<DOC> [109th Congress House Hearings] [From the U.S. Government Printing Office via GPO Access] [DOCID: f:30692.wais] CLIMATE CHANGE TECHNOLOGY RESEARCH: DO WE NEED A ``MANHATTAN PROJECT'' FOR THE ENVIRONMENT? ======================================================================= HEARING before the COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT REFORM HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES ONE HUNDRED NINTH CONGRESS SECOND SESSION __________ SEPTEMBER 21, 2006 __________ Serial No. 109-197 __________ Printed for the use of the Committee on Government Reform Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.gpoaccess.gov/congress/ index.html http://www.house.gov/reform _____ U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE 30-692 PDF WASHINGTON : 2006 _________________________________________________________________ For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office Internet: bookstore.gpo.gov Phone: toll free (866) 512-1800; DC area (202) 512-1800 Fax: (202) 512-2250 Mail: Stop SSOP, Washington, DC 20402-0001 COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT REFORM TOM DAVIS, Virginia, Chairman CHRISTOPHER SHAYS, Connecticut HENRY A. WAXMAN, California DAN BURTON, Indiana TOM LANTOS, California ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN, Florida MAJOR R. OWENS, New York JOHN M. McHUGH, New York EDOLPHUS TOWNS, New York JOHN L. MICA, Florida PAUL E. KANJORSKI, Pennsylvania GIL GUTKNECHT, Minnesota CAROLYN B. MALONEY, New York MARK E. SOUDER, Indiana ELIJAH E. CUMMINGS, Maryland STEVEN C. LaTOURETTE, Ohio DENNIS J. KUCINICH, Ohio TODD RUSSELL PLATTS, Pennsylvania DANNY K. DAVIS, Illinois CHRIS CANNON, Utah WM. LACY CLAY, Missouri JOHN J. DUNCAN, Jr., Tennessee DIANE E. WATSON, California CANDICE S. MILLER, Michigan STEPHEN F. LYNCH, Massachusetts MICHAEL R. TURNER, Ohio CHRIS VAN HOLLEN, Maryland DARRELL E. ISSA, California LINDA T. SANCHEZ, California JON C. PORTER, Nevada C.A. DUTCH RUPPERSBERGER, Maryland KENNY MARCHANT, Texas BRIAN HIGGINS, New York LYNN A. WESTMORELAND, Georgia ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, District of PATRICK T. McHENRY, North Carolina Columbia CHARLES W. DENT, Pennsylvania ------ VIRGINIA FOXX, North Carolina BERNARD SANDERS, Vermont JEAN SCHMIDT, Ohio (Independent) BRIAN P. BILBRAY, California David Marin, Staff Director Lawrence Halloran, Deputy Staff Director Benjamin Chance, Clerk Michael Galindo, Clerk Phil Barnett, Minority Chief of Staff/Chief Counsel C O N T E N T S ---------- Page Hearing held on September 21, 2006............................... 1 Statement of: Eule, Stephen D., Director, Climate Change Technology Program; and John B. Stephenson, Director, Government Accountability Office...................................... 27 Eule, Stephen D.......................................... 27 Stephenson, John B....................................... 42 Lane, Lee, executive director, Climate Policy Center; Richard Van Atta, senior research analyst, Institute for Defense Analyses; Martin Hoffert, emeritus professor, New York University; Robert Socolow, former director, Center for Energy and Environmental Studies, Princeton University; and Daniel Kammen, director, Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory, University of California at Berkeley........... 77 Hoffert, Martin.......................................... 124 Kammen, Daniel........................................... 156 Lane, Lee................................................ 77 Socolow, Robert.......................................... 149 Van Atta, Richard........................................ 99 Letters, statements, etc., submitted for the record by: Cummings, Hon. Elijah E., a Representative in Congress from the State of Maryland, prepared statement of............... 206 Davis, Chairman Tom, a Representative in Congress from the State of Virginia, prepared statement of................... 4 Eule, Stephen D., Director, Climate Change Technology Program, prepared statement of............................. 29 Hoffert, Martin, emeritus professor, New York University, prepared statement of...................................... 128 Kammen, Daniel, director, Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory, University of California at Berkeley, prepared statement of............................................... 159 Lane, Lee, executive director, Climate Policy Center, prepared statement of...................................... 79 Maloney, Hon. Carolyn B., a Representative in Congress from the State of New York, prepared statement of............... 22 Socolow, Robert, former director, Center for Energy and Environmental Studies, Princeton University, prepared statement of............................................... 151 Stephenson, John B., Director, Government Accountability Office, prepared statement of.............................. 44 Van Atta, Richard, senior research analyst, Institute for Defense Analyses, prepared statement of.................... 102 Waxman, Hon. Henry A., a Representative in Congress from the State of California, prepared statement of................. 12 CLIMATE CHANGE TECHNOLOGY RESEARCH: DO WE NEED A ``MANHATTAN PROJECT'' FOR THE ENVIRONMENT? ---------- THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 2006 House of Representatives, Committee on Government Reform, Washington, DC. The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:25 a.m., in room 2157, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Tom Davis (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding. Present: Representatives Tom Davis, Shays, LaTourette, Waxman, Lantos, Maloney, Kucinich, Clay, Watson, Van Hollen, Higgins, Norton, Cummings, Platts, and Bilbray. Staff present: David Marin, staff director; Larry Halloran, deputy staff director; Jennifer Safavian, chief counsel for oversight and investigations; Mindi Walker, professional staff member; A. Brooke Bennett, counsel; Michael Galindo and Benjamin Chance, clerks; Greg Dotson and Alexandra Teitz, minority counsels; Earley Green, minority chief clerk; and Jean Gosa, minority assistant clerk. Chairman Tom Davis. Good morning, and welcome to today's hearing on climate change technology. As we sit here today, the debate over climate change science continues, but this committee, as well as the administration and many others in Government, already have recognized the important facts: that global mean temperature has increased over the past century, and that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has contributed in some way to this warning. With that in mind, our committee seeks to move away from debating science to finding solutions. The purpose of today's hearing is to learn about the Federal Government's climate change research and development programs, specifically those dedicated to exploratory or innovative technology. We are also going to discuss the best ways to steer these initiatives. Right now, the administration spends nearly $3 billion on climate change technology research. Ostensibly, this research falls under the umbrella of the President's climate change technology program. The characterization of the CCTP, however, is misleading, because the CCTP has no budgetary authority. The billions of dollars that fund CCTP actually are dispersed directly to Federal agencies without CCTP approval. In fact, to date the CCTP has only received $1.5 million in program support to supplement the creation of its strategic plan, which outlines the current research and future priorities of the program. Without direct funding, CCTP does not employ full-time staff, and both Director Stephen Eule and Deputy Director Robert Marlay hold other positions within the Department of Energy. Currently, CCTP employs neither administrative nor analytical staff; it shares personnel with other offices on an as-needed basis. Additionally, thus far the Federal Government has yet to engage in any exploratory or innovative technology research on climate change. Under the current funding structure, only near and mid-term technology research programs receive R&D dollars. Climate clinicians that lie outside of existing technology, such as geo-engineering and artificial photosynthesis, remain unaddressed. Although CCTP is capable of commenting on technology- focused projects conducted across 13 Federal agencies under the program, in its current state CCTP simply does not have the authority to allocate funds for climate technology projects, begging the questions: one, how well are we coordinating climate change technology research? And, two, because of the present configuration of Federal climate change technology research, is it necessary to create a central, authorized body to command exploratory research, an ARPA for climate change? The Defense Advanced Projects Agency, DARPA, was created to turn innovative technology into military capabilities. The agency is highly regarded for its work on the Internet, high- speed microelectronics, stealth and satellite technologies, unmanned vehicles, and new materials, all of which produced not only military advancement but commercial benefits, as well. Unlike the CCTP, DARPA can segregate itself somewhat from its governing body, the Pentagon, and remain a small and flexible agency capable of quickly exploiting emerging technologies and adapting to immediate military circumstances. Conversely, CCTP remains under the strict direction of the Cabinet-level Committee on Climate Change Science and Technology Integration [CCSTI], reducing the likelihood it will support novel concepts in climate technology research. Given its strict structure and limited authority, would the CCTP be the appropriate body to potentially manage a free-thinking and innovative exploratory technology agency? To date, the under-funded and administratively barren climate change technology program has yet to sufficiently coordinate and influence the technology research initiatives conducted by the multiple Federal agencies under its charge, let alone manage potential new exploratory technology research programs such as the Climate Change Advanced Research Projects Agency [CCARPA]. It is time to say CCARPA Diem and seize the opportunity to take technology research to the next level by bringing CCTP to the forefront of the U.S. climate change agenda. Or will the full initiative of CCTP prove sufficient to guide climate change technology research into the future? These are the questions that we hope to begin resolving today. The committee has invited several highly qualified individuals to address these uncertainties. We will hear from Dr. Stephen Eule, the Director of CCTP, on the status of climate change technology in the United States and on his role in overseeing climate change technology and potential budgetary or organizational obstacles to the full implementation of a centralized climate technology program. We will also hear from the GAO on the ambiguity of the appropriations to agencies with regard to climate change and the need for more clear disclosure of the nature of climate change research and development funding. Also, we will explore the merits and challenges of creating a Federal climate change exploratory technology program and will hear from experts on DARPA about the applicability of instituting a CCARPA for exploratory technology research and development. Global climate change is one of the most serious environmental concerns of the 21st century. This committee has taken an important step by discussing how the Federal Government can better arm itself with technology to address this worldwide problem. I would like to thank all of our witnesses for their invaluable insights in this issue. [The prepared statement of Chairman Tom Davis follows:] [GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT] Chairman Tom Davis. I would now like to recognize our distinguished ranking member, Mr. Waxman, for his opening statement. Mr. Waxman. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Today's hearing will begin to examine what policies Congress should consider for addressing the major threat of global warming. We will hear from some of the Nation's leading experts on global warming and technology. They will present their views of how we move forward to take carbon out of the world's economy. I believe almost all of us agree that global warming is occurring and action must be taken to avoid potentially catastrophic impacts to our country and the world. Our position reflects the scientific consensus which only a small cadre of oil-industry-funded propagandists are still denying. But, despite this committee's interest, it would be a serious mistake for anyone watching this hearing to conclude that either the administration or the Republican leadership in Congress is willing to tackle the problem. That is why I would like to take a moment to review the past 6 years. President Bush and Vice President Cheney came into office determined to radically change the Nation's energy policy, and that is what they did. They crafted their policy with oil companies like Exxon and Mobil and refused to meet with consumer or environmental groups. Their plan bestowed countless favors on oil, coal, and other polluting industries and it abandoned the President's pledge to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, under the plan they developed, we have wasted precious years and exacerbated global warming. During the last 6 years there have been many constructive ideas put forward. For example, in July 2002 the Pugh Center on Global Climate Change released a report on designing a climate friendly energy policy. In July 2003, the Energy Future Coalition released an energy plan to fight global warming and address the political and economic security threat posed by our dependence on oil. In January 2004, the Apollo Alliance, a coalition of labor unions, environmental groups, and other public interest groups proposed an energy policy to modernize America's energy infrastructure and fight global warming. In April 2005, the Natural Resources Defense Council released a paper proposing an energy policy that would enhance our national security and reduce air and water pollution while curbing global warming and creating jobs. But these ideas to move us forward fell on deaf ears. The Republican Congress was simply uninterested in learning about the problem, let alone addressing it. In December 2004, the bipartisan National Commission on Energy Policy released a plan to address the Nation's long-term energy challenges, including oil dependence and global warming. The commission was composed of Republicans and Democrats, industry and environmentalists, and they had figured out a way to come together, yet the chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee would not even hold a hearing on the plan. Recently the administration has begun to change its rhetoric on global warming. Unfortunately, it is only the rhetoric that is changing. They are sticking with their policy of denying the urgency of the problem and delaying any real action. That has to change. We have already lost 6 years. Mr. Chairman, that is why our committee holding these hearings stands out in stark contrast to what the rest of the Congress has been doing. Today we are going to hear about the administration's 100- year strategic plan. The name is impressive, but inside the covers the plan has no time line for actions, no goals for what we need to achieve. Thinking about technology research and development is very important, but by itself it will do nothing to solve the problem. Thank you. [The prepared statement of Hon. Henry A. Waxman