and it is his body will go on many many years ago attempted to bring this issue before the committee and the congress the curiosity and the debate calling is a fact and human energy consumption is driving some of the detrimental effects of climate change the federal government can and must play a role in changing that is some sort of this behavior carbon based fuel consumption is one of the contributing factors to global warming problem and the federal government can and must use the tax code to encourage the development of alternative sources of energy to speak is made reduce in america and reliance on oil and other trans traditional carbon fuels as a priority on her agenda and she warming so that with the understanding the committee is able to move forward with tax policies that are more forward with what the responsibility of solving the problem we intend to frame the committee's future work in crafting a package of tax incentives that will accelerate the development of clean renewable energy and promote greater and edgy fish n c i would like to academic perspectives on climate change these witnesses will be able to quantify the effects of the nation's reliance on carbon based fuels on climate change and summarize the effects of scientific and business communities to address global warming these witnesses can also provide some big picture overview of how the tax system can be utilized to complement regulatory efforts and to encourage the series by this committee to explore issues dealing with two important goals one of which is to improve america's energy independence the other is to address issues relating to global climate change as we began to explore the issue of climate change i do no the lack of disagreement another way of saying the agreement among the panelists on the fact that the earth is experiencing a period of warming a related issue which i'm sure the panelists will discuss is the degree to which human activity is responsible for these changes we need not attempt to settle that debate here rather we should focus on whether the tools at this committee's disposal can be appropriately deployed to address the issue of climate change and making such an evaluation i would like to suggest three questions that we should apply to this discussion i hope they will be useful to all of us as we debate whether to ask our constituents to make difficult sacrifices today that might only marginally reduce largely unknown risk in the future first one of the dangers of climate change and when do they manifest themselves any inquiry into the issue of global climate change must examine the impact of changes in the earth's temperature and when those changes are going to be felt second can the united states acting on its own reverse or even slow global warming as this issue begins to take shape i'm sure that each of us will be urged by various interest groups to support a variety of solutions to global warming which could include an array of tax based carrots and sticks to encourage the development of greenhouse gas producing technologies as well as punishments on those who are deemed to be contributing to the problem before we rush to enact legislation let's be sure we understand whether placing new burdens on our economy in the name of fighting global warming an economy i should point out which is already significantly more greenhouse gases efficient than many other nations is going to make a measurable dent and the pace of climate change third are the direct and indirect costs on our economy for what improvement in the global climate this is a many ways the single most important issue for this committee as the true cost of our actions must be considered in a broader  what level of damage are we willing to do to our economy in exchange for what level of reduction in the right of global climate change is it worth sacrificing one percentage point of growth in our g d p for one degree less than the planet's average temperature and twenty one zero seven how many lost jobs does that translate into for american workers what exactly are the negative effects of that one degree of average higher temperature these are tough questions but they are questions we must ask if we are to reach the right conclusions generally if countries like china india and russia do not implement similar restrictions or even make a commitment to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions to levels of most of the develop world we need to ensure that we are not making the problem worse after all if the sticks that we apply to our economy drive up the cost of producing goods in the united states the inevitable result will be good jobs overseas where manufacturing  often done with far less regard to its impact on the environment and the global climate surely that is a result that each of us would find unsettling mr chairman i hope that this committee will consider these three major questions as we go through this took a long time for us to catch up to where have you been for so long so indulgence and patience with but together you can be assured that probably what has been a balance between the energy of the earth we see so the sun and the energy back to space that is invisible infrared radiation it is that simple the concentrations of carbon dioxide and many other long lived greenhouse gases have increased substantially over the past two centuries due in large part to human activity these greenhouse increases temporarily lower the flow of infrared energy back to say and increase the flow of this infrared energy down toward the surface the straightforward facts lead to the rising of temperatures at the surface and last twelve years include the two warmest and eleven of the twelve warmest years since the year eighteen fifty there is no doubt in my mind that climate is already changing  very significant way as begs the obvious question how much of this is due to human activity ten years ago i gave testimony during the house countdown to  hearings and which i stated that i was not convinced at that time that the human signal had arisen from the noise of natural variability i am now convinced that the human influence is proven with significant probability the observations of continued rapid warming and the recent improvements in climate theory and models are among the reasons for the change in my conclusion now human influence on climate is indicated if the observed global patterns of climate change over say the past fifty to one hundred years have