GLOBAL WARMING THURSDAY, OCTOBER 6, 1994 HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 9:35 a.m., in room 2123, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Philip R. Sharp (chairman) presiding. Mr. SHARP. The subcommittee will please come to order. I am very pleased to have the opportunity today to hear from several administration officials, particularly Secretary O'Leary on recent developments in the effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In terms of fulfilling the letter and the spirit of the Rio agreement, the U.S. Government is clearly a leader. Along with the other developed countries, the United States has agreed to reduce its emissions of greenhouse gasses to 1990 levels by the year 2000. Moreover, with its announcement last October of the President's National Action Plan, the United States took the lead in identifying and committing to concrete actions to reduce global emissions of greenhouse gasses. This plan marshals the forces of the Departments of Energy and State as well as the Environmental Protection Agency to find the most cost-effective, flexible, voluntary approaches to reducing emissions. Among the 50 or so programs undertaken in the action plan, one of the potentially most significant is the climate challenge. Earlier this year, the Department of Energy, under the leadership of Secretary O'Leary, signed an agreement under which more than 80 independently owned electric utilities, as well as hundreds more of the publics and cooperative utilities pledged to reduce their emissions on a voluntary basis. I applaud both the industry and the Department for their joint efforts, and I believe this sort of voluntary cooperative approach to solving this serious environmental problem is preferable to the command and control tradition. As everyone in this room knows, mandatory legislative controls take years for Congress to adopt, often arrive late to the real world, and force parties to confront each other instead of working cooperatively to solve the problem. We cannot afford to condemn resolution of the climate change issue to this unpredictable, divisive, and costly process without first making a serious effort to work together. Since that time, the United States has also kicked off a domestic joint implementation pilot program to demonstrate the advantages (1) of cooperative efforts between governments and industry which can produce win-win benefits for all participants. I appreciate that there is controversy surrounding joint implementation policies, both here in the United States environmental community and in the international negotiations. However, I continue to strongly support joint implementation and am pleased the administration has chosen to attempt pilot projects in this area. I want to urge the administration to maintain its effort to persuade the international negotiating committee to launch an international pilot program as soon as possible. At this point, let me recognize my distinguished colleague from California, Mr. Moorhead. Mr. MOORHEAD. Well, thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for holding this hearing on the topic of global climate change. This is a topic which has consumed a lot of our time this Congress and which will continue to be an important issue for a number of years. I am pleased that today we will have the opportunity to hear from and question a variety of witnesses from the administration and industry about the climate change debate. Today I am interested in learning several things: First, I would like to know about the status of our domestic climate change action plan. I hope utilities and industry are cooperating fully with the administration to make sure that this program is a success. Second, I would like to know what are the administration's goals in the international arena. I am disturbed about how the debates regarding the adequacy of the commitments fade under the real treaty and the joint implementation are shaping up. I would hope that we would not assume any additional international commitments until we first find out if our current commitments can be achieved. I also believe we shouldn't make further commitments until we see if other developed countries are truly trying to meet their own commitments or until some of their developing countries are willing to make some additional commitments themselves. Mr. Chairman, as this is our last hearing of the year, I thank you again for your leadership on this subcommittee. I look forward to the testimony of the witnesses. You know, we have worked together for a long, long time, Phil, and we worked on energy issues because I was the ranking member of this subcommittee for many, many years. I think we have gotten out a lot of good legislation. Mr. SHARP. Especially during IPCC, you were absolutely essen tial on that. Mr. MOORHEAD. But we have worked together in a nonpartisan basis much of the time, and certainly your contribution to this committee will long be remembered. Mr. SHARP. Well, thank you very much. Appreciate that. Madam Secretary, we are ready to hear from you, certainly appreciate your changing your schedule and being with us this morning for this hearing. ing I might indicate to our audience, as they may know, because we have a very important joint session to hear from President Mandela at 11 a.m., the Secretary, as a Cabinet officer, will be in attendance at that as well as Members of the House, so we will take her testimony this morning and then recess until 1 p.m. to get our other panelists. Madam Secretary, excuse me for interrupting. STATEMENT OF HON. HAZEL R. O'LEARY, SECRETARY, Secretary O'LEARY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and Mr. Moorhead. I am delighted to be here today to report progress on the Department of Energy, and most importantly, our administration's actions to implement the global climate change plan. Before I begin, much in the vein that Mr. Moorhead has started, I would like to compliment this committee for the work done in crafting the Energy Policy Act passed in 1992, and to this chairman especially, who in his final hearing has to suffer a bit of praise, and I want certainly Mr. SHARP. Suffer, suffer. Secretary O'LEARY. Well, I know that you are not comfortable with that, Mr. Chairman. I want on behalf of our colleagues in government and industry, to thank you for the grace and the good humor with which you have led this committee, thank you for the intellectual prowess. Often working with Mr. Moorhead, as he has just indicated, to find that nonpartisan balance that gives us the opportunity to move forward with a series of challenges and initiatives that sometimes look so tough and intractable that people have thought we could not go forward. Many have said, Mr. Chairman, that we cannot imagine how we will function without you. I am clear that we will function with you in different roles, and I very much look forward to it. But I need to say on a very personal basis how much I have enjoyed working with you for practically 17 years. My colleagues from the Department of Energy join me with others in the industry who I know all day today will be thanking you for your leadership. And at the same time, we want to thank Mr. Moorhead, because it does not happen