follows:] [GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT] Chairman Tom Davis. Thank you, Mr. Waxman. Do other Members wish to speak? Mr. Shays. Mr. Shays. Thank you. Mr. Chairman, thank you for holding this hearing. We are failing to deal with this problem not because of Republicans; we are failing to deal with this problem because there is not a bipartisan effort to move forward on this issue, and it goes back a long ways. It goes back to when President Clinton was President and he negotiated Kyoto and there was a bipartisan resolution in the Senate that passed 100 percent. It said don't leave India and China out of Kyoto. They left India and China out of Kyoto. The treaty was negotiated. It was brought before us and President Clinton never ever submitted it to Congress because he only had five or six supporters in the entire Senate. It is fascinating to me. I wish this President had submitted it so all the Senators who criticize him now would have been faced with voting for it, because at the time they weren't going to support it. There is a bipartisan effort to kill what is so logically something we should do: making better use of the energy we have. Minivans, SUVs, and trucks should get the same mileage as cars, but the dean of the House, Mr. Dingell, in a bipartisan effort with other Members who represent the automobile manufacturers, not the oil industry, labor unions who oppose getting minivans, SUVs, and trucks to get the same mileage as cars opposed it. That is our problem. We can make it a partisan issue and it is great for an election, but it is not the truth. The truth is we need to work together, Republicans and Democrats, to solve what is a huge problem. I introduced a bill with Maurice Hinchey supported by the League of Conservation Voters--not a very partisan group, I would say. The purpose is to get minivans, SUVs, and trucks to get the same mileage as cars, to take out of the energy bill that I voted against, to take out the dollars and tax write- offs that were going to the fossil fuel industry and put it into alternative fuels. That bill remains to be supported by Members on both sides of the aisle. It is bipartisan. It would move the agenda forward. But because we have decided that this is a tough election year and we are going to target certain Members, we are going to tell Members on the other side of the aisle they are going to be told by their leadership not to cosponsor legislation supported by any Member who is targeted. So when we get all of this political garbage that you are going to hear from Members about how this is a partisan issue, when we can get beyond that and we can get the election done with, I hope Nancy Pelosi will, as my own leadership, say that we need to work together instead of the Democrats going further to the left and Republicans going further to the right. Hopefully we will start to hear Members on both sides of the aisle start to be bipartisan again, talk bipartisan, and stop trying to make such a serious issue a partisan issue when it isn't. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Chairman Tom Davis. Thank you very much. Mr. Lantos. Mr. Lantos. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I want to thank you and Ranking Member Waxman for your leadership on this issue. My approach to this whole subject stems from my possession as the ranking Democrat on the House International Relations Committee and the ramifications of our energy policy or lack of energy policy on our international position. I will have a word or two to say about that later. I have been disappointed and dismayed by this administration's position on climate change. Despite overwhelming scientific evidence that global warming is taking place, the administration has basically removed itself from the international conversation and worked to stifle Government scientists. This is willful ignorance about the severe challenges and strengths that will be placed on future generations by the results of climate change. Coupled with an alarming lack of foresight for the national security implications these effects will have on our world, the administration's policies have significantly weakened our efforts toward the solution of this problem. The science on the issue is incontrovertible and the need to respond is immediate. The actions taken by the President and this Congress thus far have been woefully inadequate. It is my hope that this hearing just might be the straw that breaks the camel's back against the misinformation campaign engineered by some key energy companies which have sown seeds of doubt and have slowed a legitimate debate to occur. Our Nation's reliance on foreign oil, which is my principal concern, means that we are providing the enemies of freedom with the resources to oppose the United States or even to wage war against us. If you heard last night Chavez at the United Nations in New York you know exactly what I am talking about. But whether it is Chavez, Ahmadinejad of Tehran, Putin in Moscow, or the Wahabis in Saudi Arabia, the amplified voice of these forces of anti-democracy and anti-freedom must be enormously enlarged by virtue of their incredible oil income which they have gained largely as a result of our policies. The United States is a leader in scientific research and technological discovery and we have witnessed the extraordinary results of what happens when our Nation harnesses this intellectual resource with the Manhattan Project, which made us the first project to harness the energy of the atom, or the Apollo Project that put an American on the moon. The most abundant source of new energy, Mr. Chairman, is conservation. Although we must provide the impetus for research and development into new technologies, the most immediate and effective means of reducing our reliance on current fuel sources is to be intelligent about cutting back on their use. That is not a matter of creating new technologies but making people more conscious of existing ways to reduce energy waste. The time has come for America to rise up and face the challenge of relieving itself from its dependency on carbon- based energy and the pollutants that come with it. We need to reach beyond our current energy policy and achieve this goal through a nationwide effort combining both conservation efforts and increases in research and development of alternate energy sources. Mr. Chairman, while this hearing is ostensibly about American Government policy and the need for a nationwide project to make America a carbon neutral nation, let me speak for a moment on the international relations aspect of this project and the imperative need for us to reach out to the global community on this issue. We must re-engage the international community in order to seek successful solutions and best practices. The interconnection of international energy policy and the effects on climate change will only continue to increase in the years ahead. I hope that our President and our Congress can have the vision of a Roosevelt or a Kennedy to see over the horizon. We need to lead the American people to work together to unshackle us from our dependency on foreign energy and to preserve the environment for the sake of those who will inherit this world from us. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Chairman Tom Davis. Thank you very much. Are there other Members who wish to make opening statements? Yes, ma'am, Ms. Watson. Ms. Watson. Mr. Chairman, thank you so much for convening today's hearing. I commend your timeliness on the issue pertaining to energy policy. This hearing explicitly highlights the administration's research and development activities, or lack thereof, on technologies to address global warming and the administration's strategy on addressing global warming. I am haunted by the fact that the year before last, when we attended a conference in Cutter, there was someone from the Department of Commerce that made the idea of global warming into a myth. It was a Dr. Lash. Just recently we got into quite a warm discussion after his remarks, because it said to the world that we were hallucinating if we thought global warming was a real thing. Just recently he ended up in the newspapers as one who killed his 12 year old son and himself. I saw indications of a hot- headed approach there in Cutter. Energy is essential to the American lifestyle. The United States has only 2 percent of the world's oil reserves, but accounts for 25 percent of the world's energy demand. Of the global supply, we consume 43 percent of motor gasoline, 25 percent of crude petroleum, 25 percent of natural gas, and 26 percent of electricity. Currently, American demand for all these commodities is rising dramatically, while climate change is on the rise, as well. On the production side of the issue, the generation and delivery of energy is a serious challenge. Procurement of energy is a challenge of engineering, a challenge of planning, and a challenge that evokes the most serious aspects of our foreign policy. Moreover, energy is a key factor in the environmental challenges we face in modern America and in the world. Reliance on fossil fuels causes serious air and water pollution and it is the source of constant pressure to exploit our last precious wildlands. As the petroleum demand intensifies, Americans will remain exposed to the environmental cost and the harmful public health impacts associated with the dependence on oil. Global warming is occurring at a rapid pace today, and the consensus of the worldwide scientific community is that it will accelerate during the 21st century. Global warming and our related energy policies also raise national security concerns. One such concern is the prospect of international destabilization caused by the consequences of global warming such as the loss of land area of the loss of water resources. Mr. Chairman, I have stated in previous hearings, we have a chance to start again to create adequate climate change research and development that can help our world in the future, so I look forward to today's hearing and I look forward to hearing from the witnesses and I think that you are beginning and we are beginning to play a vital role on environmental safety in our world. Thank you so much. Chairman Tom Davis. Thank you very much. Mr. Bilbray. Mr. Bilbray. Yes, Mr. Chairman. I want to thank you for holding this hearing and want to publicly thank you for letting me participate on this committee for the rest of this session. Mr. Chairman, you may know but other Members may not know that I had the privilege of serving for 6 years on the State Air Resources Board for the State of California. I was very proud to participate in that agency because California has the distinction of having an agency that has done more to reduce emissions than any agency anywhere else in the world. The Air Resources Board in California is second to none. It has led on many, many issues, as the ranking member will remind us, many times, both in his presentations and his writings. But one of the reasons why that agency has been so successful in the past and I am sure will be successful in the future, the Air Resources Board in California does not allow partisan bickering to stand between getting to the answer. They don't allow the fact of posturing to be the primary motivation there. I have been very, very pleased to work with Democrats and Republicans in that body. But I have to tell you, since coming to Congress and leaving that body, I have been frustrated with the fact that science gets put on a back burner in Washington all too often for partisan fighting, but at the same time people don't want to look at the fact that the guilt rests on both sides of the political aisle. I was very frustrated with my first term in Congress here when I saw that the Clinton administration talked a lot about global warming, a lot about this issue on emissions. At the same time, the only policy I saw really being pushed at that time was the decommissioning of zero emission generators such as hydroelectric and nuclear. I saw an obsession with the destruction of zero emission generators without any identifying where the alternative power was going to come from without contributing to the global warming and the emissions issue. So I am very excited to be able to say that there are opportunities here. I hope that we join together. I have been frustrated with the discussion that global warming and Kyoto are somehow tied together. I do not see how any of us can take care of the global warming without working together, but I also do not see how we are going to justify any global warming policy that exempts the Third World, and especially China. I see that Kyoto was a non-starter, and we should have been brave enough to be able to recognize that there is a problem out there but the answer that was being proposed was not an answer to the problem. I hope to be able to take some of the experience I have been able to bring from California and hopefully work with both sides of the aisle to try to address this issue, but I think that we need to stop finding barriers to getting to answers and quit finding excuses just to fight about it. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I yield back my time. Chairman Tom Davis. Mrs. Maloney. Mrs. Maloney. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would like permission to place my remarks in the record---- Chairman Tom Davis. Without objection, so ordered. Mrs. Maloney [continuing]. And just ask to be associated with the comments of Mr. Waxman and Mr. Lantos and Ms. Watson. I think Ranking Member Lantos' statement of the danger this poses in the world community and in our search for peace was very relevant. Ms. Watson, you talked about how many skeptics are out there that have kept saying that it is not a problem. I appreciate the comment on the other side of the aisle that science too long has been put on the back burner. Scientists have been telling us for a long time that this is one of the gravest challenges that we confront, and there have been many skeptics, such as the one she described from the Commerce Department, that have made light of this very serious challenge. I would like to place in the record this photograph of the Arctic climate impact assessment of 2004. It shows the extent of the surface ice melting in Greenland between 1992 and 2002. They say one picture is worth a thousand words. It truly shows that we are losing the snow in Greenland, and other photographs of the Antarctic, even Florida, shows a very changing coastline with the multi-meter rises in sea level. This is a very serious problem. I congratulate former Vice President Al Gore on his book An Inconvenient Truth and the movie The Inconvenient Truth. It was inspiring for me to see a documentary literally have people standing in lines waiting to get in to see it. I think he helped beyond a shadow of a doubt to close the mouths of the skeptics whom I think are just people who don't want to do anything. I welcome this hearing today on global warming technology and research, but say that there is so much that we could do besides research right now, such as put a cap on CAFE standards, such as: switching from coal and oil to natural gas; increasing efficiency of energy in use and buildings, transportation, and industry; transition to a lower energy intensity mix of economic activities. There are so many actions that we could take right now to address this, so I urge my colleagues not only to be looking at technology and research but looking at technical possibilities that we can take right now to reduce energy intensity and carbon intensity on our planet. I truly believe it is the most important issue facing us for the future of our country and the health of our planet, so I thank you for this hearing and would like to place in the record these papers. [The prepared statement of Hon. Carolyn B. Maloney follows:] [GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT] Chairman Tom Davis. Without objection they will be placed in the record. Thank you, Mrs. Maloney. Mr. Kucinich. Mr. Kucinich. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. The title of this hearing is Climate Change Technology Research: Do we need a Manhattan Project for the Environment? I would respectfully suggest this is kind of an unfortunate title for this particular hearing. The Manhattan Project harnessed the scientific genius of America for a purely destructive purpose, the building of nuclear weapon, under conditions of assorted history of human experimentation and spawned a nuclear industry which drove up utility rates and gave us nuclear waste forever. Nuclear weapons now constitute a threat to the survival of our entire planet, and certainly, as Jonathan Schell pointed out in his book, Fate of the Earth, a threat to the common global environment. Now, if we are talking about saving the planet, maybe we should come up with an analogy that is not so obviously contradictory. Asking whether we need a Manhattan Project for the environment begs the question don't we already have one. Everything about our energy policies are destabilizing. Oil runs our politics, bringing with it not only the injurious effects of climate change but war, environmental ruin, economic decline, manipulation of prices, oil politics are visiting us right now on the eve of an election. You see the prices dropping at the pump trying to lull the public to sleep about the game that is being played by the oil companies in cooperation with the administration. Global warming? Until recently, scientists for hire were ready to discount the result of our destructive energy policies and urging administrations to refuse to participate in the Kyoto Climate Change Treaty. I would agree with the colleague that we ought to talk to China, but wouldn't it be good if we had trade agreements that held environmental quality principles as one of the bases for international trade. Mr. Chairman, I have to submit for the record here a study of the Manhattan Project called the New and Secret World of Human Experimentation. I also have my statement, which calls for new direction with respect to sustainable energy choices like wind, solar, ocean, geothermal, and with a call for investment to match the intention of changing our energy policies. We really ought to change the title of the hearing though. Thank you. Chairman Tom Davis. Thank you. Maybe we ought to call it a Marshall plan. Do you like that better? Mr. Kucinich. You know, yes, like rebuilding after a war. Yes, that is a great idea. Chairman Tom Davis. OK. Next, Mr. Van Hollen. Mr. Van Hollen. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you for holding this hearing, and to Ranking Member Waxman for his leadership on this very important issue. I agree with statements made by my colleagues really some on both sides of aisle here with respect to the importance of moving forward in a bipartisan manner, but to do that we are going to have to make decisions based on science and based on the facts. Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but everyone is not entitled to their own set of facts. Unfortunately, here in political Washington people seem to think that they can make up the facts as well as making up the policy. There is an absolute scientific consensus that global warming is real and that there is an important human contribution to the problem, and so, though we have settled science and settled facts on that question, we continue to have a lack of political leadership on this very important issue. We continue to have, for example, the chairman of the Environment and Public Works on the Senate side say that the whole global warming issue is the greatest hoax ever perpetuated on the American people. We had a Member of the House on the Science Committee in a hearing yesterday saying that the whole thing was made up, as well. Even the President of the United States, when he talks about this issue as he did in July in People Magazine, sort of said there is an open question with respect to whether or not there was a human component to the global warming question. He said it was a question of debate. So, until the political leadership in Washington begins to deal with the facts, we are not going to be able to move forward. We can have disagreements with respect to what the best policy is, but we need our political leadership to begin to take responsibility for accepting what the scientific community has told us with respect to this very important issue, and then we need to move forward, and we need to move forward quickly, and we need to stop passing energy legislation that continues to provide big subsidies to the oil and gas industry and channel those funds instead into renewable energy and energy efficiency areas. So I welcome the comments on both sides of the aisle about the need to move forward on a bipartisan basis on this issue, but, unfortunately, we have on the one hand people who continue to misrepresent the facts with respect to the science, and unfortunately the reality of the situation is the legislation that is passed out of the Congress has not demonstrated that people have come to grips with the reality of the science on this issue. I hope we will begin to turn that situation around and begin to have policy coming out of here and political leadership that matches the facts with respect to this very important issue. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Chairman Tom Davis. Thank you, Mr. Van Hollen. If there are no more opening statements, we will now proceed to our first panel. We have Dr. Stephen Eule, the Director of Climate Change Technology Program, and Mr. John Stephenson, the director of Government Accountability Office. Thank you for bearing with us through our markup and opening statements. [Witnesses sworn.] Chairman Tom Davis. Mr. Eule, we will start with you. Thank you for being with us. STATEMENTS OF STEPHEN D. EULE, DIRECTOR, CLIMATE CHANGE TECHNOLOGY PROGRAM; AND JOHN B. STEPHENSON, DIRECTOR, GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABILITY OFFICE STATEMENT OF STEPHEN D. EULE Mr. Eule. Thank you, Chairman Davis, Ranking Member Waxman, and members of the committee. Thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today to discuss the climate change technology program and its strategic plan, which was released yesterday. The administration believes that the most effective way to meet the challenge of climate change is through an agenda that promotes economic growth, provides energy security, reduces pollution, and mitigates greenhouse gases. To meet these goals, the administration has established a comprehensive approach, major elements of which include policies and measures to slow the growth in greenhouse gas emissions, advancing climate change science, accelerating technology development, and promoting international collaboration. Since fiscal year 2001 the Federal Government has devoted nearly $29 billion to climate change programs. In 2002, President Bush set a goal to reduce the Nation's greenhouse gas intensity--that is, emissions per unit of economic output--by 18 percent by 2012. To this end, the administration has implemented about 60 Federal programs, and recent data suggests we are well on our way toward meeting the President's goal. While acting to slow the growth of greenhouse gas emissions in the near term, the United States is laying a strong scientific and technological foundation. In 2002, two multi- agency programs were established to coordinate Federal climate science and technology R&D activities, the climate change science program [CCSP], and the climate change technology program [CCTP]. CCSP is an inter-agency planning and coordinating entity charged with investigating natural and human-induced changes in the Earth's global environmental system, monitoring understanding of predicting global change, and providing a sound scientific basis for decisionmaking. CCTP, which was authorized in the Energy Policy Act of 2005, was formed to coordinate and prioritize the Federal Government's investment in climate-related technology, which was nearly $3 billion in fiscal year 2006, and to further the President's national climate change technology initiative [NCCTI]. Ten R&D agencies participate in CCTP. The program's principal aim is to accelerate the development and lower the cost of advanced technologies that reduce, avoid, or sequester greenhouse gases. CCTP strives for a diversified Federal R&D portfolio that will help reduce technology risk and improve the prospects that such technologies can be adopted in the marketplace. In August 2005, CCTP issued its vision and framework for strategy and planning, which provided broad guidance for the program, and shortly thereafter released its draft strategic plan for public review. More than 250 comments were received and considered. This revised strategic plan articulates a vision of the role for advanced technology in addressing climate change, establishes strategic direction, guiding principles, outlines approaches to achieve CCTP's strategic goals, and identifies a series of next steps. The six CCTP goals are: reducing emissions from energy use and infrastructure, reducing emissions from energy supply, capturing and sequestering carbon dioxide, reducing emissions of non-carbon-dioxide greenhouse gases, measuring and monitoring emissions, and bolstering the contributions of basic science. The strategic plan defines a clear and promising role for advanced technologies for the near, the mid, and the long-term; outlines a processes and establishes criteria for setting priorities, such as those in NCCTI; and provides details of the current climate change technology portfolio, with links to individual technology road maps. CCTP's portfolio includes realigned activities, as well as new initiatives, such as the President's advanced energy and hydrogen fuel initiatives, carbon sequestration, and future gen. CCTP agencies also periodically conduct portfolio reviews to assess the ability of these programs to meet CCTP goals and to identify gaps and opportunities. In addition, CCTP uses scenario analyses to assess the potential climate change benefits of different technology mixes over the century on a global scale and across a range of uncertainties. When comparing the costs of achieving different greenhouse gas constraints, the cost savings for the advanced technology cases were 60 percent or more. The administration believes that well-designed multi- lateral collaborations can leverage resources and quicken technology development. The International Partnership for the Hydrogen Economy, Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum, Generation Four International Forum, Methane to Markets--all U.S. initiatives--and the ITER Fusion Project provide vehicles for international collaboration to advance these technologies. The new Global Nuclear Energy Partnership seeks to develop a worldwide consensus on approaches to expand safe use of zero emission nuclear power. Of course, through the Asian Pacific Partnership the United States is working with Australia, China, India, Japan, and South Korea to accelerate the uptake of clean technologies in this rapidly growing region of the world. The United States has embarked on an ambitious undertaking to advance climate change technologies. CCTP's strategic plan, the first of its kind produced by any government, sets out an overall strategy to guide these efforts and provides a long- term planning context in which the nature of both the challenges and the opportunities for advanced technologies are considered. I thank you for your kind attention. I will, of course, be delighted to answer any questions you may have. [The prepared statement of Mr. Eule follows:] [GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT] Chairman Tom Davis. Thank you very much. Mr. Stephenson. STATEMENT OF JOHN B. STEPHENSON Mr. Stephenson. Mr. Chairman, thank you for inviting GAO to testify today on our report issued last year regarding Federal funding for climate research. As you know, in 1992 the United States ratified the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, which has as its objective the stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the Earth's atmosphere but does not impose specific goals or timetables forlimiting emissions. Since that time, 14 Federal agencies have provided billions of dollars for climate change activities. OMB, at the direction of Congress, annually reports on expenditures for these activities in four broad categories: one, science, which includes research and monitoring to better understand climate change; two, technology, which is the subject of today's hearing, which includes the research, development, and deployment of technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or increase energy efficiency; three, international assistance, which helps developing countries to address climate change; and, four, tax expenditures which are Federal income tax provisions that grant preferential tax treatment to encourage emission reductions such as renewable energy uses. The climate change science program, which is a multi-agency coordination body, also reports on the science portion of these expenditures. In analyzing overall Federal climate change funding, we found that OMB and CCSP reported that climate change budget authority more than doubled from $2.4 billion in 1993 to $5.1 billion in 2004, with almost all of this increase in terms of real or inflation-adjusted terms occurring in technology; however, it was difficult for us to determine if this was real or a definitional increase because of numerous changes in reporting format from year to year without adequate explanation. We found that in some cases OMB and/or CCSP added new accounts not previously included and expanded the definitions of some accounts to include more activities. For example, $152 million NASA research program to reduce emissions in aircraft was included for the first time in 2003. In addition, we found that over 50 percent of the increase in technology funding between 2002 and 2003 was the result of DOE expanding the definition of two accounts to include over $500 million in nuclear research. OMB explained this difference by stating that the prior administration did not consider nuclear programs to be part of its activities related to climate change, but that the current administration does, as explained in yesterday's released strategic plan on climate change technology. Also, the merging of direct research, that specifically for climate change, and indirect research, that research primarily for another purpose with residual benefits in climate change, in the 2002 through 2004 reports in our opinion made the reports more confusing and less useful. For example, this merging, in effect, caused carbon sequestration research, a direct activity, and grants to help low-income families weatherize their homes, an indirect activity, appear in the same technology reporting category at the summary level. In our report, we, among other things, recommended that OMB and CCSP use the same format for presenting data in its annual reports, explain changes in report content or format when they are introduced, and provide and maintain a crosswalk comparing new and old report structures. OMB and CCSP generally agreed with our recommendations and have tried to incorporate them into this year's climate change expenditure reports. However, OMB told us during the course of our work that the short time line required by Congress for completing that report within 60 days of the budget submission limits its ability to fully analyze data submitted by agencies. As a result, OMB must rely on funding estimates quickly developed by each agency in order to produce the report within a specified time. It seemed to us that the fact that we don't yet have a clear explanation and understanding of the Federal Government's $5 billion annual investment climate change portfolio and the fact that it is built from the bottom up instead of the top down is very relevant to the purposes of this hearing. We at GAO are strong proponents of setting goals, measuring performance against those goals, and reporting publicly on progress. We believe that this framework is the cornerstone of good program management and sound investment decisions. Although we have not formally reviewed either the CCSP or the CCTP strategic plans, we believe that as an implementation of these plans move forward there needs to be clearly articulated relationship between the Government's $5 billion investment portfolio and the goals of both programs. In addition, there needs to be a mechanism to ensure that agency investment decisions directly relate to the goals and priorities expressed in the plans. Mr. Chairman, that concludes the summary of my statement and I will be happy to answer any questions that you or members of the committees may have. [The prepared statement of Mr. Stephenson follows:] [GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT] Chairman Tom Davis. Let me start quickly. What I will do is get to questions, Mr. Waxman, and then we are going to have to recess to go over for three votes. Mr. Eule, the Federal Government spends about $3 billion on climate change technology research. Isn't that about it? Which I might add is the same amount of money that British business mogul Richard Branson on Thursday announced, $3 billion that he was going to put in personally to combat global warming over the next decade. But does CCTP play any role in determining how those funds are used? Mr. Eule. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Yes, good question. We have set up a process in the strategic plan. We have a process in the strategic plan and some mechanisms to do that. CCTP has a series of working groups, each of which is matched to one of the strategic goals in the plan, so we have a working group on reducing emissions and-- Chairman Tom Davis. So you are advisory, but you play a role? Is that it? Mr. Eule. We are advisory. We have working groups that are the people that actually have influence on agency budgets. We also have outside experts come in and provide advice. And we also work through the management structure that the administration set up through the Cabinet-level committee on climate change science and technology integration and, more directly, through the box under that we call the blue box, which is the deputy level structure. Chairman Tom Davis. But the plan that was released yesterday does not provide clear criteria for determining which program to fund, when to fund them, or how much funding to provide; isn't that right? Mr. Eule. It provides a process to do that. Chairman Tom Davis. Right. Not a plan, but a process. Who has the ultimate power to determine that? Mr. Eule. The agency-- Chairman Tom Davis. You have a process, but ultimately who has the say-so? I mean, you get input into it, but CCTP is not the ultimate decisionmaker, right? Mr. Eule. No, CCTP isn't designed to be the ultimate arbitrator; it is designed to coordinate and to help prioritize the budgets that the agencies produce, with input, obviously, from the Executive Office of the President. Chairman Tom Davis. Do you think it would be helpful to have like an ARPA for climate change? Mr. Eule. Well, I think the Department's position on ARPA is clear. We think it would take funds away from other programs. But I think in the case of climate change what you have to consider is that climate change isn't just about energy. Energy is a big part of that, obviously. About four- fifths of all greenhouse gas emissions are energy related. But there are other aspects of climate change technology, and expertise is in other agencies. For example, our expertise on non-CO2 gas is at the Environmental Protection Agency. Our expertise on measuring and monitoring is in NASA. Basic research, Department of Energy. Chairman Tom Davis. I guess the ultimate question is, on an issue of this magnitude are we better off having this expertise dispersed across different agencies with no sole authority, or are you better off having it under one roof with a strong focus and decisionmaking tree that is clear-cut? I think right now it tends to be rather process oriented. Mr. Eule. Well, we think in the strategic plan we have set out a process that can do that, and we have set out some goals, long-term goals that will provide that. So I think we are satisfied with the plan that we have. We think it is a good structure, one that is workable through the management structure that the administration has developed. Chairman Tom Davis. Mr. Stephenson, how much exploratory technology and research is being conducted by the Federal Government? Mr. Stephenson. I don't know the answer in total. Chairman Tom Davis. OK. Can you get back to us on that? Mr. Stephenson. Yes, I will. Chairman Tom Davis. We want to put something in the record. How does the administration identify spending on climate change related R&D? Mr. Stephenson. It is a matter of looking at the individual agency budget submissions and accounts and rolling them up. I think the press release yesterday from the Department of Energy announcing the release of the plan summarizes it best in that it says that the plan organizes, not directs, not manages, but organizes roughly $3 billion in Federal spending. Chairman Tom Davis. Do they differentiate between direct spending, such as polar ice cap research versus indirect spending, which would be, like, R&D with just kind of an ancillary climate change benefit? Mr. Stephenson. No. There are no clear definitions to distinguish between direct and indirect climate change funding. It all gets merged at the summary level in the reporting. Chairman Tom Davis. How comfortable are you with OMB's overall climate funding trends? It seems to me there are a lot of questions whether OMB's data is comparable over time. Mr. Stephenson. It was very hard for us to tell whether the increases were due to inclusion of new programs or redefinition of existing programs, so we can't answer that question concretely, although most of the real increase, as I said, occurred in the technology portion of the climate change report. Chairman Tom Davis. Has OMB agreed to all of your substantive recommendations, or have they just agreed to the suggested changes to report content format? Mr. Stephenson. They have essentially agreed with all of the recommendations, although we haven't looked at this year's report to see how effectively they have been implemented. Our recommendations were more to get additional clarity and explanation in the reports so that they are more useful. Chairman Tom Davis. OK. Mr. Waxman. Mr. Waxman. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Eule, in a hearing on climate change in July, Mr. Connaughton, the chairman of the President's Council on Environmental Quality, insisted that the administration is taking meaningful action to address global warming, and you have tried to make the same argument here today. There are some basic facts we must recognize if we want to avoid dangerous global warming. One, we can't avoid dangerous global warming unless we sharply cut emissions of global warming pollution. Two, sharp cuts in emissions require significant changes in energy production, energy use, deforestation, and other activities. Three, as eminent climate scientists such as NASA's Dr. James Hansen keep telling us, we must start now. We have about a 10-year window to start controlling emissions and we need to achieve large reductions by 2050 or the planet will be locked into irreversible dangerous global warming. Four, as the single largest emitter of global warming pollution and the wealthiest country in the world, this isn't going to happen without U.S. leadership. The administration's climate change goal allows U.S. emissions to rise by 14 percent by 2012. Achieving that goal just locks us in more to do later. To be blunt, the administration's claim of meaningful action are simply nonsense, and the so-called CCTP strategic plan is simply a longer version of the same story--lots of talk but no action and no results. Mr. Eule, the ultimate goal we must achieve is to stabilize the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at a safe level. Does your plan set a goal, any goal, for stabilizing the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere? Mr. Eule. The plan does not set a level. It was never intended to be a mitigation plan. It was always intended to be a strategic plan to develop cost-effective options that could, over the long run, contribute to mitigating climate change. Mr. Waxman. In fact, your range of stabilization levels include very high levels that would allow devastating global warming to occur, such as temperatures that would melt Greenland, raise sea levels by 20 feet. If we don't pick a goal and the right goal, we may be aiming for disaster. You say your plan is not to achieve a goal but to give some ideas for technology. In order to achieve stabilization we need to reduce our emissions. Does your plan set any quantified goal or timing for reducing U.S. emissions of global warming pollution? Mr. Eule. The plan in the summary chapter, chapter 10, does lay out some broad overall goals for the mitigation potentials that we think the technologies in the program could achieve. We have looked at these potentials not only in terms of the amount of carbon or amount of greenhouse gases they could mitigate, but also in terms of the timing of these technologies, when they would be available. So while we don't set a goal, we have done scenarios analyses to look at different technology mixes and see how they could contribute to mitigating greenhouse gas emissions across a range of different scenarios. Mr. Waxman. Well, as I see it you have a 100-year plan with no goal for where we want to end up and no time line for getting there. The plan also fails to address how we will get these new technologies into the marketplace. If people don't use the technologies, we are not going to avoid any greenhouse gas pollution. Mr. Eule, I want to ask about the scenarios modeled in this report. The report relies on modeling to determine when the technologies could be deployed, and, even though you don't mention this in the report, that modeling assumes that there is a price on emissions that drives the use of these technologies; is that right? Mr. Eule. It doesn't assume a price, it assumes carbon constraints. Mr. Waxman. Well, even though your plan assumes that something beyond research is necessary for these technologies to be adopted, the Bush administration continues to strongly oppose any policy that would actually constrain emissions. The CBO pointed out in their report that research and development alone won't be cost effective or any way effective to reduce global warming. Dr. Kammen will testify today technologies do not adopt themselves. There aren't any clear action items in your plan to implement, but even if it was faithfully followed over the coming decades, global warming pollution would continue to rise dramatically and global warming would reach dangerous, irreversible levels. A so-called strategic plan that utterly fails to address the problem isn't strategic, and I have to tell you it is not much of a plan, either. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Bilbray [presiding]. Thank you. We are going to have to adjourn until the end of this vote. The chairman said he will return immediately after that. [Recess.] Chairman Tom Davis [presiding]. Thank you for bearing with us. We had hoped to get you through. Mr. Bilbray. Mr. Bilbray. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. This question can be for either one of you: I was sort of taken by a comment by one of the Members, about the issue of transferring generation facilities from heavy oil and coal over to natural gases being a net benefit, but that doesn't reflect a consideration of a new facet of this whole issue that we are not talking very much about. The issue that I would like to ask: are you including in your strategies consideration for global dimming? And is global dimming being accepted as being one of the thresholds we need to consider when we are talking about global change issues? Mr. Stephenson. That is really a DOE issue. Mr. Eule. Are you talking geo-engineering? Mr. Bilbray. No. I am talking about the effect of particulates on the global warming issue and the benefits of particulates and what is called global dimming, the shadowing effect. Mr. Eule. I think that would be an area of research that would probably be done under the climate change science probably but not the climate change technology. Mr. Bilbray. OK. Mr. Eule. If I could get to your issue about coal switching, fuel switching from coal to natural gas, when we look at these technologies, the administration's climate change plan also looks at energy security and air pollution and climate change, so we combine the two. We look at it in a context, so, I think from an energy security issue, simple fuel switching from coal to natural gas, you also have to ask the question what impact is that going to have on your energy security, as well. So I think what we do was we take a more holistic approach in how we approach these technologies and start to consider these other factors. Mr. Bilbray. OK. An editorial note; North America still has substantial natural gas reserves. This is a big issue. Mr. Eule. It does, yes. Mr. Bilbray. The other issue is, are we including--and I don't know if it is your department or should be the next panel--the issue of bioconversion and how much we are focusing on genetic alteration in our biofuel strategy. Arrangement we specifically including in our strategy the concept that we may want to be talking about bacterium and enzymes that have been genetically altered to be able to produce not only the fuel we want but also in a manner that is cost effective. Mr. Eule. Absolutely. The Department of Energy has just announced recently that it was seeking $250 million to fund some centers that would look at those sorts of issues, using biotechnology not only to improve the feed stocks but also using biotechnology to improve the conversion process. Currently we make ethanol from cornstarch, essentially, the sugars that are in the ear of the corn. We are working now on what you call a cellulosic technology where we construct these from other parts of the plant. We think our Office of Science is working it out. We think there is tremendous potential in biotechnology to make that process much more efficient and thus make bio-refining much more cost effective, so it is something we are looking at very closely. Mr. Bilbray. The issue of getting away from virgin products and going to ``conversion'' of trash products I think has just been grossly underestimated how important that is to make it work. A lot