shown to be consistent with those predicted by climate models which compared by the i p c c to the range of temperatures from multi model simulations with and without human forcing the separation of these two model temperature ranges during recent decades and the fact that the observations follow the host model range much more closely argues that the signal of human influence has indeed arisen from the noise and i agree the i p c c fo assessment has specifically concluded that there is greater than ninety percent chance that most of the observed increase in global average temperature since the mid twentieth century is due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas level the conclusions about human influence by the i p c c provide a substantial impetus for lowering futa greenhouse gas emissions now concern about climate change is driven also and especially by forecasts of significant warming over the next century but how good are these at mit we've developed an integrated global system model which consists of couple of models of probability of changes and surface temperature between ninety ninety and the year twenty one hundred to two hypothetical cases no expose of climate policy and a stringent policy the stringent policy dioxide in the twenty one hundred to be below twice it's pretty industrial level that's chosen somewhat arbitrarily the probabilities of in four of great events three degrees centigrade warming by the year twenty one hundred to one quarter of the circle such a warming is regarded by most climate scientists as very dangerous the policy will indicate of the odds of exceeding three degrees centigrade warming drop dramatically when the carbon dioxide level is kept in the way i mention imagine now that you are playing a game called a greenhouse gamble and you have one hundred thousand dollars in winnings to end the game and collect your money you must finally spend one of the two wheels if you land on any part of the wheel corresponding to warming exceeding three degrees centigrade you lose ten thousand dollars of your winnings you can spend on the policy wheel on the left hand side for free but you must pay to spin the policy wheel with that much a low odds of losing your money how much of your one hundred thousand dollars would you be willing to give up in order to spin the policy w the world is currently spinning no policy we'll we are not spending the one on the right hand side to help you make the decision on how much money you want to stay in to spend the policy we owe we should ask what are the risks of climate change by advise you not to look too much on the spinning wheels that can be quite disturbing the predicted warming the polar regions in the no policy case is about twice the value shown on the wheel twice also the no policy case predicts sea level rises of about eight to thirty one inches due to the warming oceans and melting of mountain glaciers these conclusions point to the great vulnerability of coastal concludes that the last time the polar regions were significantly warmer than present for an extended period of time the reductions in polar ice volume led to four to six metres of sea level rise which is thirteen to nineteen and a half feet of sea level rise also recent research a suggest a significant connection between increasing c the sea surface temperatures and the duration and wind speeds and typhoons and hurricanes further research confirms this the increased storm damages which typically rise as the cube of the windspeed could be very costly regarding the needed emission reductions it's important to note that it matters very little where the long lived greenhouse gases emitted and that substantial reduction of the type in the policy we'll i showed there required ultimate participation by all nations not just the currently rich nations to better calibrate the policy response we also need to improve the accuracy of estimates of the impact of climate change on natural and human systems natural that the systems may not be able to adapt some of these effects can be potentially mitigated by adaptation particularly in the human systems finally i emphasize we cannot wait for perfection in either the climate forecasts or the impact assessments before taking action the long lived greenhouse gases emitted today will last decades to centuries in the atmosphere added to the there's a multi decade period needed to change the global infrastructure energy and agricultural production and utilization without serious economic impact and we certainly do not want serious economic impact thank you thank you doug this is a professor in the testified in the house and also in the senate and i recall your sitting up there too when we were discussing this problem cordially as an interesting curiosity in science and fact in the hundred seventy s we were just beginning at that point in the research community to recognize the greater likelihood of warming versus cooling from human activities and some people would beginning to talk about long term concerns for policy if i had to summarize as i'm sometimes forced to do in a twenty second sound bite in a t v program so what have you all learned in the last thirty years since you've all been discussing this in congress and elsewhere i guess my single fastest quip would be that nature is cooperative with theory that most of what we predicted not precisely but warming increased seek ways decrease cold waves increasing intensity of tropical cyclons arcanes those kinds of events would occur and indeed they have now it's often said that the science is settled and indeed with regard to warming of the last century the incredibly unusual words for a scientist was used by the intergovernmental panel on climate change when they said it was unequivocal however what fraction of that was due to nature what fraction was due to us is not completely unequivocal but i believe the words they used also very strong language for science this was very likely that at least the last several decades could not be explained without the the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and i personally concur with that but the first slide suggests that despite the fact that our confidence in the observe trends both occurring as a reality and as the same time having a deep underlying cause that's both natural and human driven can't explain it without either one we still have substantial work left to do in figuring out precisely how much will be warming in the future there