<DOC> [107 Senate Hearings] [From the U.S. Government Printing Office via GPO Access] [DOCID: f:75474.wais] S. Hrg. 107-153 S. 1008--THE CLIMATE CHANGE STRATEGY AND TECHNOLOGY INNOVATION ACT OF 2001 ======================================================================= HEARING before the COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS UNITED STATES SENATE ONE HUNDRED SEVENTH CONGRESS FIRST SESSION on S. 1008 TO AMEND THE ENERGY POLICY ACT OF 1992 TO DEVELOP THE UNITED STATES CLIMATE CHANGE RESPONSE STRATEGY WITH THE GOAL OF STABILIZATION OF GREENHOUSE GAS CONCENTRATIONS IN THE ATMOSPHERE AT A LEVEL THAT WOULD PREVENT DANGEROUS ANTHROPOGENIC INTERFERENCE WITH THE CLIMATE SYSTEM, WHILE MINIMIZING ADVERSE SHORT-TERM AND LONG-TERM ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL IMPACTS, ALIGNING THE STRATEGY WITH UNITED STATES ENERGY POLICY, AND PROMOTING A SOUND NATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY, TO ESTABLISH A RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM THAT FOCUSES ON BOLD TECHNOLOGICAL BREAKTHROUGHS THAT MAKE SIGNIFICANT PROGRESS TOWARD THE GOAL OF STABILIZATION OF GREENHOUSES GAS CONCENTRATIONS, TO ESTABLISH THE NATIONAL OFFICE OF CLIMATE CHANGE RESPONSE WITHIN THE EXECUTIVE OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT, AND FOR OTHER PURPOSES __________ JULY 18, 2001 __________ Printed for the use of the Committee on Governmental Affairs _______ U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE 75-474 WASHINGTON : 2002 ____________________________________________________________________________ For Sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office Internet: bookstore.gpr.gov Phone: toll free (866) 512-1800; (202) 512ÿ091800 Fax: (202) 512ÿ092250 Mail: Stop SSOP, Washington, DC 20402ÿ090001 COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS JOSEPH I. LIEBERMAN, Connecticut, Chairman CARL LEVIN, Michigan FRED THOMPSON, Tennessee DANIEL K. AKAKA, Hawaii TED STEVENS, Alaska RICHARD J. DURBIN, Illinois SUSAN M. COLLINS, Maine ROBERT G. TORRICELLI, New Jersey GEORGE V. VOINOVICH, Ohio MAX CLELAND, Georgia PETE V. DOMENICI, New Mexico THOMAS R. CARPER, Delaware THAD COCHRAN, Mississippi JEAN CARNAHAN, Missouri ROBERT F. BENNETT, Utah MARK DAYTON, Minnesota JIM BUNNING, Kentucky Joyce A. Rechtschaffen, Staff Director and Counsel Holly A. Idelson, Counsel Timothy H. Profeta, Legislative Counsel to Senator Lieberman Hannah S. Sistare, Minority Staff Director and Counsel Paul R. Noe, Minority Senior Counsel Darla D. Cassell, Chief Clerk C O N T E N T S ------ Opening statement: Page Senator Lieberman............................................ 1 Senator Thompson............................................. 2 Senator Stevens.............................................. 7 Senator Voinovich............................................ 21 Senator Collins.............................................. 24 Senator Bennett.............................................. 26 WITNESSES Wednesday, July 18, 2001 Hon. Robert C. Byrd, a U.S. Senator from the State of West Virginia....................................................... 4 James E. Hansen, Ph.D., Head, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies........................................................ 9 Thomas R. Karl, Director, National Climatic Data Center, National Environmental Satellite Data and Information Services, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration......................... 11 Eileen Claussen, President, Pew Center on Global Climate Change.. 30 James A. Edmonds, Ph.D., Senior Staff Scientist, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Battelle Memorial Institute..... 32 Dale E. Heydlauff, Senior Vice President-Environmental Affairs, American Electric Power Company................................ 34 Jonathan Lash, President, World Resources Institute.............. 36 Margo Thorning, Ph.D., Senior Vice President and Chief Economist, American Council for Capital Formation......................... 38 Alphabetical List of Witnesses Byrd, Hon. Robert C.: Testimony.................................................... 4 Claussen, Eileen: Testimony.................................................... 30 Prepared statement with an attachment........................ 75 Edmonds, James A.: Testimony.................................................... 32 Prepared statement........................................... 79 Hansen, James E.: Testimony.................................................... 9 Prepared statement with attachments.......................... 51 Heydlauff, Dale E.: Testimony.................................................... 34 Prepared statement with an attachment........................ 84 Karl, Thomas R.: Testimony.................................................... 11 Prepared statement with attachments.......................... 68 Lash, Jonathan: Testimony.................................................... 36 Prepared statement........................................... 91 Thorning, Margo: Testimony.................................................... 38 Prepared statement........................................... 98 Appendix Statement entitled ``The Future Course of the International Climate Change Negotiations,'' printed in the Congressional Record on May 4, 2001, submitted by Senator Byrd............... 112 Statement entitled ``Climate Change Strategy and Technology Innovation Act of 2001,'' printed in the Congressional Record on June 8, 2001, submitted by Senator Byrd..................... 114 Article from The Wall Street Journal, June 11, 2001, entitled ``Scientists' Report Doesn't Support the Kyoto Treaty,'' by Richard S. Lindzen............................................. 118 Prepared testimony of Richard S. Lindzen before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on May 2, 2001.......... 120 Prepared statement of John P. Holdren, Professor, Kennedy School of Government and the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Harvard University................................... 125 Prepared statement of David G. Hawkins, Director, NRDC Climate Center, Natural Resources Defense Council...................... 134 Copy of S. 1008.................................................. 144 S. 1008--THE CLIMATE CHANGE STRATEGY AND TECHNOLOGY INNOVATION ACT OF 2001 ---------- WEDNESDAY, JULY 18, 2001 U.S. Senate, Committee on Governmental Affairs, Washington, DC. The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 9:30 a.m., in room SD-342, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Joseph Lieberman, Chairman of the Committee, presiding. Present: Senators Lieberman, Thompson, Stevens, Voinovich, Collins, and Bennett. OPENING STATEMENT OF CHAIRMAN LIEBERMAN Chairman Lieberman. The hearing will come to order. I welcome our witnesses and our guests this morning. I would like to thank them for joining us to present testimony regarding the Climate Change Strategy and Technology Innovation Act of 2001, which has been introduced by our colleagues, Senators Byrd and Stevens. In the long term, I think there is no greater environmental challenge facing the United States and the world than global climate change. It is also a most complicated international matter, to devise an appropriate response. Two recent scientific reports, one by the United Nations and the second by the National Academy of Sciences, confirmed some of the worst fears about climate change. These reports conclude that the Earth is warming; that the warming is caused by human activities; and that, unless we reverse this trend, we will face dire consequences, including rising sea levels, widespread drought, the spread of diseases associated with warmer weather, and an increase in extreme weather events. Most everyone agrees that there is a problem and on the need for a strong response, except frankly some here in the United States. One need only look to Genoa and Bonn, where thousands of protesters are gathering to demonstrate against President Bush's decision to walk away from the Kyoto Protocol, to appreciate the depth of conviction associated with this problem of global warming and the extent to which the United States has now separated itself from most of the rest of the world on this subject. Personally, I feel that we need an international agreement with binding targets and timetables for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. I say that because in the aftermath of the Rio Treaty, which the Senate ratified on October 15, 1992, which set out a series of targets and timetables that were meant to be voluntarily complied with, but were not, that the answer, I believe, is that we need binding targets and timetables. I know that some of my colleagues feel otherwise, but the truth is that we are not here today to debate those questions, although I would guess that we will hear some of the differing points of view on them. That is because our two colleagues, Senators Byrd and Stevens, have, I think, put together a legislative proposal that creates common ground that all of us can occupy and from which we can move forward together. Achieving a bipartisan consensus on this legislation can, I believe, be an historic turning point in the United States' response to global climate change. The legislation Senators Byrd and Stevens propose will create a focused, comprehensive effort within the Executive Branch that will provide the leadership and creative work that the problem of global warming requires. The bill will establish a new National Office of Climate Change Response in the White House, comparable in some ways to the current Office of National Drug Control Policy, to develop a peer-reviewed strategy to stabilize the levels of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, in order to prevent dangerous disruption of the climate system. That is a goal that we have all agreed to in the aforementioned Rio Treaty on climate change, which again the Senate ratified in October 1992. This bill will also create the infrastructure needed to develop the innovative technologies that will be necessary to address global warming and it will authorize funding for those efforts. With this bill, research and development activities on greenhouse gas mitigation would have a home centered in the Department of Energy from which they could be aggressively pursued, and in crafting a climate change strategy, the office within the White House would be instructed by this proposal to consider four key elements: Emissions mitigation; technology development; adaptation needs; and further scientific research. As Senator Byrd has said, this bill is meant to complement, not replace, other greenhouse gas mitigation measures by creating a process by which we receive expert evaluation of the challenge we face and fund research work to meet it. This legislation, I think, will become the tree from which other climate change measures will branch. In the end, I believe our shared responsibility is clear. We have got to take action and take it soon to deal with this problem that will affect our children and grandchildren and theirs, more than it will directly affect us. I would close by saying that in their long and distinguished careers in the Senate, Senators Robert C. Byrd and Ted Stevens have not only made history, they have shown they understand history and the responsibility for leadership that history places on those of us who are privileged to serve here. In this bipartisan breakthrough proposal on global climate change, they have once again shown the rest of us a way to move forward together. For that, I thank them. Senator Thompson. OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR THOMPSON Senator Thompson. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for holding this hearing on legislation pending before the Committee on the important issue of climate change. The risk from human-induced climate change is a risk that we should responsibly try to manage. When contrasted against the Kyoto protocol, S. 1008 offers a potential for a reasonable way forward, I believe. S. 1008 would require the development of a national climate change strategy and authorize new funding for the development of breakthrough energies technology needed to reduce the risk of climate change.\1\ --------------------------------------------------------------------------- \1\ Copy of S. 1008 appears in the Appendix on page 144. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- We are going to need these technologies if we want to meet the objective of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, which the United States has ratified. The objective was the long-term stabilization of atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations in the future, and to meet this, we are going to have to develop fundamentally new ways of producing and using energy that give us the energy we need without the emissions that we do not want. But reducing CO<INF>2</INF> emissions is not as simple as putting a scrubber on a smokestack. We are going to need new technologies, and we must seek a global solution, one that involves all nations of the world and not just the developed ones. These are some of the reasons why I applaud the President's rejection of the Kyoto Protocol. I also support the President's effort to define the new way forward, both domestically and internationally. The flawed Kyoto Protocol would place unfair, expensive limits on the United States. It could have rationed the amount of energy the United States could have used, even though energy is key to American prosperity. It could have caused significantly higher energy costs. It could have significantly reduced the rate of economic growth, affecting millions of jobs, eliminating the surplus and threatening American global competitiveness. Some of our biggest economic rivals would be exempt from the emission limits. It appears that a new approach to managing the risk of climate change is needed, and the President is providing it. The President's plan will focus on managing the risk of climate change using American technology, ingenuity and innovation. It will involve quantifying and understanding the risk of climate change through improved climate observations and models. It will involve developing the tools we will need to reduce the future risk of climate change, advanced energy technologies. Such useful concepts are reflected in S. 1008. I also understand that several of my colleagues, including Senators Murkowski, Craig and Hagel, may soon introduce legislation that could make positive additions to S. 1008. There is a great deal of controversy surrounding the politics and science of global climate change. While I am concerned about spending such large sums of money in creating new bureaucracies, there may be broad support for the notion that we will need significant investment in R&D to be prepared to address the challenge of climate change. There is significant disagreement on other policy options, like mandatory caps on emissions, and as the National Academy recently pointed out, there are still significant uncertainties in our scientific understanding of climate change. But perhaps we can start by reducing the gaps in our scientific understanding to quantify the risk we face, and we can develop the energy technology tools we are going to need if we want to act dramatically to reduce the risk of future climate change. I look forward to hearing from our distinguished witnesses. Chairman Lieberman. Thanks very much, Senator Thompson. We have been following a procedure here where we have opening statements just from the Chair and the Ranking Member, so I am going to ask Senator Byrd to testify now. But then obviously, because Senator Stevens is a co-sponsor, I will ask him, if he wishes, after you conclude, to speak. Senator Byrd, we are honored to have you here and look forward to your testimony. TESTIMONY OF HON. ROBERT C. BYRD, A U.S. SENATOR FROM THE STATE OF WEST VIRGINIA Senator Byrd. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Senator Thompson, Senator Stevens, Senator Voinovich, Senator Collins, other Members of the Committee. I thank you very much for inviting me to speak on behalf of S. 1008, the Climate Change Strategy and Technology Innovation Act of 2001. I thank you for holding this hearing on legislation that Senator Stevens and I have introduced and which we believe incorporates the interests of a wide range of members on both sides of the aisle. I have spoken twice in recent months on the Senate floor about the issue of global climate change. My desire to discuss this important issue derives not only from my sense of personal concern, but also from my optimistic belief that we can meet the climate change challenge if we are willing to make a commitment to do so. It is my position that all nations, industrialized and developing countries alike, must begin to honestly address the multifaceted and very complex global climate change problem. At the same time, I believe that our Nation is particularly well-positioned with the talent, the wisdom, the drive, in leading efforts to address the problem that is before us. It is for these reasons that my friend, Senator Stevens, and I introduced the legislation that is under consideration before this Committee today. The Byrd-Stevens climate change action plan recognizes the awesome problem posed by climate change. It puts into place a comprehensive framework, as well as a research and development effort to guide U.S. efforts far into the future. This legislation authorizes a major new infusion of funding for the research and development efforts to help create and deploy the next generation of innovative technologies that will be needed to address the climate change challenge in the coming decades. S. 1008 establishes a regime of responsibility and accountability in the Federal sector for the development of a national climate change response strategy. That strategy, Mr. Chairman, calls for a new framework to deal with a comprehensive climate change approach. To implement this strategy, this legislation provides for the creation of an administrative structure within the Federal Government, including an office in the White House to coordinate and implement this strategy. S. 1008 also creates a new office in the Department of Energy that will work on long-term research and development of a type that is not currently pursued in more conventional research and development programs today. The bill creates an independent review board that will report to Congress to ensure that these goals are achieved. Under S. 1008, we can begin to take action on climate change through a comprehensive and aggressive approach. It is a bipartisan initiative that is intended to supplement, rather than replace, other complementary proposals to deal with climate change. This bill is technology-neutral and does not carve out special benefits for any one energy resource or technology. We must put a portfolio of options on the table if we are to have any hope of solving this dilemma. This legislation provides for the broad framework necessary to address the climate change challenge. It reaffirms the goal of stabilizing atmospheric greenhouse gas concentration. It leaves the technology decisions to energy experts and the marketplace, and it recognizes the vital need to support public-private partnerships in developing these technologies. Senators we have an opportunity before us that we should not let slip away. It is not just an opportunity. It is also a very heavy responsibility. As this Senate begins to address our Nation's many energy and environmental concerns, climate change legislation must be part of that equation, and the Byrd-Stevens climate change action plan can help to chart that course. Addressing global climate change takes clear-headed and strong leadership. It requires extraordinary leadership. While our current menu of climate change policies and programs is an important first step, this approach only pays lip service to the awesome challenge that we face. We must go further than just making small incremental improvements in our existing research and development programs. It is a huge challenge. I hope that this Congress and this administration are willing to step up to the plate. Rarely has mankind been confronted with such an undertaking, the need to improve the energy systems that power our economy This is the greatest Nation in the world when the issue is one of applying our talents to push beyond the next step, and instead to visualize, conceptualize and then to achieve major leaps forward. We have put a man on the Moon and brought him back to Earth. We have helped to eradicate insidious diseases that