without a bipartisan effort. You have evinced that spirit to help this chairman be very successful, so I thank you both. We should also be thanking you for the flexibility within the Energy Policy Act, that really has permitted us to design and craft a global climate action initiative which is both flexible, cost-effective, and I believe can get the job done. Early last year when we were testifying on the plan, it was difficult for some to understand that the basis of the plan is in fact the Energy Policy Act. My colleagues, with a great deal of pride, want me to present and share with the public today our administration's United States of America's Global Climate Action report filed on time in Geneva. It is a very spiffy report that outlines the very flexible initiatives that will be used to meet the climate goals to which we committed. I want very quickly to answer the questions that you have asked and give you an opportunity to ask questions of me. First of all, I want to say that the good news in my mind is that we are off the paper and at the point where we are designing feasibility or assessments internationally and moving this plan. As you indicated, Mr. Chairman, when we were under the tent on the mall on the occasion of the signing of the some 800 utilities to the Global Climate Challenge, which draws the utility industry into this effort. The flexibility of permitting the private sector to simply take the mark of a goal and move with it, I think, is what has made this plan a success. You have asked for a review of those activities, and I want to do it within the context of the budget because so many quite correctly have deep concern that the cuts in the budget for energy efficiency and renewable energy exacerbate our ability to accomplish the goals set out in the plan. You also asked me to address the schedule for section 1605, which is the reporting baseline that will permit us to measure accomplishments, and I will address that. I will also touch very briefly on the science, but I want to address that issue in a very pragmatic way. I need to start really with a review of the tonnage score card. You will remember when we came to town we needed a 212 million metric ton reduction in greenhouse gas emissions to meet the mark for the 1990 measure at the beginning of the 21st century. EPACT straightaway gave us 29 million of those metric tons. The early actions in our administration gave us another 77 million metric tons, and the remainder needed for the plan designed here was 106. The plan crafted and presented gave us 109. Then we went into the budget struggle and debate. You may recall that the administration across the board had freezes on discretionary programs, and in point of fact, the way those freezes were scored, the Department of Energy overall took a 10 percent cut in its budget. Nonetheless, we went forward with a very vigorous proposal which the Congress reviewed. We proposed an increase of 25 percent in renewables and 45 percent in energy efficiency, and I came to the Congress very openly and said the bottom line cut, in my view, was $150 million. We took a bigger hit than that and went back to figure out how we could deliver on the program. The good news, in my mind, and there is good news, was that that program got nearly a 16 percent increase at a time when the Department's budget was under tough attack. I think that is a strong signal. The other good news is that in planning to take those budget cuts, we really put our low-priority programs over the side ourselves, focusing on those programs that could deliver. But the shortfall, nonetheless, is one with which people ought to be concerned. I want to turn now to two programs that were not scored in the plan because we didn't know how to score them, and those were the voluntary programs that we saw being signed under the tent on the mall in the early spring. The Climate Challenge that involves the electric utility industry will just be scoreable at the end of this month as 1605 guidelines are completed and ready for people to report to. There will be a base case to measure emissions saved. I expect to be signing real plans, not plans for agreements, but actual plans for implementation at the end of this month in New Jersey and several other States. We have scored, we believe, very conservatively that the global climate initiative with the electric utilities can give us from 10 to 20 million metric tons. Let's take the most modest of that. That is 10 million metric tons, which gets us nearly halfway to the shortfall. I want to move now to Climate Wise. This may be very confusing to people. It is to me. Climate Wise is the name we use to discuss another voluntary program with large industrial energy users who are, quite frankly, the largest emitters of greenhouse gasses. With only seven companies signed on to that program, they have pledged 10 million metric tons. These are very large companies, such as Dupont, Johnson and Johnson, AT&T, companies whose manufacturing processes are quite energy intensive. So I believe we can get there on these programs that have been unscored. What are we doing further to make up the shortfall? Certainly, not sitting back. What I think we have got are some concepts and plans now ready for implementation that will permit us to prove the concept that flexible programs do work and are most cost-effective. The Climate Wise program will cost us only $2 million in the Department of Energy because the industry will do the work. Let me talk for a moment about the 1996 budget, over which people have rightly some concern. As you well know, we committed and sent to OMB our first budget mark, which is now being negotiated. That budget mark generally tends to support again a very aggressive program for energy efficiency and renewables and certainly for our global climate initiatives. I think you will be seeing the play between the agencies and OMB as we go forward, and you can count on our vigorous pushing of these programs, especially those that have given us the greatest measure in terms of our voluntary efforts. Let me talk now about how we are doing internationally. Mr. Moorhead, you raised the question, and rightly so, of not having the United States move ahead aggressively while others lag and wait to see what will happen. You should know that on the dates when all of these reports were to be filed, all nations who had reports due, save two, did file them. And most didn't have, I believe, the aggressive kind of focus that we had. Another country, Austria, will be filing shortly, and the others will as well. So that gives me the indication that there is not only the desire but there is the commitment to meet these timetables and to implement, not merely to sign the accord. I would like to now talk very briefly about joint implementation pilot programs and, as usual, I brought with me a few toys. I want to point first of all to the picture of me with the dripping honor mark on my forehead. The people in that picture are villagers in a village in India called Danawas. It is a village that is quite remarkable because it has become a test bed for appropriate technology and energy efficiency, and is a village community where up until 2 years ago there was no electrification. |