on the route to making sure that we can reach stabilization at the 1990 level, the answer to the second part of the question is yes, as well.

We have much work to be done and much to learn about the specifics of this, Mr. Chairman. As I suggested in answering Mr. Fingerhut's good question, we have much work to do to know exactly where, how much, and how fast we believe that there will be global climate change from the increase in greenhouse forcing gases.

And we have much to learn about the exact measurement of this. But I think there is enough certainty across the scientific community research that was shared and broadly done in the previous administration and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that we know enough to act now and act with some urgency.

Mr. GEJDENSON. Currently you are formulating goals for the year 2000. Should we wait to set targets for the year 2010 or 2020, or should we set those aims as well?

Mr. WIRTH. We can reach to the 1990 level by the year 2000. The big question is what happens after the year 2000.

think that everybody's best sense would be to stabilize at the year 2000 for a long time to come. We still have much to learn about which strategies may be the most cost effective for doing so. Let me go back to your discussion of fuel-efficient automobiles. I think that there are a number of people in the administration and the automobile industry who believe that we can take a leap beyond where we are today.

And remember that then-candidate Gore was speaking about having a time in which the internal combustion engine might be obsolete. That is a goal that I think everybody would like to reach, that we are getting to a point where we are working on different fuels and truly clean automobiles.

If we changed our transportation fleet dramatically over a 30- or 40-year period of time and had a very different kind of a fuel and a very different kind of a engine, we would have a very different set of emissions in the United States and would be in a position

in which the United States would be leading in a major global technology. That is a win-win-win situation for us. It is a win in terms of environmental protection; it is a win in terms of U.S. leadership; and it is a win in terms of the export of U.S. technology. And we ought to be pursuing that.

And that, again, is one of the combined goals of this administration where we believe that there is major synergism there, and we want to do everything we can to take advantage of that.

Mr. GEJDENSON. Finally, the Clinton administration, in its economic package, has proposed a broad-based energy tax. Some people felt that should have been a carbon tax.

I think the administration may have recognized, or at least felt, that a carbon tax would place too much of a burden on particular, already depressed areas in the country. We understand the decision of the Clinton administration to try to mitigate economic impact on a depressed region.

Now, the package that has basically been passed by the Ways and Means Committee at this point, if that package is approved by the Congress, do you have any indication that this will help us meet the greenhouse gas emission standards? Is there any way to take a look at the correlation?

If you don't have the information presently, just submit for the record the relative taxes on energy by our closest competitors.

Mr. WIRTH. First, the answer is yes, we do know that the passage of the Btu tax will be helpful just as a number of other measures that we have or will take in the country have been helpful. The Surface Transportation bill passed a couple of years ago is a step in the right direction. The Clean Air bill is a step in the right direction. The Montreal Protocol is a step in the right direction. The energy bill that was passed last year-all of these steps add up.

And as it was suggested earlier, the United States has really taken a lot more steps than most countries have in specifically saying it is that we are doing. What we want to do in the Action Plan is define exactly the parameters of what still has to be done to reach the 1990 level. And there are still some uncertainties about that.

All of this, I might say, is just in the realm of sources. We have not talked at all about sinks, which you did in your opening statement, about what New England Electric is doing.

Looking at places where we can sequester carbon and how that might be changed, and then not looking very much at the methane question that Mr. Roth brought up and alternative technologies, there is an enormous area of potential that is economically promising for the United States. I stress that over and over again because for any of us to go away from a discussion of greenhouse strategies not understanding that it contains a wonderful potential for the United States of America, both domestically and in terms of foreign policy if we agree that we want to try to pursue it in that fashion, that is very important for us.

For the record, there is very good data put together by the World Resources Institutes on the question of where taxation is and maybe that is the best objective table to put in the record.

[The information referred to is retained in the subcommittee file.]