have ravaged the peoples of the Earth. Our Nation is a world leader in medical and telecommunications technologies. We should also be a leader when it comes to revolutionizing our energy technologies. Such a commitment would be important for our economy, our energy security, and the global environment overall. But I must ask how long are we going to wait to develop these technologies? This is a huge opportunity for our Nation, but our efforts will only be rewarded if we can make a concerted commitment and dedicate ourselves to the task ahead, and that will not be easy. Make no mistake about it, global climate change is a reality. There are some who may have misinterpreted my stance on this issue, based on S. Res. 98 of July 1997, which I co-authored with Senator Hagel. That resolution, which was approved by a 95-0 vote, said that the Senate should not give its consent to any future binding international climate change treaty which failed to include two important provisions. That resolution simply stated that developing nations, especially those largest emitters, must also be included in any treaty and that such a treaty must not result in serious harm to the U.S. economy. In other words, we needed to proceed with our eyes open and we asked the administration--the then- administration--to provide to the Congress the estimates of cost of the treaty, cost to the various industries in this country, the automobile industry, the mining industry and so on. Those estimates have not yet been provided. I still believe that these two provisions are vitally important components of any future climate change treaty, but I do not believe that this resolution should be used as an excuse for the United States to abandon its shared responsibility to help find a solution to the global climate change dilemma. At the same time, we should not back away from efforts to bring other nations along. The United States will never be successful in addressing climate change alone. We are all in the same boat, and what comes around goes around. The pollution that begins with China and Indonesia and Mexico, Brazil, and other developing countries, comes around to the United States and to Great Britain and to the European countries. It is a global problem that requires a global solution. It is critical that nations such as those I have mentioned, China, India, Mexico, Brazil and other developing nations, adopt a cleaner, more substantial development path that promotes economic growth while also reducing their pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. In the Senate's fiscal year 2001 energy and water appropriations bill, I inserted language that created an interagency task force to promote the department of U.S. clean- energy technologies abroad. Such an initiative is complementary to the efforts proposed in S. 1008. The clean-energy technology exports initiative is now underway and will help foreign nations to deploy a range of clean-energy technologies that have been developed in our laboratories. These technologies are hugely marketable. Many of them have resulted from our clean-coal technology, which I initiated in 1985, with $750 million committed to the task. It has been an immensely successful program. The private sector has come forward with more than it was required. It was required to come forward with 50 percent of the cost. It has put two-thirds of the cost on the barrelhead and several technologies have gone forward and proved to be successful If nations like China continue to depend on coal and other fossil fuels to grow their economies into the future, it is incumbent upon the United States to accelerate the development, demonstration and deployment of clean coal and other clean- energy technologies that will be critical to meeting all nations' energy needs, while also providing for a cleaner environment. I believe that S. 1008 maps a responsible and realistic course. That road may be bumpy and I am sure that there will be disagreements along the way, but it is a journey that we have to take. We owe it to future generations. S. 1008, if adopted and signed by the President, will commit the United States to a serious undertaking, but one that should no longer be ignored. If we are to have any hope of solving one of the world's and one of humanity's greatest challenges, we must begin now. Mr. Chairman, I again thank you for holding this hearing. I again thank my colleague, Senator Stevens, for his vision, his leadership, for his cooperation, for his joining in the promotion of this legislation. I look forward to working with you, Senator Lieberman, and with you, Senator Thompson, Senator Stevens and the other Members of this Committee on this important and timely legislation. It is not a moment too soon. I ask unanimous consent that my May 4, 2001 and June 8, 2001 climate change statements printed in the Congressional Record be made a part of the record.\1\ --------------------------------------------------------------------------- \1\ The statements submitted by Senator Byrd from the Congressional Record on May 4, 2001 and June 8, 2001 appear in the Appendix on pages 112 and 114 respectively. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Chairman Lieberman. Without objection. Senator Byrd. That completes my statement, Mr. Chairman. Chairman Lieberman. Thank you very much, Senator Byrd, for a very thoughtful, very important statement, and one that has, I think, the appropriate sense of urgency. Senator Stevens. OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR STEVENS Senator Stevens. Well, thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and I, too, join Senator Byrd in thanking you for holding this hearing, and I commend my good friend from West Virginia for his leadership in trying to establish a major research effort to reduce carbon emissions and deal with the whole subject, the myriad of subjects that are included in global climate change strategy. I thank you very much, Senator Byrd, for allowing me to join you on this, because it is a matter of great importance to me and my State, as you know. I think, Mr. Chairman, Senator Thompson, Members of the Committee, in days gone by, Senator Byrd and I might have just added this to an appropriations bill. Chairman Lieberman. We still were hoping that eventually you might do that. [Laughter.] Senator Stevens. The difference is that we know this is such a complex subject, one that needs congressional approval before we forge into this area. We want to make sure that you are all behind us before we try to put the taxpayers' money where our mouths have been. We need funds for this. I view this as being next to major medical research in terms of issues that this country faces, and I want to tell you I am particularly interested because of the last hearing I chaired, Mr. Chairman, as Chairman of the Appropriations Committee, was a field hearing in Fairbanks on the impacts of global climate change on the Arctic environment. I would welcome and urge you to think about bringing the whole Committee up to see what global climate change means. There is no question that the change has taken place more rapidly in the Arctic than anywhere else on the globe. Many of the witnesses at our hearing noted that climate activity stems from a number of factors, including human activity. I do not think we can assess it totally to human activity. The degree to which any particular phenomenon or activity contributes to climate change is not yet well-understood. Regardless of the cause, there has been a dramatic warming trend in the Arctic areas, as I said. Let me tell you, pack ice, which is the ice that insulates our coastal villages from winter storms, has shrunk 3 percent per year since 1970. Increased storm activity has caused significant beach erosion, which now has required us to consider ways to displace entire communities along the coastline of Alaska. The sea ice is thinner than it was 30 years ago, and the sea ice is the platform on which most of the reproductive activity of marine mammals takes place. It is back from the shore now. This is permanent ice that is thinning. As a matter of fact, I was told it was three inches thinner this year than last year. The Northwest Passage has been opened now for 3 years. I remember so well, as a young Senator, when I went on the MANHATTAN and tried to accompany many people and see if we could use the Northwest Passage to transport Alaska's oil to the East Coast, rather than build a pipeline; and it failed, as you know, because of the ice. We spent days riding that ice breaker tanker, grinding three, four, five miles a day of ice. That is gone now. It is not there. The Northwest Passage is just one of the indications. I would invite you to come up and see our northern forests. Our northern forests are now farther north and further west, as the permafrost is melting, and the permafrost melting means a great deal to us. Half of the coal in the United States is in that area, of the permafrost of Alaska. Whether we will ever be required to use it, I do not know, but under current law, we would have to replace the contour of the land if we took the coal out. Of course, that is an impossibility. Now, the powers-that-be, the Good Lord, is melting that permafrost and the contour may not be the same in future years as it is now. It might be easier to get to the coal. But this legislation provides us a balanced approach to climate change and will help us deal with the issue of greenhouse gases and do so without harming the economy of the United States, and to increase the capability of Third World countries to improve their economy. By making necessary research and development efforts now, I think we can inspire a generation of technologies that will enhance America's chance to be the leader in dealing with global climate change. It will increase research and development funding, so we can better understand this global climate change. We can plan to develop the capabilities that technology will lead us to, and I think we will be able to react to global climate change in a very positive way if we follow the Senator's lead, and I am glad to be his partner in this effort. This bill will require, in my judgment, that we double the technology investment for research and development related to global climate change, just as we doubled the investment in health research in the last 5 years. This will lead us into a new era of funding for research in this area. I think there should be no misunderstanding about it, because I have joined Senator Byrd in making a commitment that this money will be made available to the research community, so we can better understand these changes and take whatever actions we can to offset them. It will create a process for the United States to take seriously this issue and to address it promptly. I thank you for holding the hearing, and again I repeat my invitation to you to come up and see what is happening. I was told in Fairbanks that while the world as a whole may have increased in temperature by about one degree, the Arctic has increased in temperature by seven degrees, and we took our committee to Antarctica to see if the same situation was developing down there. They have increased ice pack down there. They have increased problems down there, but they are not as much involved in global climate change as we are in the Arctic. The Arctic is the place to understand global climate change and I am proud, Senator, that you allowed me to join you in this effort, and pledge that we will fight this battle together. We need this information. We need to develop this technology as rapidly as possible. Thank you very much. Senator Byrd. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Chairman Lieberman. Senator Stevens, thank you very much for that very compelling testimony, and particularly for the memorable reports from Alaska and the Arctic. I accept your invitation. I think Senator Thompson and I ought to figure out a way to see if we can bring the Committee exactly to the places you described. In a way, it may be that Alaska and the Arctic are the early warning system or, to use an old and worn expression, the canary in the coal mine, in the case of climate change. I thank you. Senator Byrd, thank you very much for your time. I know you have a busy schedule and I appreciate very much your being here today. Senator Stevens. Please excuse me, too. I have another---- Chairman Lieberman. Oh, you have a busy schedule, too. It is always great, not only to have your leadership on a critical problem like this, but to know when we have your leadership, the prospects of funding such a bill are quite high. [Laughter.] Thank you. We will call the second panel: Dr. James Hansen, Head of NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies; and Thomas Karl, Director of the National Climatic Data Center. Dr. Hansen, why don't you proceed? We have a clock going. Your full statement, which we appreciate, will be printed in the record in full, and I ask you to try to stay pretty much as close to the 5 minutes as you can. Then it is the tradition of the Committee now to give each Senator 10 minutes. So if any of my colleagues want to make opening statements, that hopefully will give them the opportunity to do that, as well. Dr. Hansen. TESTIMONY OF JAMES E. HANSEN,\1\ Ph.D., HEAD, NASA GODDARD INSTITUTE FOR SPACE STUDIES Mr. Hansen. Thank you, Senator Lieberman. I will talk about options for influencing future climate. The most popular prediction for future climate change is based on the business- as-usual scenario, in which the annual increments of the forcing agents that drive climate change grow larger and larger every year. This scenario leads to a prediction of dramatic climate change, several degrees by the end of the century. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- \1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Hansen with attachments appears in the Appendix on page 51. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- It is a useful warning of what could happen if we let the growth of climate-forcing agents run wild. For the sake of contrast, my colleagues and I have defined an alternative scenario for climate change in the 21st Century. In this scenario, the growth rate of the forcing agents that drive climate change decelerates, such that global warming in the next 50 years is less than one degree and the stage is set for stabilizing atmospheric composition later in the century. How can we achieve this? What are the climate forcing agents? My chart,\1\ which is over here, but is also in your handout, shows the estimated climate forcing agents that exist today. Red is used for forces that cause warming, blue for cooling. Carbon dioxide, the bar on the left, causes the largest forcing, 1.4 watts-per-meter-squared. But the forcing by other greenhouse gases, the next four bars, adds up to at least as much as carbon dioxide. Methane causes a forcing half as large as carbon dioxide. Tropospheric ozone is also important; and then there are several aerosols, which are fine particles in the air. Black carbon is soot from diesel engines and coal burning. It causes warming. Organic aerosols and sulfates from fossil fuels cause cooling. Aerosols also affect the properties of clouds (that is the large blue bar here) and cause a cooling, but the magnitude of it is very uncertain. The net forcing by all of these is positive, consistent with observed global warming. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- \1\ The chart referred to appears in the Appendix on page 62. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- The question is: How will these forcings change in the future? The added climate forcing in the next 50 years will be only one watt and greenhouse warming less than one degree provided, (1) we halt the growth of the non-CO<INF>2</INF> forcings, and, (2) fossil fuel use and CO<INF>2</INF> emissions continue, but at about the same rate as today. The resulting forcing of one watt would cause some climate change, but less than one degree in 50 years. So, first, can we stop the growth of the non-CO<INF>2</INF> forcing? Not only can we, but it only makes sense. Black carbon is the product of incomplete combustion. You can see it in the exhaust of diesel trucks. The microscopic soot particles are like tiny sponges. They soak up toxic organics and other aerosols. They are so tiny that, when breathed in, they penetrate human tissue deeply. Some of the smallest enter the bloodstream. They cause respiratory and cardiac problems, asthma, acute bronchitis, with tens of thousands of deaths per year in the United States, also in Europe, where the health cost of particulate air pollution have been estimated at 1.6 percent of the gross domestic products. In the developing world, the costs are staggering. In India, approximately 270,000 children under the age of five die per year from acute respiratory infections caused by this air pollution. The pollution arises in household burning of field residue, cow dung, coal, for cooking and heating. There is now a brown cloud of air pollution mushrooming from India. Tropospheric ozone is another pollutant whose growth could be stopped, as could that of methane. We have only one atmosphere and it is a global atmosphere. We need to reduce the pollution that we put into it for other reasons, human health, agricultural productivity, and in the process we can prevent the non-CO<INF>2</INF> climate forcing from increasing. In the United States, for example, we can reduce diesel and other soot admissions. We might also work with developing countries to help reduce their pollution. One possible long- term solution would be electrification, a clean source of energy. Now, the other part of the climate problem is CO<INF>2</INF>. It is the hardest part of the problem, but is not as intractable as it is often made out to be. In 1998, global CO<INF>2</INF> emissions declined slightly. In 1999, they declined again, and, in 2000, another small decline. This is just the trend needed to achieve the alternative scenario with only moderate climate change. In the near-term, my opinion is that this trend can be maintained via concerted efforts toward increased energy efficiency, conservation and increased use of renewable energy sources. On the long-term, we probably need a significant increasing contribution from an energy source that produces little or no CO<INF>2</INF>. In my written testimony, I note some possibilities, which include zero-emission coal; nuclear power; the combination of solar energy, hydrogen and fuel cells. Each possibility has pros and cons, and R&D is needed. It will be up to the public, through their representatives, to make the choices. Finally, the relevance of all this to your hearing is that there is more than one way to control climate change. The forcing agents that cause climate change are complex and, in some cases, poorly understood. These forcing agents have other effects on people and the rest of the biosphere that should be considered. We need to take a broad view of this issue. We will need a strategy, and that strategy will need to be adjusted as we learn more and see the effect of the actions that we take. This is a long-term issue. Thank you. Chairman Lieberman. Thanks, Dr. Hansen. Mr. Karl. TESTIMONY OF THOMAS R. KARL,\1\ DIRECTOR, NATIONAL CLIMATIC DATA CENTER, NATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL SATELLITE DATA AND INFORMATION SERVICES, NATIONAL OCEANIC AND ATMOSPHERIC ADMINISTRATION Mr. Karl. Good morning, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for inviting me here today, and Members of the Committee. I have been invited to talk about the science of climate change. First, I want to emphasize two important fundamental issues. First off, there is a natural greenhouse effect. It is real. A small percentage of the atmosphere, about 2 percent, is composed of greenhouse gases. This includes water vapor, carbon dioxide, ozone, and methane. These effectively prevent part of the heat from the Earth escaping and lead to temperatures warmer than what would otherwise be the case. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- \1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Karl appears in the Appendix on page 68. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- In addition to the natural greenhouse effect, there is a change underway in the greenhouse radiation balance. Some greenhouse gases are increasing in the atmosphere because of human activities and increasingly trapping more heat. Direct atmospheric measurements over the past 40 or so years have documented a steady growth in atmospheric abundance of carbon dioxide. Measurements, using air bubbles trapped within accumulating layers of snow, show that atmospheric carbon dioxide has increased by more than 30 percent over the industrial era, compared to the relative constant abundance that it had over the previous 750 years. The predominant cause of the increase in carbon dioxide is the combustion of fossil fuels and burning of forests. Other heat-trapping gases are also increasing as a result of human activities. The increase in heat-trapping greenhouse gases due to human activities are projected to be amplified by feedback effects, such as changes in water vapor, snow cover, and sea ice. So as atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases increase, the resulting increase in surface temperature leads to less sea ice and snow, thereby reducing the amount of the Sun's energy reflected back into space, resulting in a higher temperature. As greenhouse gases increase, evaporation increases, which leads to more atmospheric water vapor. The additional water vapor acts as important feedback to increase temperature. Our present understanding is that these two feedbacks account for about 60 percent of the warming. The exact magnitude of the feedback effects and others, such as changes in clouds, remain a significant source of uncertainty related to our understanding of the impact of greenhouse gases. Increases in evaporation water vapor affect global climate in other ways besides increasing temperature, such as increasing rainfall and snowfall rates. The increase in greenhouse gas concentration implies a positive radiative forcing and has a tendency to warm the climate. Particles or aerosols in the atmosphere resulting from human activities can also affect climate. Aerosols vary considerably from region to region. Some aerosol types act, in a sense, opposite to the greenhouse gases and cause a negative forcing or cooling of climate, as Dr. Hansen's chart shows. There may also be other natural factors that exert an influence on climate: Changes in the sun's energy, and changes in volcanic eruptions. These effects, however, such as volcanic eruptions, are short-lived. The forcing estimates in the case of greenhouse gases are substantially greater than those for these other two forcing agents. What do the changes imply? First off, there is a growing set of observations that yields a collective picture of a warmer world. There is just simply no question the climate of the last 100 years is increasing the temperature. We have ample evidence: Widespread retreat of glaciers in non-polar regions; snow cover, and sea ice extent has decreased; thickness of sea ice has decreased; and duration of ice on lakes and rivers also all have decreased. It is also likely that the frequency of extreme events have increased as global temperatures have risen. This is particular evident in areas where precipitation has increased, primarily mid- and high-latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere. Other extremes have decreased, such as the frequency of extremely cold weather, and the frequency of frost during the period of instrumental record. There is a new and stronger evidence that most of the warming over the last 50 years is attributed to human activities. Scenarios of future human activities indicate continued changes in atmospheric composition throughout the 21st Century. Based on these scenarios and the estimated uncertainties in climate models, resulting projections of global temperature increase by the year 2100 range from 2.3 to 10.1 degrees Fahrenheit. Such a projected rate of warming would be much larger than observed over the 20th Century and would very much likely be without precedent over the past 10,000 years. It is important to emphasize that greenhouse gas warming could be reversed only very slowly. The quasi-irreversibility arises because of the slow rate of removal from the atmosphere of greenhouse gases and because of the slow response of oceans to thermal changes. It is presently not possible to generally define a safe level of greenhouse gases. There are still large uncertainties related to the projected rate and magnitude of climate change. The determination of an acceptable concentration of greenhouse gases depends on narrowing this range, as well as the knowledge and risk of vulnerabilities to climate change. Analysis reveals that sectors and regions vary in their sensitivity to climate change, but generally those societies and systems least able to adapt and those regions with the largest changes are at greatest risk. This includes the poor nations and sectors of our society, natural ecosystems--those regions that are likely to see the largest changes, for example, in the Arctic. In terms of our understanding, there is still considerable uncertainty of how the natural variability of the climate system reacts to emissions of greenhouse gases and aerosols. Current estimates of the magnitude and impacts of future warming are subject to future adjustments either up or down. To address these uncertainties in several areas, we think it is important that we embark on understanding the complex climate system. Progress in this area will be limited by the weakest link in the chain. At the present time, there are several weak links that need to be addressed. First and foremost, a climate observing system is needed to monitor decade-to-century scale changes for basic variables needed to describe the climate system. Current observing systems yield large uncertainties in several key parameters, especially on regional and local scales. Although we have been able to link observed changes to human activities, it is not possible to quantitatively identify the specific contribution of each forcing factor, which is required for the most effective strategy to prevent large or rapid climate change. This will require better understanding in several areas: The feedbacks of the climate system; the future usage of fossil fuels; carbon sequestration on land and in the ocean; details of regional climate change; and natural climate variability. Finally, we found that no matter how good our understanding of future climate change might be, we ultimately must understand how this impacts natural and human systems. To achieve this understanding will require first an interdisciplinary research that couples physical, chemical, biological, and human systems, improved capability to integrate scientific knowledge, including its uncertainty, into effective decision support systems, a better understanding of the impact of multiple stresses on human and natural systems, especially at the regional and sectorial level. Thank you, and I look forward to working with you on these issues, and thank you again for inviting me to appear today. Chairman Lieberman. Thanks, Mr. Karl. Let me begin questioning. Although we asked you here to discuss the science of climate change, I think it would be interesting to ask if you have any response, having the expertise you do, to the Byrd-Stevens proposal that is the focus of our hearing today, and to the coordination of the response to climate change that it would enact. Do either of you have a response? Mr. Karl. Mr. Karl. One thing I would highlight is, as I indicated in my testimony, this is an extremely complex issue, one which encompasses many areas of science. It encompasses areas of social science, as well as the physical sciences. So, to move forward, it is very clear a coordinated effort is clearly needed, and I think that is one of the highlights of the Byrd- Stevens bill. Chairman Lieberman. Thank you. Dr. Hansen. Mr. Hansen. I was delighted to hear the discussions by the several Senators. I agree with Mr. Karl. It is a very complicated issue and we need a broad approach to look at it. Chairman Lieberman. Do you think that the Byrd-Stevens proposal, as you understand it, meets that standard? Mr. Hansen. I do not think it is appropriate for me to take a position with regard to it, but certainly the discussions we heard today seem to be right on the mark. Chairman Lieberman. Understood. It is my impression that there is not really remaining dispute regarding whether climate change is occurring. In fact, I noticed last week that our colleague, Senator Hagel, who was one of the co-authors, obviously, of the Byrd-Hagel resolution, was quoted in USA Today as saying that, ``There is no question there is climate change. We are beyond that debate.'' Would you agree with Senator Hagel, Dr. Hansen? Mr. Hansen. Yes, I was one of the authors, as was Mr. Karl, of the recent National Academy of Science's report in which we reaffirmed the reality of global warming and that there is the possibility of disruptive climate change later this century. I think we also took pains to stress some caveats about what will happen. It depends very much on how these climate forcing agents develop, and it is certainly within our capability to influence that and to influence the amount of climate change that will occur. Chairman Lieberman. Mr. Karl. Mr. Karl. Yes, there is no question that the climate is changing in ways which we have now seen from the observational record and our past paleoclimate data. One of the important attributes of climate, though, is much broader than just changes in temperature, and as I indicated, there are some unsettling things we do not know about--for example, changes in some of the extreme precipitation events in all areas of the world. So I think it is really going to be key, as we continue to change atmospheric composition, to look at changes in all the elements of the climate system, particularly for potential surprises, accelerated changes. That is one of the areas I would like to emphasize. Although we are sure climate is changing in significant ways, we do not have all the answers today. Chairman Lieberman. In other words, there are questions about whether some of the extreme precipitation or extreme weather that people are experiencing is related to the climate change that we know is a reality. Mr. Karl. Part of the difficulty we have, if you look at our observing system, is that in the mid-latitudes and some of the higher latitudes, we have enough data to make what we think are reasonably confident statements. But if you look at the rest of the world, the observing systems really are not capable of delivering that kind of information which we so badly need. Chairman Lieberman. One area of focus of the Byrd-Stevens bill, S. 1008, which is, I thought, very interesting, was the need to help us--Americans--adapt to the already inevitable consequences of climate change, or at least that is the way I read one of their four goals. I wanted to ask you to what-- perhaps you have answered it already, but just to come at it in a different way--to what extent do you believe that some climate change is already inevitable? In other words, that there will be consequences already. And what measures would you recommend to help adapt to that change? Mr. Hansen. I think that we have evidence that some additional warming is on the way. There has been warming already of about half-a-degree Celsius or one degree Fahrenheit in the past century, and I think that there is about another half-a-degree Celsius, which is already in the pipeline, because of the greenhouse gases that we have added to the atmosphere and which the system has not yet responded to, due to the long time constant of the ocean. It takes a long time for the ocean to warm up in response to this forcing. If we can slow down the growth rate of these climate forcing agents, then I think the additional warming in the next 50 years will be less than one degree. That is a magnitude which we could adjust to probably without a great deal of difficulty, although even now climate fluctuations are a major factor that we need to pay more attention to, making ourself less vulnerable to those fluctuations. Chairman Lieberman. How serious would the steps be that we have to take to control or contain climate change within the next 50 years, to the degree that you describe? Mr. Hansen. Well, there are two things that we need to do: One is, as I mentioned, stop the growth of these non-CO<INF>2</INF> forcings. I think there are very good reasons to do that anyhow, which to a large degree could pay for themselves. They are not going to happen automatically. We have to see that they happen. They are basically air pollution and they affect everybody--I gave numbers for people that die from it--but there are even more people who do not die, but suffer consequences of air pollution. The CO<INF>2</INF> part: How do we keep the rate of emissions of CO<INF>2</INF> from increasing? Again, that is debatable. There are people who feel that just from conservation, energy efficiency and renewable energy sources, we can keep the emissions similar to what they are today. Most energy experts, however, believe that we will need some clean energy sources such as--I gave you examples: Nuclear power, which has disadvantages; or capture the CO<INF>2</INF> from coal--that is now technically possible, but it adds to the cost. So there are things that appear practical--but they will require a real effort to do them. Chairman Lieberman. Mr. Karl, how about your reaction to the extent to which climate change is already inevitable, perhaps also your evaluation of Dr. Hansen's alternative scenario? Mr. Karl. Yes, I would like to address that and emphasize as well, one of the great problems we face, as Dr. Hansen said, which I agree with, we already have in the pipeline some additional warming, something on the order of half-a-degree, and it is clear that greenhouse gas concentrations are likely to continue to increase. One of the real difficulties we have is trying to ensure that new systems that are expected to have a lifetime of many decades now begin to incorporate, not just the past climate, but projected changes in climate, to ensure that their design efficiency is as good as it could possibly be. Chairman Lieberman. How do you mean new systems? Mr. Karl. For example, we have noticed that the design standards for buildings are being exceeded in many parts of the country and engineers are using climatologies based on earlier records in the 20th Century. So in order to ensure that we have efficiency in our energy systems, we would really need to think about how we use the climate of the past and what we might expect into the future, and that is a very important area of adaptation, because quite frankly, at this time, people are a bit scrambling, trying to decide exactly what to do. Chairman Lieberman. Are we seeing elsewhere, in your experience, the rather dramatic examples that Senator Stevens gave us about what is happening in Alaska and the Arctic region, of the effects of climate change? Mr. Hansen. The Arctic region--it is not the entire Arctic. For example, Greenland has actually cooled in the last 50 years. So there is a change in the long-wave patterns at the high latitudes, such that the region around Alaska and the center of Siberia warm substantially. Those are the regions where we have seen the largest warming. I do not think there is a comparable warming in other parts of the world. As we said, the average warming is about half-a-degree Celsius, but in those regions it has been significantly larger than that. Chairman Lieberman. Go ahead, Mr. Karl. Mr. Karl. I think it would be worth emphasizing that the expectations of warming are larger over land areas compared to the ocean areas, and large over places like North America and mid- and high-latitudes, significantly larger than the average temperatures that you hear being discussed in terms of projected change. Chairman Lieberman. Why is that? Mr. Karl. The oceans are a great reservoir of heat, and we have just conducted some research in our agency which showed that the ocean heat content has increased. So part of the warming being taken up into the oceans is being transported down to deep layers in the ocean. Chairman Lieberman. But why more of an impact in North America? Mr. Karl. North America is similar to other major, large continental areas. So you can make the same statement for Eurasia, as well. Chairman Lieberman. Thank you, both. Senator Thompson. Senator Thompson. Thank you very much, gentlemen. Thank you very much for being with us here today. It seems to me that one of the things that comes out of reading from your works and other experts' work is that there is a great deal of uncertainty and complexity involved in what we are dealing with here, from the work of the National Academy of Sciences and also the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and others. Obviously, many are strong proponents of Kyoto, but in 1999, more than 17,000 scientists signed a petition against it. It seems to me that there are questions with regard to the extent of the warming. There are also questions with regard to the causes of the warming. The question presented to us as policymakers is how much do we know at this point and what are the responsible policy options and choices in light of what we know and what we do not know. Getting to the question of the extent of the warming, I have read--or some scientists have pointed out or alleged--that the climate is always changing and always has. In the Middle Ages, we had another warming trend. Thirty years ago, some people were concerned about climate cooling. Is that technically accurate and, if so, what is the significance of that? Mr. Karl. I would be happy to address that, Senator. One of the major improvements that we have been able to achieve in the last 5 years is the use of paleoclimatic data or proxy data, and what this encompasses are measurements from tree rings, ice cores, corals in the ocean and historical records. These records have been painstakingly analyzed over the last 5 years by a number of different scientific groups to try and estimate what temperatures have done globally over the last 1,000 years or so. Unfortunately, the measurements are not complete enough to go back 1,000 years in the Southern Hemisphere, but for the Northern Hemisphere, we think they are. This analysis suggests that our concepts of things like the Little Ice Age, the medieval warming period, perhaps were rooted in the accounts that we read from Europe. If you look at the globe or the hemisphere as a whole, what you see is a remarkable consistency in temperatures across the Northern Hemisphere the last 1,000 years. So when you put on top of that the instrumental record of the 20th Century, you see that the warming that we see in the last 100 years is substantially greater than anything we have seen in the last 1,000 years. By no means do we have all the answers. We would like to be able to narrow uncertainties. I think the statements we are using now are saying things like, ``It's likely that,'' because we want to leave a little room for additional observations. But the best evidence suggests the warming today is very unusual. Senator Thompson. Can you determine that there have been periods of time in our history where there has been a cooling? Mr. Hansen. Certainly there have been. There was a cooling from the 1930's and 1940's until 1970, and that does relate to your comment about some scientists talking about mechanisms that would cause cooling. That actually is in my chart. The blue bars--the aerosols, most of the aerosols, tend to reflect sunlight and therefore cause a cooling, and it is a possibility that the cooling that we observed in that period was related to the aerosols. As we started to get our energy systems going, we were producing a lot of aerosols and CO<INF>2</INF>. Recently, in recent decades, we have tried to reduce some of those sulfate aerosols, which are pure white and cause a cooling effect. The reason to reduce them being that they cause acid rain and other undesirable things. So it is good to try to reduce those. In the process, though, we accelerate the tendency toward warming. So that is why it is important to also attack not only sulfate aerosols, but the black carbon aerosols, because those aerosols cause warming. Senator Thompson. May I ask this? Do we know enough about this particular subject and this history? Mr. Hansen. We do not know enough to---- Senator Thompson. Extrapolate that the current trend is going to continue? Mr. Hansen. Right, because, you see, there are uncertainty bars on these, the black vertical bars. In fact, the aerosol changes are very uncertain. We do not have the measurements. It is clear we need to try to do some things, and we will need to adjust our strategy as we go along, as we learn more. Senator Thompson. If my suggestion is correct, it does not mean that we should not do anything about it. It does not mean that we should not try to