of people forget that gasoline was a trash product. It was a leftover trash from kerosene production. That is the only reason why we are driving around with gasoline now, not because gasoline was a secret formula that was developed somewhere down the line. Mr. Eule. A couple of years ago USDA and DOE did a joint study called the Billion Ton Study to take a look at the amount of biomass that is available in the United States, and it came to the conclusion there was about 1.3 billion tons of biomass available in the United States annually on a sustainable basis. That is a huge resource, so if we can develop a cellulosic technology to tap into that resource we can significantly reduce the amount of gasoline that we use in our transportation fuels, for example. Mr. Bilbray. Go from that to the other end of the spectrum, the adaptation technology and theories or whatever. We have been getting reports that basically the Federal Government is walking away from adaptation concepts or technology. Where are we going with the whole concept of that other end of the spectrum? Mr. Eule. Adaptation? Mr. Bilbray. Yes. Mr. Eule. Adaptation is an issue that is handled in a number of agencies. CCSP, for example, climate change science program, does take a look at adaptation. Really what we need to help us with adaptation is regional level models that have much more specificity than they do now. We have made a great deal of progress in those models. More needs to be done. But there are some what we call synthesis and exception products coming out of the climate change science program. They are looking at those sorts of issues. One that has relevance for the Department of Energy is a synthesis and exception product on the impact of climate change on energy production and use. So those sorts of things are being considered through the climate change science program. EPA has programs, as well as the Department of Interior and others. Mr. Bilbray. Mr. Chairman, I apologize, but there is one very simple but very big question I have that I don't think our colleagues on the other side of the aisle will bring up. Is there one major industrial nation in the world that has substantially reduced greenhouse gases? And, if there is, what technology did they use to do it? Mr. Eule. That is an excellent question and the answer quite simply is no. We have taken a look at data that EPA reports to the U.N. Framework Convention, other countries report this data, as well, and if you take a look at the numbers for 2000 to 2004 emissions growth in the United States was 1.3 percent at a time when the economy grew by about 9.5 percent and population expanded by about 4 percent. The EU 15, which is essentially Western Europe, their emissions grew by 2.4 percent, so they performed worse than the United States. So I don't bring that up to denigrate all the things that are going on in the EU. They are all helpful. But it just goes to point out that no country is significantly cutting its emissions at this point. Mr. Bilbray. Who do you think is doing the best? Mr. Eule. Well, I have a chart here. I could look. The Japanese are doing quite well. But, you know, we have heard a lot about cap in trade. I would point out the Japanese are doing well but they don't have a cap in trade policy in place. The Canadians don't have a cap in trade and they are not doing as well as the United States. So there is a mix but everybody is pretty much in the same place as far as emissions go. Mr. Bilbray. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Chairman Tom Davis. I want to thank this panel. Thank you very much. This has been very helpful for us as we move forward. Thank you. We will take a minute break and get our next panel. We have our next panel: Mr. Lee Lane, the executive director of the Climate Policy Center; Mr. Richard Van Atta, the senior research analyst at the Institute for Defense Analyses; Dr. Martin Hoffert, emeritus professor, New York University; Robert Socolow, the former director, Center for Energy and Environmental Studies at Princeton University; and Dr. Daniel Kammen, the director of Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley. It is our policy to swear you in. Dr. Van Atta, your daughter is where now in school? Mr. Van Atta. UVA. Chairman Tom Davis. Excellent. Mr. Van Atta. Thank you. Chairman Tom Davis. Excellent. Mr. Van Atta. Your remarks about Jeb Stuart are very well taken. Chairman Tom Davis. I knew you would appreciate it. Mr. Van Atta. It is a wonderful model for people to look at in terms of how a school has been resuscitated and turned into a model. Chairman Tom Davis. Yes. Excellent. Mr. Van Atta. It is a real asset for our area. Chairman Tom Davis. Well, I had two through there. One, Shelley, is at William and Mary, and Pamela is at Swarthmore, so they have done well. [Witnesses sworn.] Chairman Tom Davis. Mr. Lane, we will start with you and we will move on down. There is a light in front of you that is green when it starts, then it turns orange after 4 minutes and red after 5, but we are going to try to keep within that because your entire statement is part of the record. Thank you. STATEMENTS OF LEE LANE, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, CLIMATE POLICY CENTER; RICHARD VAN ATTA, SENIOR RESEARCH ANALYST, INSTITUTE FOR DEFENSE ANALYSES; MARTIN HOFFERT, EMERITUS PROFESSOR, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY; ROBERT SOCOLOW, FORMER DIRECTOR, CENTER FOR ENERGY AND ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY; AND DANIEL KAMMEN, DIRECTOR, RENEWABLE AND APPROPRIATE ENERGY LABORATORY, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY STATEMENT OF LEE LANE Mr. Lane. Thanks a lot. I really appreciate the opportunity to appear here this afternoon, and I also really want to thank both you and the committee, as a whole, for conducting this hearing. I think this subject is one of tremendous importance. One of the attachments to my written statement is an editorial from the current issue of the Journal of Nature pointing out the enormous importance of government-funded R&D as a potential source of solutions to the problem of climate change. As soon as we recognize that we really need government- funded R&D, in particular, it raises the question that the record of the Federal Government on energy R&D has been distinctly mixed, and so we really face a serious set of questions about how to do R&D to solve our climate problems in such a way that it actually is likely to get the results that we are looking for. It is a very hard, very big problem, climate change, as you know, so it is a very difficult problem and I think you are really to be commended for asking some of the questions about how to organize an R&D effort in such a way that it really works. We have a very distinguished panel of experts here and they are going to discuss, I think, several of them, some of the more global aspects of the issue of how to do R&D, but I wanted to open my remarks by focusing on what I think are three pretty simple initial steps that could really get us started, things that are not necessarily global in nature but things that would, if we could do them, would really have an impact in enhancing the cost effectiveness of our Federal climate-related R&D effort. The first of those, which is described in attachment B in my statement, would be to create a focused exploratory research program directed at finding new climate technology solutions. Several of us, four very distinguished scientists, including Dr. Hoffert and several others, and me, who is not a scientist at all, put together this straw man proposal describing a possible way of organizing an exploratory R&D program aimed at climate solutions. I think that the two problems that such a program could solve are, first, that it could reduce the rigidity of the Federal climate change technology program. Bureaucracies tend to perpetuate themselves. All bureaucracies do that. It makes them rigid. It makes them slow to change. The program as we have designed it would go outside of the bureaucracy to open up the search for new ideas just as broadly as possible, and hopefully in doing that would encourage the flow of new ideas into our R&D portfolio. The second thing it would do would be to counteract some of the tendency toward risk averseness, toward over-caution in the current portfolio of the climate change technology program. This is a problem that has been noted by some of DOE's own reviews of the climate change technology program. We think that the proposal we have sketched out offers a possible way of counteracting both of those problems with the existing program. Our proposal for doing this--and there are other ways you could do it, but our proposal is to create an autonomous, not-for-profit Government-funded corporation to organize the exploratory R&D effort. We think it is better to create a corporation outside of the DOE in order to make sure that we don't simply perpetuate the same problems that exist within the existing organization. Your opening remarks alluded to one of my other key points here, which is the need for expanding the R&D portfolio of DOE to include geo-engineering and adaptation in the CCTP. I think those are extremely important points. We could find ourselves with nasty surprises, and it would be much better to have done the research on those things beforehand. I guess the third thing I will say, just in closing, is that it really is important to give DOE the planning staff of CCTP the resources that they need to do a better job of planning in the future. They have actually done, I think, yeoman's service given their resource limitations, and if we want them to do better we have to give them the resources to do that. I conclude by just saying again I think that this hearing is enormously valuable. I thank you very much for your initiative in organizing it, and certainly the Climate Policy Center will do whatever we can to be helpful. [The prepared statement of Mr. Lane follows:] [GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT] Chairman Tom Davis. Thank you very much. That is very helpful. Dr. Van Atta, welcome and thank you. STATEMENT OF RICHARD VAN ATTA Mr. Van Atta. I am not an energy specialist. My background is Defense and Defense research. I spent a fair amount of my career looking at emerging technologies and how they are made to emerge, and I teach a class at Georgetown on emerging technologies and security, and I emphasize the fact that emerging technologies are made to emerge. The question is the processes and the means by which you do that. DARPA is a unique example of an entity that was created with that purpose in mind, and I think it is important to look at it in terms of why it succeeded and what made it succeed. In my testimony, which I will read portions of here, I emphasize that the research that DARPA does is unique and different, and is purposefully so. The organization, itself, is designed explicitly to allow it to do this unique and different type of research, and it has cultural features within its organization and management style that allow it to do that. In the testimony I talk about the DARPA model and I also ask the question of which DARPA model, because DARPA has done many things in many different ways. It has been adaptive. It is very malleable. One cannot just say there is a DARPA and that we are going to take that and implant it some place else. You have to understand what it took to make it do what it could do and why it was able to change in those very effective ways. So it evolved over time and it has many successes, and those successes, in fact, were different because they were dealing with different problems. We have to understand the way in which those successes were made and what it took to make those successful, and I will talk about a couple of examples of that. DARPA's program managers are the core. They are, in fact, almost individual entrepreneurs. They are encouraged to challenge existing approaches. In the case of Defense, for war fighting and to seek results rather than just explore ideas. In addition to supporting technology and the components of the technology development, DARPA has also funded integration of large-scale systems demonstrations to look into what we would call disruptive capabilities. There is a high-risk, high-payoff motif for DARPA that is a set of organizational and operational characteristics that include its relatively small size, its lean, non-bureaucratic structure, its focus on potentially change-state technologies, its highly flexible and adaptive research programs, but what is most important at the outset is that, in contrast to the existing Defense research environment, ARPA was manifestly different. It did not have labs. It does not focus on existing requirements. It is separate from any operational organization elements. What is explicit is that its charter is to be different so it could do fundamentally different things that had not been done in a research environment. So when one looks at an energy ARPA or climate change ARPA, the question is what are the things that it is trying to do that are different and how do you set up an organization to do that. DARPA was established as a research and development organization to assure the United States maintained the lead in the state-of-the-art technology for military requirements and prevent technology surprise. As one then looks at the characteristics of how it did that, first of all it was independent of other organizations. Second of all, it is lean and agile. It was risk-taking and tolerant of failure, open to learning. You have to have a specific kind of research environment and organizational structure and a way in which your link to the rest of the organization will allow you to do that. The program managers are, in fact, the technical champions who conceive their own programs and have to then sell those programs within the DARPA environment. The coin of the realm in DARPA is promising ideas. Gaining notion is not that the idea is well proven, but that it has high prospects for making a difference on the problem they are trying to solve. So you have to have an organization and culture that focuses on those kinds of innovations and those kind of directions. In my testimony I talk a lot about DARPA's successes, and I don't have time to go into those here, but I will give you some key what I consider to be elements of that success. First of all, focus on creating surprise, creating difference, not avoiding them. Second, build what I call communities of change state advocates. One of the key things that is unique to DARPA is it doesn't create and do its own research, it incentivizes and creates a community of people to do that. If one talks about the current structure of DOE in the national labs, they do their own work with their own capabilities within their own operations. What DARPA did is it found the people who could do that. It developed the community. It found the new ideas out there and brought them together in a coherent manner. The third element is to find challenges, develop solution concepts, and then demonstrate them. We can show examples of that in my testimony. Finally, I would say if one were to ask the question what were the key things about climate change that relate to DARPA and the DARPA model, the first thing I would say is you have to understand the imperative that drove the creation of DARPA in terms of national security, the Sputnik issue, and ask the question: do we have the same imperative and understanding of imperative to make an ARPA-like organization work elsewhere? You also have to have the understanding that it will work because of the protection, oversight, and interest of the Secretary of Defense and even the President to make it happen. Without that, just naming something ARPA will not solve your problem for you. Finally, I would say you need to deal with not only leadership support but the issue of congressional oversight. ARPA has benefited from the fact it has a simple oversight structure, it is not being managed by multiple congressional committees simultaneously, and with that kind of multiple meddling you are not going to get anywhere. You have to deal with existing lab structure. An ARPA-like organization cannot succeed if, in fact, it was supposed to support and integrate all those labs and use that as its basis of success, and then they have to deal with the incumbent business interests. One of the key things, examples of DARPA, was how it created information technology capability despite the fact that IBM dominated all of the information technology development at the time that it created that very successful program, but it did it by not having to directly address but create alternatives to those incumbent capabilities. So my suggestion is that there is value in an ARPA energy that could be created, but if you are going to do that you have to understand that first of all you need to have that galvanized focus, you need to have an approach that is allowed to be independent, and it has to have top-level leadership if it is going to succeed. Thank you. [The prepared statement of Mr. Van Atta follows:] [GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT] Chairman Tom Davis. Thank you very much. Dr. Hoffert, thanks for being here. STATEMENT OF MARTIN HOFFERT Mr. Hoffert. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. You may have to bear with me. I have a bit of a cold. What I would like to do is outline some of the specific attributes of the climate energy problem that make it a candidate for ARPA or DARPA-like R&D, but I would also like to distinguish between several contexts which are being used interchangeably. A Manhattan Project or an Apollo Program Project is not the same as a DARPA-type organization, and neither is an exploratory research program, so let me just discuss what I think is the objective problem, the objective climate energy problem. What we are faced with is a kind of existential challenge to our high-technology civilization. Almost universally all the countries of the world are in favor of continued economic growth, roughly at 2 or 3 percent a year. That is built into all of the models. At the same time, those of us who have worked on the climate problem--and that includes myself. I have worked on this for almost 30 years. I was, in fact, a colleague of Jim Hansen's at the Institute for Space Studies back in the 1970's. We have, over time, evolved a pretty good understanding quantitatively of this issue, and if we were to say that we don't want the planet to warm more than 2 or 2\1/2\ degrees, which might lead to irreversible melting of the ice caps, and at the same time require that economic growth continue at 2 or 3 percent a year--and that seems to be what everyone wants to do--that imposes mathematical constraints on not only the amount of emissions that we would be allowed to emit but on the amount of energy that we would have to either produce by alternate energy technologies that don't emit CO2 or energy demand reducing technologies that would give us the same end products but with less input. We have written several papers on this. The first paper we wrote was in 1998 where we first floated the idea of an Apollo or a Manhattan Project for energy. The week after that paper appeared in Nature, the editorial writers of Nature said this is really a bad idea because we know that the Jimmy Carter energy program had a lot of boondoggles, it wasn't really effective, and researcher is no substitute for political action. I want to come back to that in a minute, but because it is so important I must be sure that I say this at the beginning and don't forget. There is a perception in some quarters that research can be used as an alternative to prompt implementation of things that we know how to do right now. I want to as strongly as possible say that is not the case. I favor a metaphor, a sort of World War II type metaphor. I think the problem we are facing is at least as challenging as winning the second world war. We didn't stop fighting the second World War while the Manhattan Project was going on. We did the Manhattan Project, but by the time the war ended it did deliver a remarkable piece of technology that managed to change the shape of the world for the next 50 years, for better or for worse. So I think that, although I won't refer to this any more, it is very clear that whatever we do on the R&D front has to be done in parallel with implementing everything that we have on the shelf right now. Having said that, let me go to some specific problems that I think could benefit from an intense R&D of--I believe that the DARPA model might be very valuable in some of these problems. What do we actually have in the coffers now to provide the levels of energy that we need to run the world, which is something like 300 to 400 percent of the energy that we are using right now? In order to stabilize at 2 degrees warming or less, we are going to have to have some energy source X if we are going to do it with supply that can provide between 100--or a combination of sources--between 100 and 300 percent of all the energy that we use now without putting CO2 in the atmosphere. To put this into context, Fermi's first nuclear reactor in 1942 was farther in time than 2050 is from us, and roughly 5 percent of our primary power comes from nuclear power. So whatever this energy source is, it will have to grow something like 20 to 60 times faster than the last revolutionary energy source we had. That is an immense challenge, if you put it in that framework. There are other ways of stating it. My colleague Rob Socolow uses the metaphor of wedges. But it is a major, major job and it is not going to get done, in my opinion, unless we have a targeted program to develop three classes of technology, each one of which has a number of variants. The first class is coal, with carbon sequestration or carbon capture. There is a lot of coal, and if it weren't for global warming this would really be a problem for the 22nd century or beyond. We can make synthetic fuels out of coal, but CO2 and the climate problem has moved it to the agenda where we have to start working on this right now. In fact, 850 new coal- fired power plants are being built right now by the United States, China, and India, and the emissions from those plants are going to overwhelm Kyoto emission reductions by a factor of five. The U.S.'s response to climate change, as put forth by Negotiator Harlan Watson at the recent round of Kyoto discussions in Montreal, was something called future gen, where DOE is going to build a plant that will make hydrogen and electricity from coal gassification. We don't even have a location for that plant, and the contribution that we can expect from that technology is very small compared to what we are already doing. So, although coal is important, we are rapidly building precisely the wrong infrastructure marching in the wrong direction, tying up capital for 50 to 75 years. The second general category are safe or so-called green nuclear reactors. Nuclear power has come a long way, although we haven't in this country built a new reactor for at least 30 years. We need to come to grips with the issue of what it would take to generate nuclear power sustainably, and it is not clear that once the reactor is burning the U235 isotope can do it. That is less than 5 percent of natural uranium. There are alternative ideas that involve breeders that may involve using folium. Those were always parts of the discussion back in the 1970's, but the institutional memory of that has dimmed, and I believe we are far too modest in our plans for nuclear and could really use some innovative ideas to drive us toward a sustainable energy source. The third category and the one that I am most identified with and favor the most is renewable energy, primarily solar and wind energy. These energy sources are low intensity, intermittent, and widely distributed. If we wanted to use these sources, if we wanted to get, let's say, one-third of our primary power from renewables, one-third from green nukes, and one-third from coal sequestration, we really need to invent and deploy entirely new systems for transmitting and storing this energy. Indeed, the transmission and the storage of the renewable energy may become the cost pacer in the implementation of renewable energy beyond the point where renewables can penetrate as a niche market. I think that is another area that could benefit from a DARPA-like program. This emphasis on technology, which in no way should be construed as an alternative to prompt action, I also think is a way that we might entrain a bipartisan support for this. I had the pleasure yesterday of appearing before a different committee, the House Committee on Science, and Congressman Rohrabacher was there and made some remarks to the effect that he doesn't accept the theory of global warming, which I know, and that was fine. But I also know Congressman Rohrabacher to be a proponent of space solar power, solar power satellites where one collects solar energy in Earth orbit and beams it to the Earth. He has given many talks in conferences on this that I have attended. On this score, we are technologically simpatico. I think it would be very important to have an R&D program in space solar power. After all, the world is spending $13 billion to build an experimental thermonuclear reactor that isn't even going to generate any power. There is essentially zero funding for space solar power right now, although we did have a program in the 1970's. It is another discussion, but the one problem is that, if that technology or other related technologies like global super- conducting transmission lines, auto gyros that might be suspended in the upper troposphere which have the potential of providing all the electricity on Earth are not being supported because there is no champion within the Government agencies, particularly the Department of Energy. How are we ever going to start working on those ideas? I think that I would imagine a sequence of events in which we might start with a relatively modest exploratory research technology program that would examine the feasibility of these ideas and start looking into experiments to test them. That might be eventually correlated with an ARPA-E program and, if it looks like it is very promising, it might transfer eventually to the Department of Energy. I don't think I have very much time left but I have one more point that I think is vitally important. Many Americans believe that the job of the Department of Energy is to develop alternative energy sources that would be sustainable and allow us to live harmoniously with nature and yet retain our high- tech civilization. That is not the job, as you well know. DOE has two jobs, one is called stockpile stewardship, which means to make sure that the nuclear weapons we have will actually work if we ever had to use them, and the other is toxic waste cleanup. I put it to the committee that the Department of Energy, itself, should be reorganized. This is not such a far- out idea. As you may well know, NASA has recently been reorganized and tasked with the mission of going back to the moon and going to Mars, perhaps without adequate funding but certainly heads rolled and there were internal reorganizations. I don't bring this up because I necessarily agree with that direction. In fact, I am quite unhappy about the loss of monitoring programs from space that have applicability to climate change. But I bring it up because it is not impossible for a Government agency to be reorganized and to be retasked, and I cannot think of a more important task for this century, a more important organizing principle than developing sustainable energy sources in harmony with natural ecosystems. Thank you. [The prepared statement of Mr. Hoffert follows:] [GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT] Chairman Tom Davis. Thank you very much. Dr. Socolow, thank you for being with us. STATEMENT OF ROBERT SOCOLOW Mr. Socolow. Chairman Davis, ladies and gentlemen, I have titled my remarks One Hand Clapping. You have heard a very strong case for moving forcefully forward with technological responses that address climate change. We need early deployment of technologies that we already know are matched to the job and we need long-term research to expand the list of options. Congressional action is critical in both areas. To accelerate the deployment of the technological strategies whose promise is already clearly identified, requires price signals for carbon. To raise the energy R&D effort to a new level requires greatly expanded, durable funding of research with a long time horizon. To do one without the other, that is like one hand clapping. I want to share with you work that I have done over the past 2 years with my ecologist colleague Steve Pacala that has added coherence to discussions of climate policy. Please look at the figure on the screen. This, by the way, is in the Scientific American in September 2006, the current issue. The upward trajectory envisions 50 years of inaction while carbon dioxide emissions double, followed by aggressive action to hold global emissions constant for the following 50 years. Following the upward trajectory, the world will find it difficult to avoid tripling the preindustrial carbon dioxide concentration and a rise in the average surface temperature of roughly 5 degrees celsius. The lower trajectory, the blue one, envisions immediate action to hold global emissions constant, followed in half a century by a second aggressive program to reduce global emissions roughly in half. Following the lower trajectory will enable the world to beat doubling--that is, to keep the concentration below twice its preindustrial concentration--with a rise of roughly 3 degrees. The stabilization triangle is that orange and yellow area between the two trajectories. You can see that it is divided into seven stabilization wedges. A stabilization wedge is a strategy that produces a reduction of 1 billion tons of carbon and global carbon dioxide emissions 50 years from now relative to what would happen in the absence of attention to climate problem. The size of the world's job for the next 50 years is to achieve seven wedges, if we can live with a 3 degree temperature increase. If we want to stay below 2 degrees celsius, more wedges will be needed. I note that the climate change technology plan published yesterday, if you look at 2055, also has exactly seven wedges. They have 16 minus 9 instead of 14 minus 7, but there is a complete agreement about the scale of the job that is associated with avoiding a 3 degree temperature rise between the DOE and our own analysis. In a world in 2056 that emits the same amount of carbon as today, the United States will emit less CO2 than today, and the trajectory that we will need to follow from here to there must depart from its expected business-as-usual trajectory immediately and must peak in about a decade, and global emissions would peak soon after. You must not underestimate the size of the policy intervention required to turn U.S. emissions downward. A too- low price for carbon dioxide emissions will lead industries and consumers to treat these