are in fact two fans of uncertainty one is human behavior and if you look at this figure and this is one of those unfortunate figures we scientists love so much i tell my students that a figure is supposed to save a thousand words not take a thousand words i fear this one may be in the latter category fortunately it's in your written testimony the main point that it says is a large f certainly in the colored bars those are primarily related to assumptions of how many peoples of the in the world what standards of living will use and what technologies we're going to use to get there highly polluting or lower polluting it makes a big difference then there are bars on the right hand side of the figure that represents the second fan of uncertainty which is the uncertainty in the internal dynamics of the bio geophysical system altogether it gives you a very daunting range of projections for the end of this century is somewhere between one point one celsius and six point four one point one is larger than we now have around point seven when we've already experienced increased intensity of hurricanes and and fires and heat waves and and ice shrinkage and therefore you could argue that we'd rather not warm up one point one more on the other hand six point four would be as ron prend said a warming that i don't know any serious scientist who studied the problem would advise that we risk it's the temperature difference between an ice age in an interglacial cycle occurring not in five to ten thousand years but in one to two centuries would probably represent a massive extinction crisis and many many difficult outcomes so what is it that we have to give the concerned about its risk management i do not believe the scientific community will any time in the near future be resolving precisely that range of uncertainty and just like anyone who buys insurance invests and determent or makes any strategic cadge you have to make the balance between the price of the premium and the benefit of the policy and that's precisely what we will be doing here because i do not think that you can rule out substantially dangerous change nor can we precisely pin it down in the foreseeable future the next picture which i promise you we won't go over mates in the in the in the testimony basically says it isn't just happening to our thermometers it's happening to nature what those three panels show you in a phrase is that plants are blooming earlier in the spring by by a week or two that birds come back earlier on migration and the problem is they don't all do it together so you tear apart the fabric of ecological communities and that's occurred is something like six tenths of a degree celsius warming in the past fifty years and we shudder to imagine what would happen if we were unfortunate and came out of the six degree and with ten times more change finally i want to stress an aspect that's very significant there are two issues one is is perceived in the world now that climate policy is on the track and is no longer just an issue for conversation therefore there will be elements who will try to sneak in under the wire and build and what the economists call locking on the largest emitting plants they can get away with before they're controlled and what i would suggest to the committee is to consider whether the rules that you set up would prevent anybody from having a negative positive incentive to do the wrong thing if the baseline dat against which they have to compare their emissions were in the past and not in the future there would be little opportunity for chick tannery to sneak in under the wire and those again of the kinds of issues i think that you'll have to carefully address as you look at the policy finally let me conclude with this figure which is complicated but i can summarize it simply a former friend of mine was the astronomer carl sagan and he used to always get made fun of from his accent when he talked about billions and trillions of stars and galaxies and we have a bit of a billions and trillions problem in dealing with climate change as well they're all the sorts of groups that will tell you how many billions or trillions it might cost to have one mitigation option or the other and even if they are accurate and trust me i've read a lot of this literature there's a wide range of uncertainty in that literature as well but even if they are accurate it's not adequate to say that we'll lose one percent of g d p in the future when the economy will be eight times larger and therefore that's trillions of dollars and then take that trillions of dollars from twenty one hundred and compare it to the president economy where it looks like a great depression because almost all models project something like a two percent per year growth rate in the economy and what that means is if there were a loss of one or two percent and g d p associated with mitigation policy as many models suggest what would it mean in terms of a delay to be a given percentage rich or well this is work explained in the text and it's just one set of examples please do not take these numbers literally the framework is what we're designed to look at and i'll conclude by saying almost every study shows that even a loss of a few percent in g d p which can translate into staggering numbers of trillions of dollars is only a year or two delay in being say five hundred percent richer so what we learn is that the growth rate in the economy which nearly everybody projects makes up for the extra cost of mitigation in somewhere between six months and a few years and i just submit to you whether it's a good insurance policy to avoid the more dangerous aspects of climate change to stay under the three degrees that my colleague ron print had said is a dividing point for dangerous a fact by being five hundred percent richer in twenty one to one for capita rather than twenty one hundred and avoid most of that climate risk thank you very much thank you to we'll hear next from  eileen claussen who is the president of the pew center on global climate change and strategies for the global environment she spots a lifetime of studying climate change and we ought to have you to be present with us this morning thank you mr chairman and members of the committee for the opportunity to speak about the important issue of level climate change as you have heard from dr schneider in print it is now well established that climate change is occurring and that humans are primarily responsible the recently released