deal with it, or err on the side of safety in the long-term. But it does seem to me, from all I can gather and my limited knowledge of this area, that there is still an awful lot we do not know. It would be very difficult, based on where the science is and where the history and the historical analysis has been, to extrapolate any trend with confidence. It is kind of like budgets and deficits and surpluses around here. Whatever is happening at the moment is what we predict is going to continue to happen. I hope scientists do not do the same thing, but it is a good thing to keep mind, I think, as we go forward. I also understand that some satellite measurements have been different than others in terms of the extent of the warming. Obviously, you have got regional considerations to take into effect. Some parts of the world are cooling, many are warming. In some cases, surface measurements have been different from satellite measurements--have they not? Mr. Karl. It is an interesting aspect of trying to understand some of the details of what we see. Senator Thompson. Do not try to make me understand it. We do not have time enough for me to understand all that. But I have a couple more questions, if you can give me a summary. Mr. Karl. It is clear that if you look at the middle of the atmosphere--I think you were referring to satellite measurements--if you go back to the late 1950's, where we have weather balloons, the middle atmosphere and the surface warming is very comparable. If you look at the last 20 years, a smaller period where satellites have been able to provide additional information, you do find significant differences that we do not entirely understand today. Senator Thompson. Alright, sir. Getting to the causes of warming, Dr. Hansen you especially have made the point that perhaps we are not emphasizing enough the non-CO<INF>2</INF> aspects. I notice this bill creates an Office of Carbon Management and so forth. Obviously, CO<INF>2</INF> is significant, but actually I believe that has been rather stable. CO<INF>2</INF> emissions have been rather stable over a period of time--haven't they--while the other particulates and so forth have gone up? Mr. Hansen. The CO<INF>2</INF> emissions have been, in the last 20 years, increasing at about 1 percent a year. That compares with about 4 percent per year from the end of World War II until the oil price shock in the 1970's. So we changed the growth rate from 4 percent to 1 percent. But if we allowed even 1 percent per year growth to continue 50 years, we would be in trouble. So we really need to change that 1 percent to more like 0 percent, and that does require some effort and some technology. It is often assumed that CO<INF>2</INF> is all the problem or almost all the problem. That is under the assumption that CO<INF>2</INF> emissions continue to increase, so that every year we burn more fossils fuels than the year before, and that is not necessarily true. If we can decrease that growth rate down to 0 percent, then its contribution is not so overwhelming. Senator Thompson. Both of you worked on the National Academy of Sciences report that did an evaluation of the work of the IPCC, and it has been somewhat controversial. The summary that came out was used in the media, in many cases, to say that what you were doing was endorsing Kyoto or certainly at least endorsing the IPCC conclusions. One of your fellow panelists, Richard Lindzen has written in the Wall Street Journal about it, and says, ``The panel was finally asked to evaluate the work of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, focusing on the summary for policymakers, the only part ever read or quoted. The summary for policymakers, which is seen as endorsing Kyoto, is commonly presented as the consensus of thousands of the world's foremost climate scientists. Within the confines of professional courtesy, the NAS panel essentially concluded that the IPCC's summary for policymakers does not provide suitable guidance for the U.S. Government. The full IPCC report is an admirable description of research activities and climate science, but it is not specifically directed at policy. The summary for policymakers is, but it is also a very different document. It represents a consensus of government representatives, many of whom are also their nation's Kyoto representatives, rather than scientists. The resulting document has a strong tendency to disguise uncertainty and to conjure up some scary scenarios for which there is no evidence.'' \1\ --------------------------------------------------------------------------- \1\ The article by Richard S. Lindzen referred to by Senator Thompson appears in the Appendix on page 118. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Would you concur or disagree with his assessment of the work of the NAS in this instance? Mr. Hansen. I am disappointed that the media takes such a simple perspective. We reaffirmed that there is some global warming going on, and that there is a danger of large climate change later this century. But that does not lead to the conclusion that therefore the solution to this is Kyoto. We did not address the appropriate policy responses. We did take pains to stress some caveats that should be associated with the IPCC assessment. In particular, right at the very beginning, our second paragraph of the summary, we said that the projections of IPCC that get very large climate change are based on the premise of a business-as-usual scenario, which has larger and larger emissions. It is not obvious that will happen. In fact, in the last 20 years, there has actually been some deceleration in the rate of growth of climate forcings. The peak rate of growth occurred in 1980 and there has been a 25-percent reduction in that rate, due to the fact that we decided to phase out chlorofluorocarbons and the methane growth rate declined. So that is an example of the kind of strategy, that you can have other benefits from reducing some of these climate forcing agents. That is what we are trying to argue, that we need to look at the entire picture, not just CO<INF>2</INF>. Senator Thompson. I am over time, but if you want Mr. Karl to respond to that, it is fine with me. Chairman Lieberman. Mr. Karl. Mr. Karl. Commenting on Mr. Lindzen's comment, one of the things, I think, we tried to point out in the Academy report is any time you are necessarily taking a very large volume of work, like if you look at the IPCC full science report, and then you look at the technical summary and the summary for policymakers, it shrinks down. So it is very clear that you do not have the time to or the length of paper to explain all the uncertainties and all of the details of the changes. So I think it is only natural, when you look at a briefer summary, that you do not spend a lot of time reading all the uncertainties, and clearly they are there in the IPCC report, and often beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and people can take all of those reports and selectively pull out individual sentences and try and craft either a very uncertain future or a very certain future. Senator Thompson. Sometimes commentators or politicians using scientific research and analysis to justify their opinions is not a pretty sight; is it? Mr. Karl. It is not a pretty sight, but one thing I would say is in Shanghai, as we said in the Academy report, every change that was made to the report--because we went there with a draft--there were suggestions from the floor. They did not understand some comments that were made. They suggested alternative language. But for every change that was made, there was a scientist who was responsible for that section, who formed a group and eventually agreed to whatever change was put into the report on the summary for the policymakers. Senator Thompson. Thank you very much. Chairman Lieberman. Thanks, Senator Thompson. Senator Voinovich. Senator Voinovich. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The two of us are on two committees, this Committee and Environment and Public Works, and I am not sure sometimes which committee I am before. I noticed that there is a movement to move climate change into our Subcommittee in Environment and Public Works. Chairman Lieberman. That is correct. OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR VOINOVICH Senator Voinovich. I thank you for calling this hearing today. I think that this legislation does a good job of calling more attention to the issue of climate change without jumping to some of the conclusions, regarding the science and other issues, which have plagued other approaches. I am pleased, in particular, that it recognizes the need for the continued use of coal. I was interested in Dr. Hansen's comments. Coal is now and will continue to be the most economical way of producing energy in this country for many years. We have a 250-year supply of coal and we need to encourage clean-coal technologies. Unfortunately, Mr. Chairman, the previous administration was anti-coal and did everything it could to discourage its use, instead of promoting clean-coal technology and working with the utilities to improve their emissions to protect the environment and public health, and to provide low- cost energy. I sincerely believe that until we pass a multi-emissions bill and deal with the issue of new source review, that we are not going to be able to utilize the technology available for coal so that we can have low-cost energy and move forward with improving our environment. The same applies to nuclear power. We cannot examine climate change and a national energy policy and ignore the fact that nuclear power is something that should be looked at, and again, until we deal with the political football of what we do with nuclear waste, we cannot move on with that option. But it is one that we need to move forward with. As you know, Mr. Chairman, we did have a hearing in the Public Works Committee which examined the state of the science in terms of climate change, and I was impressed with the fact that there are still many uncertainties regarding climate change and the state of consensus on the issue is, I think, greatly exaggerated by climate change proponents and most members of the press. I noticed that Senator Thompson mentioned Dr. Lindzen's testimony and I am going to ask if that testimony that he gave in the hearing can be inserted in the record for today.\1\ --------------------------------------------------------------------------- \1\ The prepared testimony before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee by Richard S. Lindzen on May 2, 2001 appears in the Appendix on page 120. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Chairman Lieberman. Without objection Senator Voinovich. I am encouraged, although I think that President Bush handled this Kyoto Treaty issue--maybe from a public relations point of view, he could have handled it differently, because I know that Europeans are up in arms, and I ran into that when I was at the Organization for Security and Cooperation meeting in Europe and also at a NATO meeting. But I am encouraged that President Bush announced last week a broad policy initiative to further study climate change and the potential impacts, including an important joint venture with Japan to develop state-of-the-art climate modeling. The models that the U.N.'s IPCC has relied upon need additional research before we base a major policy initiative on them, such as what is called for by the European Union. We have to really improve the modeling substantially. I think this legislation is a positive step forward in the sense that it is bipartisan and tries to answer the many uncertainties involved with this issue. My concerns with the legislation are the costs, which are substantial, and whether or not creating a new bureaucracy in the Department of Energy and in the White House is going to enhance our ability to deal with this challenging problem or whether it is going to make it even more difficult. It authorizes some $4.8 billion, and I am interested in finding out how much is already appropriated to various agencies and departments for climate change and whether or not there is an overlap in terms of the funding. In addition, I would like to make sure that the new offices in the Department of Energy and the White House actually reduce bureaucratic burden instead of increasing it. I want to again underscore what Senator Thompson said, and that is the National Academy of Sciences, in their report, said, ``Because there is considerable uncertainty in current understanding of how the climate system varies naturally and reacts to emissions of greenhouse gases and aerosols, current estimates of the magnitude of future warming should be regarded as tentative and subject to future adjustments either upward or downward, and reducing the wide range of uncertainty inherent in current model predictions of global climate change will require major advances in understanding and modeling of both the factors that determine atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases and aerosols and the so-called feedbacks that determine the sensitivity of the climate system and prescribed increase in greenhouse gases. There is also a pressing need for a global observing system designed for monitoring climate.'' It is really important that Senator Byrd and Senator Stevens are trying to bring some more objective evaluation of where we are to this subject. Would you agree that we need a whole lot more work in this area? Mr. Hansen. Yes, absolutely. I have been arguing for some years that--some people would say that the error bars that we have on these forcings are actually underestimated--that we have to measure what things are actually changing. If we are going to project the future, we have to know what is happening now. Mr. Karl. There is absolutely no question, as I indicated in my oral statement, that we need fundamental observations for the long-term, not just a 2- or 3-year effort. We need to make sure that we put into place an observing system that can guarantee 50 years from now that we will know what actually happened to some of these very important variables that we have discussed here today. Senator Voinovich. This legislation funds clean-coal technology, and Dr. Hansen, you mentioned that. With your understanding of the science today, do you believe it is possible to address the concerns of the climate change proponents and continue to rely upon the burning of our current coal levels? Mr. Hansen. Coal has at least two--it has several emissions. Black carbon is one of them. I think that scrubbing the sulfate and the black carbon is something that can be done. I think that, as you have mentioned, the technology for that has been worked on. That will take care of part of the problem. In the long-run, if coal were to be a major contributor in the next 100 years to our energy needs, we may also need to actually capture the CO<INF>2</INF>. That is possible, and there are now experiments intended to prove that this can be done in an economic way and we can dispose of the CO<INF>2</INF>. There are experiments where this is being tested, the CO<INF>2</INF> injected into the ocean, and the ocean can absorb it all. So I think that it is technically possible. We need to support that technology, but it will raise a practical issue because it will increase the cost. We need to make sure that it is not so costly that it would discourage some countries from actually using it. Senator Voinovich. Do you think that it could be compensated with more attention to carbon sinks? Mr. Hansen. Carbon sinks, if you mean in the biosphere of forests and soils, there is a limit as to how much you can put there. It can help, but by itself, that is not sufficient if we, in fact, continue to have fossil fuels as a major energy source. Senator Voinovich. And what do you think of nuclear power? Mr. Hansen. Again, these types of issues, of course, have to be decided by the people through the representatives, and as you know, there are pros and cons to each of these. Nuclear power, from our standpoint as climate scientists, we can say, ``Well, it looks great from that standpoint.'' It produces essentially no CO<INF>2</INF>. So, if it were acceptable, then that is certainly a good candidate for an energy source. Senator Voinovich. I know that you seem to be reluctant to comment about the organizational structure, when you were asked a question earlier. Mr. Hansen. I do not think it is appropriate really, for me to do that. Senator Voinovich. May I ask you this? We have the Department of Energy, President Clinton had a task force with the Council on Environmental Quality in the White House, and there are many agencies right now that are dealing with this issue. From your observation, do you think that these activities are well coordinated? Mr. Hansen. I think there is a NAS report--Mr. Karl can put in his word here, too, but I think there is pretty widespread agreement that it is not as coordinated as it should be. Mr. Karl. As I mentioned earlier, this is an exceedingly complex issue, ranging from understanding the physical aspects of the climate system down to the impacts, and I must tell you one of the most frustrating experiences as a scientist is when you try and go interdisciplinary and try and link up the information from one specific scientific specialty to others, to really understand almost every problem we have, relate to multiple stresses. It really requires a lot of coordination. So the statement that it is not nearly as well-coordinated as it could be, I think goes without saying. Senator Voinovich. So you would both agree that, whether through this proposed legislation or some other vehicle, there is a need for better coordination between all of the agencies that are dealing with this problem? Mr. Karl. Yes. Senator Voinovich. Thank you. Chairman Lieberman. Thanks, Senator Voinovich. Senator Collins. OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR COLLINS Senator Collins. I want to begin by thanking you for holding this hearing. Climate change is a serious and growing problem. Global temperatures have increased by approximately 1 degree over the last 100 years. According to the scientific community, much of this warming is likely due to human activities that have increased greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. This warming is expected to accelerate. The best predictions forecast an increase in global temperatures of anywhere from 2.5 to 10 degrees by the end of the next century. According to a report recently prepared by the National Academy of Sciences, such warming could well have serious adverse effects, including droughts, floods, sea level rise, and far-reaching changes to ecosystems. Senator Byrd and Senator Stevens deserve praise for their efforts to address the difficult issue of climate change by crafting legislation that would position the United States to address climate change in a comprehensive manner and with adequate resources. I am therefore very pleased to join the Senators as a co- sponsor of their legislation. By more than doubling authorized funds for research and development to create new technologies to deal with climate change, this legislation would significantly advance the United States' efforts to address climate change, as well as better position the United States to become a leader in the energy technologies of the future. The Climate Change Strategy and Technology Innovation Act is an important step in creating an appropriate U.S. response to climate change. But, Mr. Chairman, I would suggest that it is not the only step that we should take. We also need to continue making improvements in energy efficiency, further develop our renewable energy resources, and take action to reduce emissions. In fact, the Chairman and I are co-sponsors of legislation that would attempt to bring about those changes. By taking these actions in combination with the groundbreaking legislation proposed by Senator Byrd and Senator Stevens, I believe that we can create an energy strategy that will save consumers money, make America less dependent on foreign energy sources, and protect society and the environment from the detrimental effects of climate change. Mr. Chairman, I am very fortunate to have on my staff a climatologist. I suspect that I may be the only Senator who is not a member of the Environment Committee that has a climatologist on my staff, and I have to tell you that he speaks very highly of the work done by the two scientists who are appearing before us today. Dr. Karl, my staff tells me that you have done groundbreaking work on the analysis of global temperature trends, and your work has made