expenses as routine costs of business. The required price schedule for CO2 emissions must induce fundamental changes in the energy system beginning within a decade or less. We figure out how much we have to spend by how much will create action. Pacala and I estimate that the price needed to jump-start this transmission is in the ballpark of $100 to $200 per ton of carbon, that is to say $25 to $50 per ton of CO2. Arrangements, for example, would make it cheaper for new coal plants to capture and store CO2 rather than to vent it. Based on its carbon content, $100 per ton of carbon is $12 a barrel of oil, $60 a ton of coal, $0.25 a gallon of gasoline, and $0.02 per kilowatt hour for electricity made from coal. Policy-induced scale-up of existing technology can only succeed if accompanied by R&D to squeeze down costs and to solve the problems that inevitably accompany widespread deployment. Along with such programmatic R&D, we will also need another kind of research program that we are talking about here, more blue sky, a program able to capture the imagination and the loyalty of the world's best scientists and engineers like the Manhattan Project and the Apollo program. Both of those historic programs provided dependable research support, which is a necessary condition to induce the most productive scientists and engineers, to reorient their research careers, and to induce the most ambitious students to adopt these retooling scientists and engineers as their mentors. But energy research must be international and must heavily involve the private sector. Those are two characteristics that the Apollo program and the Manhattan program did not share. I repeat my main message: we need a serious expansion of high-risk R&D, but not only R&D. As Marty Hoffert also said. We also need policy that elicits carbon responsive investments by industry and carbon-saving practices on the part of consumers. R&D in the absence of near-term technology-forcing policy is like one hand clapping. Thank you. [The prepared statement of Mr. Socolow follows:] [GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT] Chairman Tom Davis. Thank you very much. Dr. Kammen. STATEMENT OF DANIEL KAMMEN Mr. Kammen. Chairman Davis, thank you very much for the opportunity to speak today. [Slide presentation.] Mr. Kammen. If we could move to the next slide, I share many of the points in common with the two previous speakers. I would like to highlight a number of what I think are the key issues of a serious approach to this problem. The first is a major commitment to energy. Leadership and sustainability is needed. It is long overdue and it would benefit this country. There is a global lack of leadership in this area. We would profit financially, as well as environmentally, by taking on that role. Energy environmental sustainability is a marathon. It is not a sprint. Like in a marathon, where your worst of many miles times can dramatically affect your performance, cutting the funding and cutting support on a given year critically cuts programs that are otherwise successful. The best graduate students leave fields. The best researchers leave fields. Companies don't see it as a serious effort if funding levels fluctuate up or down dramatically, so having a sustained, long- term program that is much wider than just DOE is going to be critical to make this happen. We have the scientific and technological foundation not necessarily to get us all of the way there but to make major inroads, and we learn by doing. We must start that process in a much more aggressive way than the CCTP even lays out the beginning of. I would submit that the next serious stage is to do what the CCTP has looked at within DOE in a much broader way across not only other Federal agencies but also with those States and those foreign governments that are making serious inroads here. That was largely lacking in the process. The benefits of investing in innovation are well documented by the world's economists. They are significant. They reach across many sectors of the economy. If we did this in the energy sector, the so-called clean tech area, we would see those benefits. Innovation leads to more innovation, whereas stagnation does not. We need to invest and we need to make clear signals where we want to get to. Finally, the point that Congressman Waxman so kindly made, and that is technologies do not adopt themselves. Programs that are technology-only focused will not succeed in this area. A critical difference not yet discussed with the differences between a DOE program is that there was essentially a single client for DOE efforts. Our clients here are companies, homes, utilities in the United States and around the world. It is not the same thing as having a single client, the Secretary of Defense, and sending a project forward. We need a broad strategy that marries in a sustained way energy R&D with efforts to bring technologies into the market. That is a critical step. On the next slide I highlight two things. One is the oft- reported growing U.S. emissions in carbon. If we move ahead, that is our business-as-usual trajectory, depressing as it is. You will notice the next point forward shows not only where the administration's target, the so-called reduction in energy intensity, which in my view is a false and misleading way to lead out the strategy. Nature does not care how much we change our energy intensity; nature cares how much we reduce our loading of the environment with carbon. We need to have a target that is absolute and not a target that is a function of a percentage growth rate change. I highlight this with the Kyoto protocol target and a red line indicating what California has adopted through a series of measures, Assembly Bill 1493, Assembly Bill 32, Senate Bill 1, the million solar roofs measure that has near-term targets that we know are achievable. We believe we can do and we know how to do 20 to 25 percent reductions in the State, and we have heard excellent comments from Congressman Bill Ray about how the California Air Resources Board tasked to do that has done it in the past. The rest of the path we do not know how to do. The parts of this line to bring our emissions down in this later part of the picture we do not have a recipe for, but to look for single- technology solutions, very expensive individual programs, without building out the first part of the curve is not to learn from the process of technology, innovation, and development that has been successful in many other areas. Run the marathon through here and determine your strengths down here. Do not delay until you think you have the magic bullet to get you down to the target. If you advance the slide one more time you will see a target is dramatic. If you can advance one more slide, the stabilization regime is down here. It is an 80 percent reduction. It is a large, overall process. Notice there is a gap, as Dr. Socolow calls it, a wedge here. If you go to the next slide there is a remarkable experience in the United States. The top lines show the overall increase in electricity use per person in the United States. The lower lines show the California and New York experiences. If we advance the slide, you will notice there is a remarkable wedge of energy efficiency savings. That was not envisioned and developed by a one-stop, one magic energy efficiency technology. It was a combination of better light bulbs, water heaters, standards for buildings, shading homes, etc. It was a cumulative process, the same sort of process we can expect to see if we invest significantly in energy efficiency in renewables as we do in energy efficiency. If we move to the next slide, we are seeing now in the world of ethanol, whether it is ethanol made from corn or ethanol made from cellulose, a dramatic increase in ethanol production and use, and many States are adopting more and more aggressive ethanol targets, and our lab has been involved in that process through a fairly high-profile paper in this area. This is an effort of increasing R&D and market opportunities at the same time. We must look for those in both areas, not just R&D, not just markets, but those working in concert. If we jump ahead a few more slides, this unfortunately is our current situation. The top line shows Federal energy R&D, the $3 billion number we heard before, the number here, and the black line below it shows private sector R&D. We have a mis- match of private sector spending in this area. In fact, this does not have to be the pattern. If we look at the next slide, in the area of health care private sector R&D has been increasing for several decades, while in the energy sector it has been decreasing. A friend and colleague of mine, a former assistant secretary in DOE, noted sadly that this means that we will be alive to see the folly of our lack of investment in the energy sector. I conclude with the fairly simple but clear set of comments on the last slide, and that is this committee, with a largely bipartisan interest in these areas, has demonstrated that we are able to raise our expectations and raise our standards for investment in this area, that clean energy can be an area of tremendous innovation for the economy, an area that we would export to the world and benefit from. If we support States that enact aggressive policies such as the New England States, the mid-Atlantic States, California, some of the northwest States that are adopting renewable energy content requirements for their power, we can assist those areas undertaking experiments that we all want to see happen to determine which policies are the most effective and not wait for a magic bullet, single- size-fits-all, DOD-mimicked solution. I would like to note, as well, if we jump to the next feature, that over the last 3 years we have observed a carbon tax of roughly $270 per ton in the run-up in gasoline prices. None of that has effectively gone into clean-tech R&D. We have paid this out of our pockets with that money going overseas without capturing it, as Dr. Socolow said, with a significant carbon tax. I recommend a much more modest initial tax to gain experience with the process, but that is exactly how we need to start to send the right signals to industry that we are serious about it, that we expect performance, and that we will award the performance in this area. I would like to again thank you for the chance to speak, and I urge us to take advantage of the opportunity to be the environmental leader that the United States is currently not doing relative to a number of other nations. It is our opportunity and our challenge to take on that leadership. Thank you very much. [The prepared statement of Mr. Kammen follows:] [GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT] Chairman Tom Davis. I want to thank all of you for your testimony. The first question you always ask is, regardless of what California or the United States does, if everybody doesn't act together, particularly with the emerging nations, you know, you are penalizing yourself economically in not getting the same kind of results, but it starts here. I mean, all we can talk about in Congress is what we can do. Mr. Van Atta, let me just ask you. You stated in your testimony that ARPA's success is dependent upon a galvanized structure and direct oversight. Where do you think a climate change ARPA could be housed? Mr. Van Atta. Well, the most natural place would be the Department of Energy, but I would agree with others that probably not this Department of Energy. We have to find a way of having an imperative that is focusing on the energy and climate issues. If you chartered the Department of Energy to do that as its primary mission and the Secretary had that as the primary mission from the President, then an organization like this would be well housed there. If it is not that, then it would not succeed. Chairman Tom Davis. And right now, I mean, the report right now, there are no lines of authority anywhere. You have all these task forces and everything else. You know, my experience in government is that this is not the way to get anything done. Mr. Lane, what would a CCRPA be able to do that the CCTP doesn't have the capacity for right now? Mr. Lane. Well, I think if you organized it the way that our paper proposed to organize it, which is to say as a not- for-profit government-financed but independent corporation, I think it would be insulated from the bureaucratic pressures for not very daring, not very breakthrough oriented technology that I fear characterizes part of the current DOE portfolio. I don't want to exaggerate that, but I think it all depends on insulating the entity doing the exploratory research to be able to operate the way Dr. Van Atta describes DARPA as operating. I don't think you can do that within the existing institution, so our proposal of a corporation was a way of trying to get around that. Chairman Tom Davis. Let me ask this. I come at it from a more political perspective, because that is the way I have come up through the ranks. I don't have a Ph.D in physics. I am a lawyer by training. But we find out when you put FEMA in Homeland Security it is competing for dollars with prevention dollars in Homeland Security and it gets starved. We found this in other agencies. The Federal Information Security Management Act without information security gets starved when you put it in competing with everything else. Making it a priority, that is one of the reasons, you know, you talk about Cabinet-level positions to make it priorities where it is not competing for precious dollars, discretionary dollars or anything. That is why I like the concept of an ARPA of some kind where you get the focus. I am just afraid, despite some good intentions of some people across the bureaucracy and even the administration, the way it is set up today I just don't see how we get from here to there. I guess that is the major concern. Let me just ask if anybody else has any thoughts on that. Mr. Hoffert, do you have any thoughts on that? Mr. Hoffert. Well, I mean, there are things that you can do immediately in the exploratory R&D program that we proposed. There is not a lot of money. It is not a lot of money. I think we were asking on the order of $30 million. What it would do is it would be a first stage of analyzing what kind of ideas are out there that aren't really being captured by the present Department of Energy structure where you don't have a champion. It is something that could be done now. Now, eventually, as I said in my statement, I really think the Department of Energy has to be restructured and given a mission. That is a very high-level decision. It is probably a Presidential decision. If you ask me what I would wish for, I would wish that, in time for the next Presidential elections, that both major political parties would realize that this is a vital interest of the United States, it is vitally important to U.S. policy and to the world. If you ask me, I think it is more important than terrorism and we would be having public debates about it and both parties, from whatever their ideological perspectives, would attempt to have a real energy policy, not just pork and reshuffling. I think that is important. That is something you guys can do. Chairman Tom Davis. We can, but let me just tell you this place, once you get this thing to the mish-mash between the House and the Senate and Members with their employment opportunities in their State it gets bogged down. It really has to start at the top. I am just telling you. I mean, I think all of us here have good will in trying to tackle this, but trying to get it through the mish-mash makes it