a significant contribution to our knowledge of global warming. Given your expertise on measuring temperature trends, could you discuss an issue that I understand has been hotly debated with climate change, on the differing results between ground-level and satellite measurements of temperature trends. I understand that ground-level measurements have often shown greater warming than satellite measurements. So the question that comes to my mind: Is there a problem with one set of measurements or are ground temperatures really warming faster than those in the lower atmosphere? Mr. Karl. That is a very good question, Senator, and I will try to briefly answer that. As I indicated earlier to Senator Thompson, that if we take a look at the temperatures in the middle part of the troposphere, they have been measured by satellites since 1979. If we go back farther in time, using weather balloons, we can get an estimate of the temperatures in the middle part of the troposphere back to 1960. If we see what is happening at the surface and compare that to the middle part of the troposphere, we find a reasonably consistent picture over that longer 40-year period. If we focus on the last 20 years, we find a significant difference. Part of that difference, we think we understand in terms of the timing. It is a short record, remember, 20 years, the timing of El Nino events, the timing of volcanic eruptions-- Mount Pinutubo, for example, all have big effects in a short record. Also the way in which the Earth is sampled differently from ground-based measurements compared to balloons and from satellite data impacts the difference. So we can go some way toward explaining the difference in the last 20 years, but part of that difference still remains unexplained and it is one of the challenges of the scientific community to understand. Now, are there still problems with both surface and tropospheric temperature measurements? Certainly we try to put error bounds on the data, and we think even given the error bounds that we put on these two different sets of measurements, in the troposphere and at the surface, there still remains an unexplained physical difference that we do not quite have resolved yet today. Senator Collins. Thank you. Dr. Hansen, I have a question for you, also. In your written testimony, you speak extensively of the importance of combating air pollution as a means of addressing climate change. As you point out, this would have substantial collateral benefits. Your statistics on the impact of air pollution in Europe are really stunning: 40,000 deaths and 500,000 asthma cases a year in France, Switzerland, and Austria alone. In your judgment, does the Kyoto Protocol adequately and efficiently address the global warming impacts of black carbon and other forms of air pollution? Mr. Hansen. No, it does not. It, in fact, does not include black carbon. It does not include tropospheric ozone. As you notice in my chart, if you add up our estimates of those two forcings, it is comparable to that of CO<INF>2</INF>, and I think it is important that they be included. Given the difficulty, the cost of the kind of agreements that you would need for the Kyoto Protocol, I just do not see us having two of these. So I think it makes much more sense to combine the air pollution issue and the CO<INF>2</INF> issue, otherwise we are just not giving enough attention to this aspect of the problem. I do not know how many people are dying from global warming right now, but I do not think it is very many, and I do not think there are as many people being affected by that. So it is just inappropriate to neglect this air pollution aspect. Senator Collins. And that does appear to be a significant weakness of the Kyoto Protocol. Mr. Hansen. In my personal opinion, yes. Senator Collins. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Chairman Lieberman. Thanks very much, Senator Collins. I remember being at a seminar on global warming in which--this was one of those Aspen programs in which we had a bunch of scientists talking to a bunch of us members of Congress, and one member of the House, who happened to be a Republican, at the end said--it was Jim Greenwood who said, ``So let me get this straight,'' to the scientists, ``If you are right,'' and they were mostly very proactive about global warming, ``and we take appropriate remedial action, we will have saved the planet as we know it. And if you are hyperventilating a bit, all we will have done is to clean up the air and keep a lot of people healthier than they otherwise would be.'' So, not a bad trade- off. Thank you. Senator Bennett, thanks for being here. OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR BENNETT Senator Bennett. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. If I may, I would respond to that with another set of trade-offs. There is no agreement in the scientific community about what is causing global warming. There are hypotheses that are vigorously argued one side or the other. There is, as nearly as I can tell, absolute agreement in the economic community that Kyoto would be a disaster, economically, to the United States, if it were to be put into place. My point is that the greatest enemy of the environment is poverty. Dr. Hansen has talked about India and the brown cloud that hangs over India. The reason India puts up with that is not that they like air pollution, but that they cannot afford in their economy the kind of scrubbers that we have. So if we go chasing down the cliff, and I consider it a cliff, of Kyoto, we run the risk of impoverishing the economy that drives the rest of the world, and thereby end up with people in underdeveloped countries causing greater global warming than otherwise. So I would have argued with your Republican friend if I had been present at that particular Aspen Institute. Dr. Hansen, I do not want to mousetrap you or blindside you in any way. I have here a report written by Patrick Michaels. Are you familiar with Mr. Michaels? Mr. Hansen. Yes, I am. Senator Bennett. Rather than debate it, I would ask you to supply for the record your rebuttal to Mr. Michaels' argument, so that those who do not know what we are talking about will understand this. I am quoting from this report, he says, ``NASA scientists--on June 23, 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen testified before the House that there was a strong cause-and- effect relationship between observed temperatures and human emissions into the atmosphere,'' and then you presented a model based on that assumption where you predicted an increase of .45 degrees centigrade from 1988 to 1997, and Mr. Michaels has a chart where he shows that prediction was wrong on the high side by a fairly significant amount. I would appreciate it if you would respond to that chart and give us your analysis. If you can do it quickly here---- Mr. Hansen. Yes, I would like to quickly respond to that. It is a very curious charge, because, in fact, if you look at my 1988 testimony, what I showed was three scenarios for the future. One of them, scenario A, was business-as-usual, in which the emissions increase, every year you have more than before, and the other--scenarios B and C had more flat emissions. In fact, the real-world emissions have been between scenarios B and C. If you look at our climate model calculations for the forcings which have actually occurred, they are right on the money. So Mr. Michaels did a very interesting thing. He took our chart--by the way, in the Senate testimony I said---- Senator Bennett. In the House testimony. Mr. Hansen. In my Senate testimony in 1988---- Senator Bennett. Oh, OK. Mr. Hansen. I testified to both the House and Senate in 1988 and showed exactly the same projections--but I said the most likely scenario is scenario B, not scenario A. But Mr. Michaels took this chart, erased scenarios B and C, and showed scenario A. So it is a very simple answer to this. Senator Bennett. I appreciate that, because I suggest or believe that the New York Times has taken scenario A and enshrined it in conventional wisdom forever and ever, as they tell us what scientists are saying. I appreciate your clarifying that, because what you are saying is that there is no absolute certain prediction upon which everybody can depend with respect to the future. There is a great deal of uncertainty. Mr. Hansen. That is exactly right. There is no reason that we need to follow scenario A, the business-as-usual. Senator Bennett. You are saying now that we did not follow the scenario---- Mr. Hansen. We have not, no. I mentioned a little earlier that, in fact, the growth rate of emissions declined 25 percent in the last two decades because of chlorofluorocarbons being phased out and because of methane slowdowns. So we have already taken some very helpful steps for reducing the future climate change and we need to take some more in the next century. Senator Bennett. I would hope that if there is any representative of the New York Times here, that they would call your answer to the attention of their editorial writers, so that they could become a little less hysterical. Mr. Hansen. I actually tried to do that. I wrote an op-ed article a week ago, but they did not publish it. Senator Lieberman. We can sympathize with that. [Laughter.] Senator Bennett. You will not get opinions that are not fully orthodox ever reported in the New York Times, unless you can get Bill Sapphire to write the column about it. Chairman Lieberman. That explains why I like those editorials, they are fully Orthodox. [Laughter.] Senator Bennett. Very good. You have maybe answered this question, but I would like you to get into it a little bit more. We are talking about temperatures going up in the last 100 years. In fact, they went up for 30 years. They went down, admittedly at a lower angle than they went up, for about 30 years, and then they started up again for 30 years. So, instead of this being the chart for the last century, it is this, this, and this. [Indicating.] Can you tell us what caused that 30 years of temperature going down, roughly between 1945 and 1975? Mr. Hansen. We cannot do it with confidence. It could be unforced variability. The climate system is a chaotic system, which fluctuates from decade to decade, just like the weather fluctuates from day to day, because the atmosphere and ocean are fluids, which are chaotic and have an unforced variability. It could also have been forced. As you know, as we have talked some time today, there are both positive forcings and negative forcings, and the negative forcings probably--the aerosols have not been increasing so much recently. In fact, in the United States and Europe, they have been decreasing because of acid rain concerns. It could be that the aerosol increases caused that cooling trend, but we do not have the measurements to prove that. Senator Bennett. You are underscoring once again the uncertainty here. Mr. Hansen. Right. Senator Bennett. We do not really know what caused it to go up so rapidly in that first 30-year period or what caused it to come down in 30 years. We think we have got a better handle on what is causing it to go up now, but even there, we cannot be absolutely sure. Is that a fair statement? Mr. Hansen. That is exactly right. Senator Bennett. One final question. As I looked into this, I asked a layman's question and was a little stunned at the answer that I got. I hope you can help me understand it. I said, ``How much CO<INF>2</INF> is there?'' We talk about CO<INF>2</INF>. How much CO<INF>2</INF> is there and what percentage of it comes from human activity? I am told that roughly three--maybe generously 4 percent--of the total CO<INF>2</INF> that the planet has released into the atmosphere every year comes from human activity, and that the rest of it is all generated by the planet itself. My question is, is there a difference out there in the atmosphere or troposphere or wherever it is you wander, between naturally-generated CO<INF>2</INF> and human-generated CO<INF>2</INF>? Let me tell you why I want to know that. Because if indeed there is no difference--let's take the 4 percent number, which is the largest number I have heard for human activity generating CO<INF>2</INF>, and take the 25 percent figure, which the New York Times quotes as coming from the United States, that means the United States is producing 1 percent of the total CO<INF>2</INF> out there, and if we do Kyoto, we reduce that by less than \1/10\ of 1 percent. I wonder why savaging the American economy to reduce the total by less than \1/10\ of 1 percent is a good idea. Now, that is where the math is. Once again, is there a difference in the atmosphere between naturally-generated CO<INF>2</INF> and human-generated CO<INF>2</INF> that affects this whole equation? Mr. Hansen. There is not a difference which is relevant to their ability to cause warming. However, I do not understand where your 4 percent comes from, because there are various ways to do these numbers. Senator Bennett. It comes from the Department of Energy and cross-checked with the Congressional Research Service at the Library of Congress. Mr. Hansen. Let me tell you what I think the relevant numbers would be. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the amount of CO<INF>2</INF> in the atmosphere was about 280 parts- per-million. It did change over time scales of tens of thousands of years with the Ice Ages and things, but the last several thousand years it was about 280 parts-per-million. It is now about 360--is that right, Mr. Karl? So it is about a 25- or 30-percent increase, and we are pretty darn sure that that is almost entirely due to human activity. So, based on those numbers, it is not a 4 percent increase. It is more like a 30 percent increase, and the United States has contributed a fairly large fraction of that. Senator Bennett. Clearly, we need a resolution to this, because I have gone to every source I could find to say what percentage of the total CO<INF>2</INF> currently being sent into the atmosphere comes from human activity, and the answers have been amazingly uniform. Mr. Hansen. The way you get that small number is to look at the fluxes. There are fluxes that go up and down, because the plants are growing and decomposing--there are fluxes up and down. But the point is, if you look at those total fluxes, yes, the human contribution may not look so large. But the net impact of that human contribution--it is always one sign. Humans are the cause almost certainly for almost all of this increase from 280 parts-per-million to 360 parts-per-million. So I think it is more appropriate to say that humans have contributed an increase to atmospheric CO<INF>2</INF>, which is about 30 percent of what is there now. There is really no scientific disagreement about this. Chairman Lieberman. You got your answer, Senator Bennett. Senator Bennett. I will go back to the Department of Energy and the Library of Congress now and see what comment they have. Chairman Lieberman. Thanks very much. You raise some important questions, including the ones about the economic consequences of Kyoto, which I believe that some of our witnesses on the second panel will testify to. If they do not, I am going to ask them about it. Thanks to both of you. Did you want to respond at all, Mr. Karl, to Senator Bennett's questioning? Mr. Karl. I might just want to make one statement, and that is absolute certainty is very rarely going to be found in these complex environmental issues. So when we say we are nearly certain, that is pretty high statement coming from scientists in an area that is fairly uncertain. Chairman Lieberman. Thanks very much to both of you. I would like to now call the final panel: Eileen Claussen, President of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change; Dr. James Edmonds, Senior Staff Scientist, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Battelle Memorial Institute; Dale E. Heydlauff, Senior Vice President, Environmental Affairs, of the American Electric Power Company; Jonathan Lash, President of the World Resources Institute; and Margo Thorning, who is Senior Vice President and Chief Economist of the American Council for Capital Formation. Thanks to all of you for coming this morning. We really look forward to your testimony about the Byrd-Stevens legislation and about the problem overall. Ms. Claussen, welcome back. TESTIMONY OF EILEEN CLAUSSEN,\1\ PRESIDENT, PEW CENTER ON GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE Ms. Claussen. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee. Thank you for this opportunity to testify on S. 1008, the Byrd-Stevens Climate Change Strategy and Technology Innovation Act of 2001. My name is Eileen Claussen and I am the President of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. The Pew Center on Global Climate Change is a nonprofit, nonpartisan and independent organization dedicated to providing credible information, straight answers and innovative solutions to the effort to address climate change. Thirty-six major companies in the Pew Center's Business Environmental Leadership Council, most included in the Fortune 500, work with the center in assessing the risks, challenges and solutions to climate change. There is a list of who they are up there on the chart. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- \1\ The prepared statement of Ms. Claussen appears in the Appendix on page 75. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Mr. Chairman, I believe that enacting the Byrd-Stevens bill will be an important first step in developing a serious domestic climate change program, a step that should be taken quickly. This bipartisan bill will integrate our energy policy with the long-term goal of stabilizing atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations. It will respond to concerns often raised by other nations that the United States has no basis for domestic action. It will continue investigation into the uncertainties of the science and economics of climate change. Most important among the many provisions of the Byrd- Stevens bill is the one that requires the development within 1 year of a U.S. climate change response strategy with the objective of stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations. To meet this goal, the strategy will rely on emission mitigation measures, technology innovation, climate adaptation research, and efforts to resolve the remaining scientific and economic uncertainties. At the Pew Center, we believe enough is known about the science and environmental impact of climate change for us to take action now. As we have learned from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, confirmed recently by the National Academy of Sciences, the scientific consensus is very strong that greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise. As a consequence, there likely will be substantial impacts to human health, agriculture, ecosystems and coastlines. The high probability of these outcomes indicates the need for some action now. Even as we act, however, we need to refine our scientific understanding, particularly on the impacts of climate change. But the best scientific evidence tells us that we have already bought a changed climate, to which we and our children will need to adapt. Obviously, the more quickly we mitigate, the less we will have to adapt. But some amount of adaptation appears inevitable. The Byrd-Stevens bill creates a sound basis for giving priority to and investigating how we must adapt to climate change. We also applaud efforts to further analyze the uncertainties regarding the economic impacts of climate change. Work done by the Pew Center suggests that no existing model accurately predicts the economic effects of any given measure to mitigate climate change. We are hard at work to fill in many of the gaps of the models, but additional efforts would be most welcome. Second, the Byrd-Stevens bill will promote technology innovation. In May, Senator Byrd said from the Senate floor that to address global climate change, ``What is required is the equivalent of an Industrial Revolution.'' We think he was exactly right. To effectively address climate change, we need to lower carbon intensity, become more energy efficient, promote carbon sequestration, and find ways to limit emissions of non-CO<INF>2</INF> gases. This will require fundamentally new technologies, as well as dramatic improvements in existing ones. New, less carbon-intensive ways of producing, distributing and using energy will be essential. The redesign of industrial processes, consumer products and agricultural technologies and practices will also be critical. These changes can be introduced over decades