very, very difficult. But you are right. I mean, I agree with you. It is a serious problem. We ought to be talking more about this. We ought to have an honest debate. There are differences of opinion about how we proceed, not just procedurally but what some of the functions are, and we don't even know scientifically everything we need to know in terms of what some of the options are. I think we agree it ought to be a priority. Anyone else want to add anything on that? Mr. Kammen. I agree that this needs to be a Cabinet-level position in time, but perhaps for a little bit different reasons, and that is that the benefits that would accrue to Commerce, to Agriculture, to Energy, to Defense come up in different settings in different conversations, and you discover that there is a security benefit by bringing down your oil. Mr. Socolow and I sit on a Defense Science Board looking at these issues right now. Commerce discovers that there is an unmet international need for importing high-efficiency power plants, not because of greenhouse gas issues, because they are more efficient and less costly to operate in the long term. These are all technological areas where U.S. companies are well set up to innovate but they are not doing their share, A, because they don't see the Federal leadership on this; B, because the Federal dollars flowing in are simply too small to tickle enough of those interests, much different than we see, for example, in NIH, where private sector funding in the health field is far ahead of the public funding, so the public can fill a role and fill gaps. That is what a better mission would be here, and that would require the sort of inclination that the Cabinet-level would hold. The benefits to our economy are very large. California is already adding up the tens of thousands of jobs that we expect to pull into the State because of the greenhouse gas requirements. Those are things that the United States could also capture as a peace or a green dividend by taking this on at that very highest Presidential cabinet level. Chairman Tom Davis. You think it is helping the economy in California? Mr. Kammen. It is documented. We have studies from universities, from private sectors---- Chairman Tom Davis. I would love to see that. Mr. Kammen [continuing]. In and out of State. I would love to send the copies along. The estimates are that to meet the AB32 greenhouse gas standards California will generate about 50,000 new jobs, largely high-tech, in-State jobs. Chairman Tom Davis. Because the general rap on California is it is a job killer. I will keep an open mind. I am interested to see it. I come from a District with a 2 percent unemployment rate out here in northern Virginia, but I would be eager to see that. Mr. Waxman. Thank you all very much. Mr. Waxman. I also want to thank all of the panelists. One of the things you may not be aware of is that the hearings are carried on the internal television coverage within the House, so I was away but I was able to watch your testimony and to read it, of course, from the statements that you submitted. Dr. Socolow, the administration's plan is to put off action on global warming for years to come. They continue to fund some research, but they would leave concrete action to address global warming to future administrations. They seem to think there is little meaningful action we can take now. You have done considerable work examining what technologies are available today. Can you explain more about what you call stabilization wedges and give us some examples of available technologies that could be deployed to fight global warming? Mr. Socolow. I don't think there are many people in the administration who would agree with everything I am about to say, and it really infuses the climate change technology plan. I called it One Hand Clapping. The program there makes no sense unless, alongside it, there is a motivation for early action, for trying things out. I will take the example of carbon capture and storage at coal plants. We shouldn't be building any coal plants from here on that don't further the goal of carbon capturing storage in all of them and keep as short as possible the transition from some of them to all of them. The DOE has a program on carbon capture and storage, a wonderful one, one of the best in the world. They, themselves, know that it makes no sense unless there is a carbon policy that goes with it, so we are not even going to get the taxpayers' benefit of the R&D without the associated program. This is widely understood. This is not a Democrat and Republican thing. Inefficiency technologies, again, the DOE has had a perfectly simple program and substantially pushing the R&D element of efficiency, but we could have tougher appliance standards across so many sectors and move these things out. The R&D goes hand in hand with the policies. In renewables, again, we have an incoherent renewables program as far as I can tell. If we had stronger signals that were broadly posed in terms of carbon price, for example, you would have better sorting out of the alternatives. We listed 15 wedges, each of which is a gigantic challenge worldwide to reach a point where you are contributing 15 percent to the whole job 50 years from now. Each of these is a campaign. That is another word I like to use, a campaign or a strategy. It has to be globally coordinated. The United States is emitting one-quarter of the emissions today. We have technological leadership. We are slowing everybody else down by our inaction, which is another dangerous thing. We will bring the world along if we join, and we will conjoin along renewables, efficiency, and fossil fuel technologies in a very important way. Mr. Waxman. Thank you very much. Dr. Kammen, we are proud of California for the leadership that our State has shown in this whole area. To me, I strongly believe in States experimenting, but this is an area where we need Federal leadership. Maybe California's actions will spur it. You have testified that the administration's climate change technology program's strategic plan is seriously flawed. You state that the goal it seeks to attain is too modest. I would appreciate it if you could elaborate on that. And, moreover, if the administration were to achieve its so-called emission intensity target, would we have any confidence that we have meaningfully tackled global warming? Mr. Kammen. Let me start with your second question first. The answer is absolutely not. The emissions intensity target, as I said before, has no basis in the natural world. It doesn't address the fundamental question that we are putting in too much carbon, so we have to have an absolute target here, one that is measurable and quantifiable. California, as you know, has set up a carbon registry so that companies and municipalities track their emissions and look at them not on an intensity basis, which is a sliding scale based on how much you are growing, but based on overall emissions levels. And the most interesting first conclusion from that is that just by monitoring you discover some of the areas. I liken it to the frequent flyer effect. If you start to collect frequent flyer miles you want to spend them. Companies that tally up their numbers and discover they are saving this much, they could save more, want a market to sell those credits. That is what California's AB32 has in place. It has a market mechanism that extends across the economy and outside, because all electricity sold into California will be subject. I know of six coal-fired power plant plans that were on the table to be built in the mountain States to sell to California that have now been shelved as a result of what California has done. So the reach is impressive. You are right, we do need to have this go beyond not just California and the west but it has to extend to all countries. I do not believe there is a benefit, however, in waiting to act until we get this. Those municipalities, countries that export and have developed the best technologies will have the opportunity to export them for a variety of efficiency gains, and that really is the benefit that we are seeing in Scandinavia. We see parts of Germany and Spain doing the same thing, and Japan and California and New England. The Reggie Coalition is also taking an aggressive role in that. That is where the economic benefit lies. Mr. Waxman. Thank you very much. Chairman Tom Davis. Mr. Van Hollen. Mr. Van Hollen. Thank you. Mr. Chairman, I want to thank all of the witnesses for your testimony. As Dr. Kammen said in his testimony, what we are measuring here against in terms of reductions is what has to be accomplished for the purpose of reducing the negative impacts of global warming, the human contribution to that to whatever level we feel is sustainable in terms of our own needs. The administration, when they talk about just reducing the rate of increase, that may not be enough if you are not reducing the rate of increase by the amount necessary to achieve the goals that we want. I also, although I am from the State of Maryland, I want to commend the State of California for its leadership on this issue and moving forward. I think you have already spoken to some of the immediate economic consequences in terms of decisions that are being made by coal-fired plants not just in California but outside of California. This is really a question for any of the witnesses. Because we have had testimony from various administration officials and you have heard their technology plan--there is no dispute about the need to invest in technology and renewable energy and energy efficiency. I mean, on a bipartisan basis people can agree and we should do it on an urgent basis and I think we should increase dramatically our investment in there. Where there seems to be disagreement, which is what Dr. Socolow really called the other hand for clapping, in other words, it is the need to invest in technology, but you really need that market forcing mechanism. You need to bring them both together. That is where there has been no political will. That is why the California legislation is important. That is where the administration has nothing to offer so far. So I guess my question for any of the panelists here, if you just take the administration's plan with respect to what they want to invest in technology and renewable energy, what kind of reductions, if any, are we going to see? And what is the gap between the reductions we will achieve if we just do everything they say as compared to where we need to be? Mr. Hoffert. I just want to make a personal observation. I live on Long Island, on Great Neck Long Island in New York, a suburb of New York City. Our family has signed up for green energy. We get electric power from upstate New York. We don't actually get the electrons. It is basically an offset, but we have to pay extra for that. Now, Long Island, where I live has a nuclear power plant called Shoreham that cost $6 billion. There are only 3 million people. That means every man, woman, and child is paying $2,000 for a power plant that is never going to produce any kilowatt hours. Most of the people don't even know that is happening, and that is one of the reasons we have a very high rate base. And then, when wind power becomes available, we have to pay in addition to that. I think there is a really big problem of educating people so that they really understand where their utility bills go and how decisions that are made ultimately impact on them. I think there is also certainly a role for the Federal Government in making it financially desirable to do something like getting your power from green power, even though it means importing it. There is also a lot that can be done with hybrid cars. I heard Dan talking about that earlier. Probably the most effective near-term thing that could be done to reduce our imported oil, in conjunction with biofuels like ethanol, which I might have some problems with, but the combination of plug-in hybrids and ethanol is very desirable. You can't buy a car like that. I mean, I have a hybrid. I am not happy with it. It turns out I bought this Lexus hybrid before it was available on the market and the fuel economy is nowhere near what I was hoping it would be, but there are a lot of issues like that that I believe there is a role for incentives by the Federal Government that could really make a difference to the average person. Mr. Kammen. I'd be happy to. I'd actually like to defend the Department of Energy here. I believe that the language in the mission statements that are in the CCTP were really a product of a little bit of an earlier era, and that the sense of that document is what are a set of individual stovepipe policies that are attractive. Many of the individual things in the report are quite interesting, but what I think we have heard broadly across the board here and what I heard actually from the Members and their comments is that an integrated strategy is needed. Until you have the integrated strategy, in my opinion, with aggressive R&D, aggressive market policies, and a carbon tax you are not going to get the kind of document out of a tasked agency to do so, so I really think it is, and I would love to see a sense of the committee statement, a memo coming out saying we believe the following is in the national interest and this is what we should push for. It is those sorts of sentiments coming back to a Department of Energy, a restructured one or not, that will allow us to say what is our goal. In my opinion the goal is the 80 percent reduction in greenhouse gases, but over a very manageable period of time--a big challenge, but a manageable period of time, five decades or so. When those political statements come out, I think that the DOE can actually move itself quite far in the direction they want. Mr. Van Hollen. Thank you. Chairman Tom Davis. I think that the committee will try to work some bipartisan language on this. One of reasons we are holding the hearings is to establish a pretty solid link. Most Members understand there is a problem and are concerned about the way it is being addressed. It is not necessarily the goal, but just how you implement it. Where's the priorities? Dr. Socolow, we have just a second because I have a Cabinet Secretary waiting in the back. Go ahead. Mr. Socolow. I just wanted to say that there is a time warp, I think, too, in the way in which we are all looking at this problem. The climate scientists have raised the level of the alarm. I live among them in my own office. They can't believe we are going to take the risks of going above doubling the CO2 concentration. There isn't any urgency if we live with three times. So we have to keep reminding ourselves that there is a message coming from the science community, and as far as how much carbon we can put in for a given level, that is a completely agreed-upon area with very small uncertainties. Chairman Tom Davis. Thank you. Did you want to make one last comment? Mr. Van Hollen. I agree with you, Mr. Chairman. It would be important to get a sense of the Congress in terms of what goal we are trying to achieve, but the other half of that, of course, is how we get to the goal. I think, as I understand the testimony, just investment in R&D, alone, won't accomplish that. Is that fair? Mr. Socolow. Absolutely correct. Chairman Tom Davis. We agree. That is one of the reasons we are doing it. Thank you all very much. It has been very helpful for us. The hearing is adjourned. [Whereupon, at 1:20 p.m., the committee was adjourned.] [The prepared statement of Hon. Elijah E. Cummings follows:] [GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT] <all>