as we turn over our existing capital stocks and establish new infrastructure. But we must begin making investments, building institutions and implementing policies now. Third, under the Byrd-Stevens bill, the climate change response strategy will be required to incorporate mitigation approaches to reduce, avoid and sequester greenhouse gas emissions. This will force us to take a hard, needed look at our policy choices. We believe that it will be extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, to muster the kind of sustained effort needed to reduce, avoid and sequester greenhouse gas emissions without the force of legally-binding commitments. There is little incentive for any company to undertake real action unless ultimately all do and are in some manner held accountable. Markets, of course, will be instrumental in mobilizing the necessary resources and know-how. Market-based strategies, such as emissions trading, will also help deliver emissions reductions at the lowest possible cost. But markets can move us in the right direction only if they are given the right signals. In the United States, those signals have been neither fully given, nor fully excepted. Three decades of experience fighting pollution in the United States have taught us a great deal about what works best. In general, the most cost-effective approaches allow emitters flexibility to decide how best to meet a given limit, provide early direction so targets can be anticipated and factored into major capital and investment decisions, and employ market mechanisms to achieve reductions where they cost least. To ease the transition from established ways of doing business, targets should be realistic and achievable. What is important is that they be strong enough to spur real action and to encourage investment and development of the technology and infrastructure needed to achieve the long-term objective. A good first step to get our house in order is to immediately require accurate measurement, tracking, reporting and disclosure of greenhouse gas emissions. In addition, the government could enter into voluntary enforceable agreements with companies or sectors willing to commit to significant reductions. While such efforts can help get the United States on track, the long-term emission reductions needed can be achieved only with a far more comprehensive and binding strategy. I should add that congressional debate over the mitigation measures should start now and not await completion of the strategy, especially since the debate will take some time, we believe, to resolve. As Senator Byrd said when he introduced his bill, this legislation is intended to supplement, rather than replace, other complementary proposals to deal with climate change in the near-term on both the national and international level. In closing, Mr. Chairman, the Byrd-Stevens Climate Change Strategy and Technology Innovation Act of 2001, if enacted quickly and implemented in a serious manner, will provide an excellent foundation for climate change policy in this country. Thank you for the opportunity to testify. Chairman Lieberman. Thank you, Ms. Claussen, for that excellent testimony. Dr. Edmonds, welcome. Thank you for being here. TESTIMONY OF JAMES A. EDMONDS,\1\ Ph.D., SENIOR STAFF SCIENTIST, PACIFIC NORTHWEST NATIONAL LABORATORY, BATTELLE MEMORIAL INSTITUTE Mr. Edmonds. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee, for the opportunity to testify here this morning on the Climate Change Strategy and Technology Innovation Act of 2001. It is a privilege to be invited here and to have the opportunity to share a position on this panel with such distinguished colleagues as Dale Heydlauff, as well as, Eileen Claussen, Jonathan Lash, and Margo Thorning. My presence here today is possible because the U.S. Department of Energy, EPRI and numerous other organizations in both the public and private sectors have provided me and my research team at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory long-term research support. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- \1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Edmonds appears in the Appendix on page 79. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- That having been said, I come here today to speak as a researcher and the views I express are mine alone. The focus of my comments today are on the funding portion of the Climate Change Strategy and Technology Innovation Act of 2001, not on its organizational aspects. My observations draw upon the work that was conducted under the Global Energy Technology Strategy Program to Address Climate Change, an international, public-private sector collaboration advised by an eminent Steering Group. Analysis conducted at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, as well as in collaborating institutions around the world during Phase I, supports three general conclusions: (1) It's concentrations of greenhouse gases that matter. For CO<INF>2</INF>, cumulative emissions by all countries, over all time determine the concentration; (2) technology is the key to controlling the cost of stabilizing the concentration of greenhouse gases; and (3) managing the cost of stabilizing the concentration of greenhouse gases, at any level, requires a portfolio of energy R&D investments across a wide spectrum of technology classes. My first point is that: It's Concentrations Not Emissions. The United States is a party to the Framework Convention on Climate Change, which has as its objective the ``stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.'' This is not the same as stabilizing emissions. Because emissions of the greenhouse gas, CO<INF>2</INF>, accumulate in the atmosphere, its concentration will continue to rise indefinitely even if emissions are held to current levels or even at some reduced level. Stabilization of CO<INF>2</INF> concentrations means that the global energy system, and not just the United States' energy system, must undergo a fundamental transition from one in which emissions continue to grow throughout this century into one in which global emissions eventually peak and then decline. Coupled with significant global population and economic growth, this transition represents a daunting task even if a concentration as high as 750 parts per million is eventually determined to meet the goal of the Framework Convention--though no consensus yet exists as to what concentration will prevent ``dangerous'' interference with the climate system. My second point is that: Technology Controls Cost. Stabilizing the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will require a credible commitment to limit cumulative global emissions of CO<INF>2</INF>. Such a limit is unlikely to be achieved without cost but that cost will in large measure be shaped by the character of the energy technology options available to limit cumulative global emissions of CO<INF>2</INF>. My third point is that: There Is No ``Silver Bullet.'' No single technology controls the cost of stabilizing CO<INF>2</INF> concentrations under all circumstances. The portfolio of energy technologies that is employed varies across the world's regions and over time. Regional difference in such factors as resource endowments, institutions, demographics and economics, inevitably lead to different technology mixes in different nations, while changes in technology options inevitably lead to different technology mixes over time. Technologies that are potentially important in stabilizing the concentration of CO<INF>2</INF> include energy efficiency and renewable energy forms, non-carbon energy sources such as nuclear power and fusion, improved applications of fossil fuels, and technologies such as terrestrial carbon capture by plants and soils, carbon capture and geologic sequestration, fuel cells, and advanced energy storage systems, and commercial biomass and biotechnology. The latter holds the promise of revolutionary change for a wide range of energy technologies. Many of these technologies are undeveloped or play only a minor role in their present state of development. Mr. Chairman, thank you for this opportunity to testify. I will be happy to answer your and the Committee's questions. Chairman Lieberman. Thanks, Dr. Edmonds. Thanks very much. Mr. Heydlauff, welcome. TESTIMONY OF DALE E. HEYDLAUFF,\1\ SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT- ENVIRONMENTAL AFFAIRS, AMERICAN ELECTRIC POWER COMPANY Mr. Heydlauff. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. It is a privilege to be here, Senator Thompson, Senator Bennett. My name is Dale Heydlauff. I am the Senior Vice President for Environmental Affairs at American Electric Power Company. We are headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, and have the distinction of being the country's largest consumer of coal. As a matter of fact, I think we burn more coal than anybody in the Western Hemisphere. We are the third-largest consumer of natural gas. We are the largest producer of electricity in the Nation. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- \1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Heydlauff with an attachment appears in the Appendix on page 84. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- As a consequence of that, we recognized early on that the concerns about global climate changes were ones that we needed to take seriously. We have been heavily engaged in the debate since literally Dr. Hansen testified before the Senate in 1988. We have been following this debate very closely. We have been participants and observers in the international negotiations on this issue, and importantly, we have sought to find and identify ways that we can effectuate meaningful emission reductions, avoidance or sequestration through our activities and our operations, both domestically and around the world. It is in that context that I wanted to testify before you today, and with your permission, I will submit my written statement for the record and just summarize my oral remarks. The simple thing for me to do is just to say I concur completely with the statements of those who have preceded me on this panel. We are one of the founding members of the Pew Center on Climate Change Business Environmental Leadership Council and we are honored to be in that position. I rarely find myself in disagreement with the wisdom of our President, Mrs. Claussen. Dr. James Edmonds and I have known each other for a number of years now. The Global Energy Technology Strategy Program that he referenced in his testimony is research that we helped fund and have funded for years. Quite honestly, it has guided substantially what I want to say here today. Let me start and say if I could summarize my remarks in one line, it would be this: Accelerating climate friendly technology development through very dramatic increases in energy technology, research and development, both by the public and private sectors, and then deploying the fruits of that R&D on a global basis is by far and away, in my judgement, the most sensible, cost-effective and ultimately sustainable strategy for addressing the climate change issue. I do not think there is going to be any other way you are going to do it. If you believe that atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gas emissions need to be stabilized in the future, it is only going to come about as a result of a technology strategy, one that can help be facilitated by the legislation that we are testifying to today. Let me talk a little bit about the challenge that befalls this country in doing that, and indeed the world, because this is truly a global commons problem. The first is, in real terms, energy technology R&D in this Nation in the past decade has fallen by 47 percent, both in the public and private sectors. The energy industry itself, I am somewhat embarrassed to report, today invests \1/2\ of 1 percent of total national revenues on technology R&D. Compare that to the chemical, pharmaceutical, and telecommunications industries, which routinely spend about 10 percent of annual revenues on R&D, or the U.S. industrial average of 7 percent, and you can see the challenge we have confronting us. To compound the problem, however, what we are spending our dollars on today could be characterized as evolutionary improvements in existing technology, which certainly have some societal good, and particularly even some climate change benefits, because in many cases we are attempting to squeeze out more efficiency from existing technologies. But it simply is not going to be a successful strategy, because what we really need to do is develop those bold breakthrough technologies that the Byrd-Stevens legislation would help to facilitate. A couple of other points I wanted to mention, specifically with respect to the Byrd-Stevens legislation. One is I think they have done a commendable job in the construct of the national research program and agenda. First of all, you need leadership, and that leadership can only and should only be governed from the top of the Executive Branch in the White House. I commend them for the establishment of the White House office. Second, you do need a bureaucracy. I hesitate always to differ with the Senator from my home State, but in this case, I think you do need leadership, you need management of an effort of this magnitude. Third, quite honestly, as significant as the level of expenditures would be under this legislation, they will ultimately be inadequate, and I realize we are just talking about public sector investments with respect to the authorizations that we derive from this legislation, and hopefully the private sector would be willing to step up and come close to matching that level, because you are going to need investments of that magnitude ultimately to be successful. You look at the four paradigms of the Byrd-Stevens bill, and I think they have got it right. It would establish the solid foundation upon which to address the climate change issue for a very long time to come. So, with that, I would admonish the Committee to exercise the same degree of speed and forthrightness that you took to scheduling this hearing so soon after the legislation was introduced and proceed on to pass it out and send it over to the House. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Chairman Lieberman. Thanks very much, Mr. Heydlauff. It strikes me that for somebody who may be either here in the room, and not very familiar with this dialogue that has been going on, or watching on television, that the favorable testimony and very proactive testimony that you have given, representing the company that is the largest consumer of coal, might be surprising, because some might think that you would be avoiding a solution. So I admire the fact, and it is typical of a whole group of companies in a similar position, that you are forward-leaning, are part of the solution, and I know from previous conversation you want the certainty that will come with a legislative leadership and solution. So I thank you very much for your testimony. Mr. Lash, welcome back. Good to see you again. TESTIMONY OF JONATHAN LASH,\1\ PRESIDENT, WORLD RESOURCES INSTITUTE Mr. Lash. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Senator Thompson, and Senator Bennett. It is a pleasure to be here with you today. I was very struck by Senator Byrd's opening statement and by his co-sponsor Senator Stevens' comments at the beginning of this hearing. These comments are most important because they signify a recognition that climate change is a problem that needs to be systematically addressed and is a priority for our country. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- \1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Lash appears in the Appendix on page 91. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- I would actually like to address the legislation that is before us, rather than the science or the strategies that might emerge. Senator Byrd commented, as he did when he introduced the bill initially in the Senate, that this is a part of a broader effort on climate, not a substitute for action, and I want to address it in that context. It is essential that, at the same time, the Senate continue to deal with complementary proposals for addressing the problem of climate change including legislation that Members of this Committee have co- sponsored. I will come back to why I think that this is so important. But S. 1008 is particularly important because it recognizes that climate change represents threat to the Nation's interests and that we need a national climate change strategy that is informed by a public dialogue which can help the country to understand what is at stake in the issue and what is at stake as we approach the solutions. The strategy should take as its goal, the stabilization of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at safe levels. That recognition is an important step in our debate. This was the goal accepted by the United States almost a decade ago when then-President Bush signed and the U.S. Senate ratified the Framework Convention on Climate Change. Now the United States does not have a strategy on climate change, and as many commentators have noted, we are clearer about what we are against than what we are for. Second, S. 1008 recognizes that climate change considerations should be integrated into decision-making at every level of the government. I offer no view about the specific administrative arrangements proposed in the bill and the highly-detailed requirements, but I think that the effort to ensure that climate change considerations enter into energy policy and environmental policy decisions is essential, at all levels of the government. Third, S. 1008 recognizes that economic consequences of inaction on global warming may cost the global economy trillions of dollars. As Senator Bennett pointed out several times earlier, there is no free effort to respond to climate change and there is a great deal of discussion about the costs of any strategy for a response, but we need to recognize the costs of failure to respond as well. Fourth, S. 1008 recognizes that current research and development budgets are grossly inadequate to meet the challenge of climate change. As the bill's findings correctly state, stabilization of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will require transformational change in the global energy system, as well as research and development that leads to bold technological breakthroughs. I agree very much with what Mr. Heydlauff said a moment ago about the importance of research that is not just at the margins, but, of research that helps us understand the significant kind of changes that we could make. Today we have technologies available that companies part of the Pew Center are using to reduce emissions. It is not impossible for us to respond to climate change this week, next week, or next month, to improve efficiency, and to adopt new sources. At the World Resources Institute, we work with a group of companies who will soon purchase several thousand megawatts of wind energy in an effort to reduce their reliance on carbon- based fuels. But none of this is a substitute for large-scale research on major new technologies. Finally, S. 1008 recognizes that our national energy strategy cannot be shaped without paying close attention to the challenge of climate change. I want to go back to what I said at the start and emphasize again the need for early action. I think there are three reasons for slowly taking action now. First of all, if we begin to slowly take action, we will learn the answers to some of the questions that are troubling many Senators about the costs and technological and social difficulties of change. If we start slowly, we can add to our store of information about how to respond pragmatically. Second, a slow start gives us a chance to make a stable transition. Mr. Heydlauff's company, I believe, burns 80 million tons of coal a year. Part of the national energy strategy will certainly be to encourage companies like AEP to build new plants for the generation of electricity. I do not know how AEP managers can effectively represent the interests of their shareholders if they do not know what policies government may impose in 5, 6, or 8 years that will add to the costs of burning coal. Without knowing what regulatory costs will be managed, they do not know how much to invest in efficiency, how much to invest in gas, how much to invest in pollution controls. Finally, I do not think it is to the benefit of the United States' competitiveness to fail to invest in more efficient technologies for producing energy. Whatever long-term strategy we ultimately develop to try to stabilize concentrations, what we do in the first 10 years will likely have to be the same. Whatever the path we ultimately are going to follow, it will still involve early efforts to reduce pollution and control CO<INF>2</INF>. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Chairman Lieberman. Thank you very much, Mr. Lash, for that very interesting testimony. Ms. Thorning, thanks for being here. We look forward to hearing you now. TESTIMONY OF MARGO THORNING,\1\ Ph.D., SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT AND CHIEF ECONOMIST, AMERICAN COUNCIL FOR CAPITAL FORMATION Ms. Thorning. Thank you very much. I appreciate the opportunity, Mr. Chairman, to appear before this Committee and to appear with such a distinguished panel of climate policy experts. I would like to request that my written testimony be included in the record. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- \1\ The prepared statement of Ms. Thorning appears in the Appendix on page 98. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Chairman Lieberman. It will, without objection. Ms. Thorning. My written testimony includes a discussion of some of the issues you asked about, including the macroeconomic impact of the Kyoto Protocol and near-term emission limits, the impact on U.S. budget surpluses of actions that would slow economic growth, international trading systems, and a discussion of the fact that the European Union itself will not be able to meet its Kyoto targets, and a discussion of the science. Although I am not a scientist, I did want to raise the issue that, as we heard earlier, the science is not clearly understood. Much further work, much more study, needs to be done on that. Before launching into a little discussion of S. 1008, I would like to draw your attention to the story on the front page of the Washington Post this morning, Steven Pearlstein's story about the economic impact of global slowdown. The implication of the Pearlstein story is the United States is the engine of world economic growth. If we are unable to regenerate the strong growth that we have experienced in earlier years, it is going to be much harder for the developing economies and for Europe and for Japan to pull themselves out of their slump. Therefore, I think it is appropriate to weigh very carefully any major policy decisions, such as measures to, in the near-term, sharply reduce the growth or cap CO<INF>2</INF> emissions. The studies that we have looked at and that are described in my testimony suggest such policies would reduce U.S. levels of GDP by 2 to 4 percent a year, which would be a significant negative drag on the U.S. economy and on our trading partners. Also, there is a substantial body of research by scholars such as Robert Crandall at Brookings, McKibben and Wilcoxin, Yale professor Bill Nordhaus, that suggest that the cost of going ahead with sharp, near-term caps on emissions far exceed the benefits, even when you take account of the possibility of some changes to climate. So I think the evidence suggests we need to take a cautious attitude before deciding what is the best strategy to address the potential threat of climate change, and I do not think the scholars whose work I am mentioning suggest that nothing needs to be done. Clearly it does, but we need to move forward in the most efficient, cost-effective possible way, so as not unduly burden the U.S. economy and our trading partners. I would like to make a few comments about S. 1008. I think Senators Byrd and Stevens are to be commended for their recognition of the importance of technological innovation as the principal means of dealing with the possible threat, potential threat, of climate change. S. 1008 contains some helpful initiatives that could further the goals of maintaining strong economic growth and energy security, while reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The bill also appears to be supportive of some of the initiatives put forth by the Bush Administration, including advancing clean-coal technology. I was very pleased to hear the other comments about the importance of coal to the U.S. economy. It is clearly going to be a major energy source for the foreseeable future, and we do need to accelerate the development of clean-coal technology. However, I would like to suggest that S. 1008 falls short in some ways, in terms of promoting many of the policies I suggested in my testimony for encouraging technological innovation. For example, S. 1008 does not address the question of how to deploy new technology. We need to develop it, but how do we get it adopted? How do we get it into the system? One thing I would like to draw your attention to is the U.S. Tax Code, which taxes new investment much more harshly than most of our competitors, whether it is productive investment or whether it is pollution-control investment. As Table 1 of my testimony shows, the United States has very slow capital cost recovery. We rank near the bottom of a list of eight countries that Arthur Andersen surveyed. If we could improve depreciation or tax incentives for pulling through, it would help to pull through the kinds of equipment that would enable us to both grow and reduce CO<INF>2</INF> emissions. So, taking a look at the tax code and, as the Bush Administration moves forward with tax reform, hopefully that would be part of hopefully better depreciation, particularly for energy-efficient or pollution-reduction--would be part of any tax code reform. Second, S. 1008 does not address nuclear power. That has clearly got to be a major component, at least over the next several decades, of U.S. energy supply; France manages to produce 80 percent of its electricity and the United States only 20 percent. So it suggests that we ought to be able to move forward to rely on a source of energy that is much less polluting. We also need more bilateral cooperation with developing countries to promote the use of existing and emerging technology. We need to expand incentives for landfill methane and biomass, the EIA Clean Technology Initiative report shows that those were the two most effective programs, and I do not believe S. 1008 addresses those. Finally, we need to avoid caps on CO<INF>2</INF> emissions by U.S. industry and avoid setting targets at this time. We need further study of this issue. We need to move forward, but in a cost-effective, careful way. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Chairman Lieberman. Thank you very much. Thanks for your testimony. I appreciate the effort that all of you put into appearing before us. Ms. Claussen, let me start with you, and you talked about the critical need for a national strategy on climate change. You have extensive experience in government. Now you are in the private sector, working with some of America's largest corporations. Just give us your reaction to what you think the impact would be of a central White House office focused on climate change, and I want to ask the question implicitly, is it worth it? In other words, we do not want to continue to proliferate offices in the White House, but how do you see it here? Ms. Claussen. Senator, I was in government for about 25 years, and I participated in interagency process in the Reagan Administration and the first Bush Administration. In the early part of the Clinton Administration, I actually ran an interagency process. I hope I learned from the first two administrations and applied some of it in the third, but the fact is, this is a monster of an issue and everyone has a legitimate reason to be involved across the government for a variety of different reasons. If you do not have a way to focus the effort and coordinate the effort, you just have everybody doing their own thing based on their own set of objectives and the culture of their own agency. You do not have a coherent policy. It is extremely hard to do, but I think you have to center it in the White House and you have to put some real effort into making it work. Chairman Lieberman. Thank you. Let me go now to the economic consequences and, in a sense, some of the questions that Senator Bennett raised about the costs of complying with Kyoto or the cost of responding to the climate change problem. I was interested that, I think, Dr. Edmonds and Mr. Lash, in your prepared testimony, talked about the economic consequences of inaction here. I wonder if you could both expand on that, and if there is any way in which we could begin to quantify the economic cost of inaction. Mr. Edmonds. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The Global Energy Technology Strategy Program has shown that cost does matter and is an important element that must be taken into account in framing an effective response to climate change. The climate change issue is essentially an intergenerational problem. This makes the climate change problem far more difficult than local environmental problems involving short-lived gases and aerosols, with which we are more familiar. We largely live with the climate that we inherited from our predecessors, while we are in turn laying down the foundations of the climate that we will pass on to the next generation. But, we have very little margin to change our own climate. The actions that we take to mitigate emissions are therefore largely undertaken out of an altruistic motivation-care for our children and grandchildren. Under such circumstances the cost of emissions mitigation matters a great deal. This observation in turn leads us back to the importance of developing technologies and energy systems that can limit emissions in a cost-effective manner. And, that is the heart of S. 1008. Without cost-effective energy technologies and systems even the best-crafted tactics to limit cumulative global emissions of carbon to the atmosphere will ultimately prove to be either too expensive to implement, or will more likely lead to higher concentrations and greater climate change for future generations. On the other hand, if energy technologies and systems are developed and made available at reasonable cost, all tactics for controlling emissions begin to look much more attractive, as do lower cumulative global carbon emissions and long-term CO<INF>2</INF> concentrations. I think the thrust of everything we have learned under this global energy technology strategy program is that cost does matter. It is a very important element. It has to be taken into account. The climate change issue is essentially an intergenerational problem, and we largely live with the climate that we inherited from our predecessors, and we lay down the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that are passed onto the next generation. So, in fact, most of our margin is not on our own climate. It is an altruistic enterprise, and under those circumstances, we do altruism. We save for our kids education and we do things for the future, but cost really does matter and it matters a lot. I think what comes out of this global energy technology strategy program is that addressing the climate change issue seriously requires that we deal with this as a century scale problem, not as a year by year problem, and that if the technology to address climate change is not available--that is the core of what S. 1008 is about--if it is not available, pretty much independent of the best crafted tactics to limit cumulative global emissions of carbon to the atmosphere are ultimately going to turn out to be too expensive, and we will either not do it or we will not do as much as we could. On the other hand, if the technology is developed and is made available, all the tactics begin to look much more attractive and it is a lot easier to do the job right. I think that is the important lesson, that if we have the technology, it is going to be a lot easier job and costs are going to be minimal. Chairman Lieberman. Mr. Lash. Mr. Lash. Two brief comments--first, looking at the costs of action, one gets very different answers depending on the assumptions used in the models that do the calculations and on the policies that one analyzes. If the models assume that the economy is very good at changing sources of fuel, that we would use more gas and less coal as a response, and that new technologies would develop, the cost is low. If the models do not assume that kind of flexibility in our economy, the cost is high. If the models account for benefits, the cost is low. If the models do not account for benefits, the cost is high. Most models do not account for benefits because to account for benefits is very difficult. For instance, Dr. Hansen was talking about the number of people who die from air pollution who might be saved if we reduce pollution. Certainly, it is very important what policies are used. If you have a rigid regulatory system that imposes huge and sudden cost on utilities or on the auto industry, reductions will cost a lot. If you have a market-based system that allows companies to choose how they are going to proceed over a number of years, reductions will cost less. It is important to make those distinctions as one is analyzing costs. The same is true for the benefits of action and the costs of inaction. Because we are uncertain about precisely what will happen 25 years from now if we do not take action--any assessment we make of those costs is going to involve the kinds of scenarios that Dr. Hansen was talking about, and guesses about impacts, both here and externally, and it makes counting them difficult. The assumptions going in determine the numbers coming out. Chairman Lieberman. Mr. Heydlauff, it might be interesting to ask you to comment on this from the perspective of one company, a big, significant company, America's largest generator of electricity, generating about 6 percent of the U.S. figure, comparable to the annual electric power consumption of Mexico and Australia. I am just reading from your testimony--6.1 million customers. So the question is, from your company's point of view, you are supporting action here, I assume, as an act of good citizenship, but also because there has been a calculation made within the company and you dispatched your responsibility to shareholders that this is the right way to go economically, as well. I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit. Mr. Heydlauff. I would be happy to do that. One thing I believe has come out of the research that we help fund, is that you cannot solve this problem without new technology. We believe as a company that it would be a shame if the country adds new generation, utilizing existing technologies, and does not take advantage of advanced, more efficient, less carbon intensive technologies to meet the energy needs of the Nation, and most importantly, then, if we also do not take that technology and deploy it around the globe. Let me give you a concrete example of where I think the challenge is greatest, and that is in the developing nations, which are going to utilize their indigenous energy resources to grow their economies. Case in point is China. China's total coal burned in 1996, I think, was 600 million or 700 million tons a year. They are projected to burn 2.1 billion tons a year by 2015, the year at which they are also projected to have their greenhouse gas emissions equal those of the United States of America. A number of years ago, the Chinese came to us recognizing our expertise in coal-fired generation. They said we are going to build lots of new coal- fired generation, approximately at the time they were talking about building 15,000 megawatts of new generation a year, and we would like to talk to you about building some of those plants for us. We told them that, initially, our real interest was in trying to take these innovative clean-coal technologies that are much more efficient and much cleaner and deploy them in China. The problem is there is a price premium for that, that neither we nor our shareholders were willing to eat, nor were the Chinese willing to pay. That is one of the reasons why, for a number of years, Senator Byrd has had legislation in saying we need to figure a way to subsidize that delta between conventional technology and innovative technologies. We built a power plant in China, relatively clean, but it was utilizing 1940's, 1950's technology because that is all they were willing to pay for. I felt real bad about it, honestly, until I understood what we were displacing, which was the direct use of coal to heat and cook in residential dwellings. We brought electricity to a community that never had it before, which is obviously far cleaner and more efficient than what they were doing. But it was not what we should have accomplished, which was that leapfrog in technology use internationally. I do not believe AEP will build another coal- fired power plant like we have in operation today. I believe it will be much more efficient. I think coal has been the bedrock fuel for electric generation in this country for 100 years, and it will continue to be. We have got to find a way to burn it more efficiently, more cleanly--which the Byrd-Stevens legislation would accomplish. I applaud President Bush in his initiatives that he announced late last week, which is to advance research on carbon capture and then either utilizing the carbon dioxide for enhanced oil and gas recovery, or more appropriately probably because the volumes will be so significant, disposing of it in a safe and permanent manner in geologic formations; deep saline aquifers, abandoned oil and gas wells, coal mines, whatever. That is how you keep coal in the fuel mix, which I think is essential. Chairman Lieberman. I am going to yield to Senator Thompson and maybe he wants to take up this line of questioning. I take it from what you said in your earlier testimony that notwithstanding the need for transformational new technologies, energy technologies, you do not see the private sector here investing the necessary money in research and development, which is why we need the kind of focused, expanded effort that is part of this research and development effort through the Federal Government that is part of the Byrd-Stevens bill. Mr. Heydlauff. That is correct. Certainly, history would suggest that the levels of private sector investment in those revolutionary bold breakthrough technologies is pretty much nonexistent. There is very little of it going on today, and perhaps this legislation will motivate that. Chairman Lieberman. Thanks, thanks very much. Senator Thompson? Senator Thompson. I wonder why the R&D has been so low in this area, compared to other industries. It looks to me like you are being besieged at all sides. I know you and I share a commonality in that we both represent entities that are being sued by EPA right now. I am referring to TVA, saying that we are keeping the old plants on too long, and the modifications are not permitted under the Clean Air Act. So, in fact, it is a mini-Kyoto situation, it looks to me like. You have the factor of your need for a global approach to it, because the pollution in the area is destroying the Smoky Mountains National Park, by the way. You have automobile emissions and the coal emissions from the TVA plants, but a lot of it comes from your part of the country and it settles right down in that area. No company or entity wants to be disadvantaged. So you are going to have to have a global solution, more or less. The costs are said to be astronomical if we do it any differently. The rates will go up in the TVA area if we correct the problem and nobody knows really how much, but the damage being done is clearer there. It is more imminent. It is more polluted on the top of the Smoky Mountains most days than it is on the streets of New York City. So if we cannot have some kind of regional solution to that, I am wondering how we are going to take on the world. I get back to my point. I wonder why, with all this pressure and commentary, industry is not doing more. Clearly the government needs to step into this. That is what we do best up here. We mandate all these different things, all these different entities, and we come to what seem to be logical conclusions about what ought to be done about all of these problems. We pass some bills not knowing what we are doing, unintended consequences run rampant. This is what we do well up here, research and development, but industry, I think, has got to do more too. I would like to work with you some in the future and talk about some way we can approach this regional problem that is doing a lot of damage. Nobody wants to put anybody at a competitive disadvantage, but maybe if we do it together---- Mr. Heydlauff. Just to respond very quickly, one of the other things that Congress can do and can do well is resolve conflicts in Federal policy. Nowhere is that more in evidence than in the issue that you raised about new source review. The Clinton Administration came to us early on and said they were going to meet the aim of the framework convention on climate change to reduce emissions levels by the year 2000, but they do not want to rely on new bureaucracies and new regulations. They want to tap the ingenuity of the American public, and in particular, American industry. The electric utility industry stepped up to the plate and put together a very robust program of response measures. We literally combed our company for opportunities to improve the efficiency with which we convert coal into electrons, and we took a number of measures at our power plants to do that. I would submit to you that everything we did that improved the efficiency with which we converted energy into electrons, simultaneously reduced those air emissions that you are concerned about in the Smoky Mountains. Yet, we are in the unhappy position today of having been sued for taking some of those actions. We are improving the efficiency of the plant, we are reducing emissions, yet the government is telling us that was a violation of new source review rules and, consequently and unfortunately, we have halted those measures until we have resolved this issue. I hope that--and I realize that is an issue not for this Committee. Senator Lieberman, it is for your other committee, and in that we can get that issue resolved too. View it in the context of a multi-pollutant control legislation that Senator Voinovich talked about, where we can bring a rational approach, a resolution to all of these issues; the air quality issues, Senator Thompson, that you are concerned about in Tennessee, and I know they are concerned about it in the Northeast, as well as, perhaps, starting down the path that we all hope to go down in terms of the response to global climate change concerns. Senator Thompson. Going to another question here that was mentioned, I think that several members of the panel, specifically Mr. Lash, mentioned the uncertainty of the economic estimates. I saw a June 12 USA Today article, I think you referenced it in your testimony, Ms. Thorning, that indicates the Clinton Administration has now acknowledged that its economic analysis was flawed. Back during Kyoto, they came up with some rather low numbers as to what it would cost--but, it seems it was based on China and India accepting binding emissions limits, which they have not, and Europe and other countries engaging in emissions trading as a solution, and apparently they are not making any progress on that. Former administration officials were quoted as saying, ``That the thing that made them really uneasy about our analysis was that if our assumptions do not come true, costs can come up much, much higher.'' Ms. Thorning, you have done that, I know, in some of your work. It has been pointed out that it is very uncertain and it all depends on assumptions and so forth. I would like for you to address that and I would specifically like for you to address what we should do and how much is it going to cost? Kyoto is a good place to start. That is one so-called solution that is out there, and people can try to measure it. There are, obviously, other approaches that will presumably have lower price tags. As far as Kyoto is concerned, first discuss the validity of being able to analyze the economic aspects. Second, what does your work reveal in terms of the effect it would have on: The gross domestic product of this country; our growth, on gas and electricity prices; and on migration of industry out of this country? Ms. Thorning. Thank you, Senator Thompson. The focus of our work over the past 10 years at the ACCF--and we have spent a fair amount of time on the issue of climate change--has been looking at the costs of action, and what are appropriate policies to respond to this potential threat. A range of credible modelers, ranging from the Department of Energy to Wharton Econometric Forecasting Associates, Australian Bureau of Resource Economics, Charles Rivers Associates, Professor Alan Mann at Stanford, suggest that the cost range of complying with Kyoto would be 2 to 4 percent of U.S. GDP or $200 to $400 billion a year. Of course, the cost varies depending on what the assumption is about global trading, particularly, as well as some other variables in the models. As you mentioned, the Clinton Administration's Council of Economic Advisers number was really off the chart, which they have now admitted was erroneous. So it seems to me very clear that the costs are high. The Department of Energy also estimated that electricity prices would have to rise perhaps as much as 80 percent, gasoline prices, 50 percent. So the cost to the American economy is very significant. Low-income wage earners would be particularly disproportionately impacted, because the cost of energy is a much larger share of their budget. U.S. industry would tend to migrate to countries that were not CO<INF>2</INF> constrained. Alan Mann's work suggests that by 2020, we might lose 10 to 15 percent of our energy intensive sector. So there are very serious consequences to precipitously moving forward to limit--cap CO<INF>2</INF> emissions. It seems to me that given the uncertainty about the science, the focus of your hearing today, which is on the importance of technology and the development of alternative technologies for energy production, is very appropriate. We do need to focus on that. Senator Thompson. Without China and India and these other countries being a part of it, would the CO<INF>2</INF> emissions continue to rise anyway? Ms. Thorning. They will continue to rise. There are numerous projections that show that even if the United States and Europe shut down and sat in the dark--no electricity, no cars--the impact on global concentrations of CO<INF>2</INF> would be almost negligible. Senator Thompson. Do you have any basis for reaching an opinion as to whether or not the European Union could or would comply, even if we did? Ms. Thorning. As my testimony points out, there are five or six new studies that suggest that the European Union will be 15 to 25 percent above its emissions targets by 2010 or 2012. So it is hypocritical, really, of the European Union to rail against the Bush Administration's policy of stepping back and taking another look at how to address climate change. Senator Thompson. It seems to me that the European Union's attitude toward Kyoto is somewhat like some of our Democratic friends'--on the House side--attitude is toward campaign finance reform, and that is it is a great idea, as long as it does not happen. [Laughter.] Ms. Thorning. One of the things that I think people need to realize about the European Union is the leaders there have 10 years worth of capital built up, political capital. They have made the case that they need to comply with Kyoto and it is very difficult for them now to simply back away, I think, and we need to be sensitive to that situation and help--which I think the Bush Administration is trying to do--come up with alternative strategies that will enable them to feel that we and the rest of the world are going to move forward. Senator Thompson. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Chairman Lieberman. Thanks, Senator Thompson. It strikes me you are one of a small, courageous band of Republicans that could have made that comment about Democrats and campaign finance reform. [Laughter.] Senator Bennett. Senator Bennett. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I could not possibly have said what Senator Thompson said on that score. As I sit through the morning, I am beginning to see the emergence of consensus, and let me try it out and see if you agree, because obviously I do not want to put words in anybody's mouth. But it seems to me that technology is the answer to this problem. Arbitrary limits, such as came out of the Kyoto Protocol, are not, but technology that is developed to be more efficient almost always means cleaner, and there are economic benefits to being more efficient, and cleaner is a wonderful side effect that comes out, and indeed, as Mr. Lash points out, has some economic benefit in and of itself. I am referring to an editorial comment made by Robert Samuelson, and I liked his opening. He said, ``The education of George W. Bush on global warming as simply summarized: Honesty may not be the best policy.'' Greenhouse politics have long blended exaggeration and deception, and the Bush Administration, I think, has told the truth about Kyoto and now is being beaten up for it. But that is not the issue. The issue is what do we do, and the answer seems to be, coming out of today's hearing, that we develop the technology to deal with it, rather than putting on the artificial, politically- dominated caps. Now, you are shaking your head, Ms. Claussen. You take the first shot at me here. Ms. Claussen. I agree with I think virtually everyone on this panel that you cannot solve this without technology. But I do not think that precludes the need for rational, sensible limits, which I think can also help you move the technology on the development side and also on the deployment side. This is not to say you need a mandatory system that will bankrupt the economy or that will move too soon, too much, but I think there is a real place for limits which, if done rationally over time and in a way that the market can sort out, have to be a part of the system. Senator Bennett. Let me give you an analogy then. You used two words, neither one of which can be challenged, but that create great mischief up here: Rational and sensible. I am not sure we are ever complying with both of those in legislation that we pass. Ms. Claussen. Well, I have great faith in the Senate. Senator Bennett. But in the automobile industry, CAFE standards have no doubt produced technological breakthroughs. I was at the Department of Transportation when the catalytic converter was introduced, and that was a technological breakthrough. But it was driven in part by CAFE standards. One of the interesting side effects of CAFE standards has been the creation of the automobile industry in Japan, because the Americans, for whatever reason, did not seem to be able to produce reliable small cars, and so more and more people started importing cars from Japan, where they had the technology to produce these kinds of cars. That is a separate debate. In the Samuelson column, he talks about how Europe has achieved what they have achieved with respect to emissions. He says there are only three countries in Europe that have reduced their emissions: Germany, Britain, and Luxembourg. I do not think we need to worry about Luxembourg. Britain, because of plentiful North Sea gas, they have shifted from coal. But in Germany, it is a one-time experience, as they have shut down the technologically-impaired plants of East Germany that came in with unification, and once that is done, they are not going to get another boost, unless there are technological breakthroughs that can say, when the time comes to retrofit a plant, we are going to retrofit it with one that is more efficient and cleaner. Along the lines, to stretch the analogy, of the CAFE standards, we are going to get rid of the Cadillac and buy a Toyota, and maybe we have to buy two Toyotas to carry everybody around, but maybe not, because you can really only get six people in a Cadillac, and if everybody breathes at the same time, you can get five in a Toyota. So I am just reacting here, but the reason I am doing this is because I find in the environmental community some segments that are anti-technology. They hate the idea of technology. Now, the best example of that, and this is obviously pathological, was the Unabomber, who did everything he could to attack technology as the source of all of our problems, when, in fact, technology is the solution to our problems, and the people who are heavy in the rhetoric, anti-technology, need to realize that we all need to get on board in the same thing if we are going to solve this kind of problem. Now let me give you an example, and maybe Mr. Heydlauff, you could comment on this. I talked to the electrical generators in Utah--obvious parochial interest. They tell me they are very bullish on wind. We have got a lot of wind in the West and they are very bullish on wind, and they have been able to design the windmills in such a way that they are not particularly dangerous to birds anymore. But there is one problem with wind, and that is that the wind stops, and you cannot stockpile energy the way you can stockpile Toyotas, and when the wind stops, you have got to have some alternative. The obvious alternative is hydro, where you have a body of water stored, and when the wind stops, you allow that water to go through the turbine and generate electricity until the wind starts again, and then, in those hours of the night when nobody is using the wind energy and you have excess capacity, you pump the water back up. To me, this is an obvious, wonderful solution to changing, and many in the environmental community say we are opposed to hydro in any way, shape or form. This is a technological solution that can help us, that is being attacked for ideological political reasons. Does anybody have a comment on technology? You have taken me on, and I accept your---- Mr. Lash. Can we disavow the Unabomber first? Senator Bennett. Yes, let's all disavow the Unabomber. Chairman Lieberman. We environmentalists do not want Mr. Kaczynski to be our representative here. Mr. Heydlauff. Senator, one of the strengths of the U.S. economy, I think, is the fact that we power it with a wide diversity of energy sources. Coal is approximately 50 percent of the electricity base. We have got 21 percent, I think, roughly is the nuclear capacity. Natural gas is approximately 15 percent; hydro is 10 percent; a little bit of oil and the balance is going to be these non-renewable resources you talked about, which is less than 2 percent. I think we need them all and I think we need to develop them all, and we need to develop them in a way that is both economically rational, but also protective of the environment, more so than we ever have in the past. We are a diversified energy company. I talked about the fact that we burn, I think as Jonathan said, nearly 80 million tons of coal a year, but that is only 66 percent of our generation mix; 24 percent is natural gas. We do have nuclear generation, hydro, and we are about to commission a 150 megawatt wind plant, which we are very proud of. It is in Texas, and we think there is a lot of wind potential in Texas. You are absolutely right about the intermittent nature of wind generation, and it is going to be a problem that will keep a lot of these intermittent renewable energy resources, like solar and wind, at the periphery of the electricity supply business until such time as we have a dramatic breakthrough in energy storage technology, and that has been elusive, as you know. As a matter of fact, we would solve the urban smog problem in Senator Lieberman's State if we could just come up with an efficient energy storage system, so that people could drive around in the cars and electric vehicles that do not emit anything. But we are still going to have an urban smog problem for as far as we can see, because we have not found that, and the automobile manufacturers actually have cut back on a lot of that research and gone to hybrids instead. So that is a challenge, but it is growing and it will continue to grow and capture more of the energy market. Frankly, I think--and we have got experience with this--the renewable energy systems make a lot of sense in developing countries, either in those areas where they have no access to electricity or in areas where their electricity comes from diesel generation. We, for example, have put in solar generation, photovoltaic systems, in Bolivia, and in one case it was to provide electricity for the first time to a community, and in the other case it is displacing diesel generation. We are looking at that. We are looking at, actually, renewable hybrids similar to what you talked about, small-scale hydro systems, combined with solar and wind generation. So there are a lot of solutions, I think, to the energy challenges of the world, and certainly the country, that we need to continue to exploit. Your suggestions are correct and you are absolutely right, there are relatively entrenched opponents to virtually any form of electric generation. We certainly have it with coal. You see it with nuclear. You have it with hydro and we are well-aware of that. It is very difficult today to site and build a new hydro plant. As a matter of fact, I think we have pretty much developed all the economically feasible areas anyway. It is just hard to get them relicensed today. Senator Bennett. They are trying to tear them down in my State. Mr. Heydlauff. And they are trying to tear them down, I know, out West. Even the most efficient, clean natural gas generation, you are having a hard time siting and building in the Midwest, some States where you would not expect it, like in Indiana, where they have had enormous difficulty trying to site new natural gas power plants. We have the old NIMBY (not in my backyard) syndrome prevalent in ways that we have never had to deal with when we built the existing infrastructure. But that infrastructure needs to be replaced. It is getting old and we have got to replace it. So we have to come up with a rational energy strategy, and I guess that is for another committee as well. Senator Bennett. Thank you. Let the record show that I am the only member of the Senate who drives a Honda Insight, get 55 miles to the gallon, and I bought it because I was in love with the technology. Senator Thompson. How do you get in it, is the question? Senator Bennett. I have had you in it, the two of us. Chairman Lieberman. I have actually seen you get in and out of it, and it is an impressive sight, and quite comfortable. [Laughter.] I would say to my friend from Utah--I thank him for his questions--I think he is right. There is a consensus here about the need for technology and bold new energy technologies to deal with the problem of climate change and air pollution and the rest. I think there is also an agreement, an important one, that, for various reasons, the private sector is not going to do it itself. So this is one where the government has, as Senator Thompson said, some credibility and needs to do it. But the second part of this, about the private sector, and this is where we separate for the moment, anyway, is that I think, as Ms. Claussen does, that we need caps, and the best reason is actually the example you gave, of the CAFE standards, of the fuel mileage standards, because what we do here does drive technology. In other words, if we create standards, the private sector will figure out ways often to meet them. As Ms. Claussen said, we have got to calibrate this as best we can, because we do not want to create economic havoc, certainly, in the short run. The other reason that I favor the binding targets and timetables is that we had this experience in the 1990's after the Rio framework, which set targets and timetables and made them voluntary, and nobody did much of anything around the country and the world, and the problem got worse. So I think that is what actually led to Kyoto. One may disagree with the specifics of the Kyoto Protocol. I was actually in Kyoto, and it was a remarkable experience, watching all those countries with differing points of few, differing domestic political constituencies and energy resources, trying to work something out. So it is far from perfect and it is always subject to alteration, but I think that is a point at which we differ. The good thing about the Byrd-Stevens is it does not require us to reach consensus on those questions. It creates these mechanisms, these offices in the Federal Government, that will stimulate and finance more research and development, that will force us to come back at this every year and see how we are doing and create a strategy that reaches toward stabilization. I come to the end of the hearing, thanking all the witnesses and my colleagues, feeling that though there are still disagreements about tactics here, that this bill really does provide us with some common ground to go forward, and in doing that, I do think it is a breakthrough. Senator Thompson, if you want to add anything---- Senator Thompson. Well said, Mr. Chairman. Chairman Lieberman. Thank you, all. The hearing is adjourned. 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