summary of the i p c c fourth assessment report calls the evidence of climate change unequivocal and expresses over ninety percent confidence that most observed warming is due to human influence left unabated climate change will have tremendous consequences for our country and the world the greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change come from a wide variety of sources and sectors throughout the economy these include transportation electric power generation use of energy in our homes and offices and manufacturing and just as there is no single sector or emissions source that is responsible for greenhouse gas emissions there is also no single technology or policy that will solve global warming we need a portfolio of policies and technologies to meet this challenge the pew center believes that there are three things we in the united states must do to reduce the real and growing risks posed by global climate change first we must enact and implement a comprehensive national mandatory market based program to progressive lee and significantly reduce u s greenhouse gas emissions in a manner that contributes to sustained economic growth second while taking the necessary first step of placing limits on our own emissions the united states must also work with other countries to assam an international framework that engages all the major greenhouse gas emitting nations in a fair and effective long term effort to protect our global climate and third we must strengthen our efforts to develop and deploy climate friendly technologies and to  diffuse those technologies on a global scale only in this way will we achieve our environmental objectives and keep costs to a minimum recently the pew center joins with three other n g o s and ten companies including p caterpillar duke energy dupont and general electric in announcing the u s climate action partnership or us cap together we are calling for a combination of mandatory approaches technological incentives and support for demonstration projects the us cap went into detail as to how we think these goals should be achieved given this committee's interests and jurisdiction let me highlight only the recommendations posed on focus on federal technology research development demonstration and deployment but let me reiterate that any solution to this problem will require a portfolio of technologies the united states will continue to burn coal and natural gas we will continue to use nuclear energy and we will need to ramp up our use of renewable energy resources transportation will be a key part of our future but given our interest in both energy security and climate change we will need to see far greater use of biofuels advance and hybrids in the short term as well as continuing innovation in fuels and technologies over the longer term including the use of electric or hydrogen vehicles the us cap recommends the following key characteristics of a technology program first a mix of deployment was deployment of policies create incentives to use low greenhouse gas emitting technologies and address regulatory or financial barriers such policies could include loan guarantees investment tax credits your standards for example of tax incentives currently available to a limited number of hybrid electric cars and trucks could be extended to a larger number of qualifying vehicles second stable long term financing for example in the form of a dedicated revenue stream or other means not reliant upon annual congressional appropriations third joint public private costs after car sharing and oversight the department of energy's future gen project is an example of a joint public private initiative with cars shared between the government and the companies in the projects alliance the u s capitol eaves however that we need more demonstration projects to demonstrate the potential for long term seaque variety of geologic structures for establishment of performance criteria and a technology road map to guide our d n d and deployment programme investment decisions and finally establishment of a public private institution to govern the deployment program fund from our own work on technology policy the pew center has found that government has not always been good at picking technology winners so it is best to have programs and incentives that serve to promote a variety of technologies and approaches the committee could also consider incentives for energy efficiency measures in businesses homes and vehicles for capture and sequestration of carbon that would otherwise be emitted from coal burning power plants for energy efficient transmission and distribution systems and for transportation planning measures that reduce miles driven i thank the committee for considering steps to address global climate change and look forward to your questions thank chairman i'm honored by your invitation and the opportunity to be here since the starting point of this discussion is climate science because i should outline briefly a bit of my understanding of that subject i am an economist but anyone who works on climate economics and policy has to have some understanding of the science and few words on mine there is clear evidence that the earth is warming the amount of warming that's been caused by human activity is open to debate but there is no question that the human race can play a role in slowing or stopping that trend clearly something should be done questions are what will the turn of this cost what will be effective and where to start to point to or mentioned by professor print in his written testimony i think should a great deal of light on these  questions he stated and this is my paraphrase that it does not matter where greenhouse gases originate they're all mixed in the atmosphere and contribute equally to warming everywhere observation implies that the cost of meeting any climate goal can be reduced by ensuring that emission reductions occur in the countries where they are least costly professor print also mentioned that it's pretty much irrelevant when emission reductions occur and this observation implies a decision about how much to abate now and how much to abate several decades in the future can be based pretty much exclusively on the relative cost fifty either way we can change to achieve the same reduction in long term temperatures so when we return to the three questions of cost effectiveness and where to start first  limits on greenhouse gas emissions will impose a cost on the u s economy and the costs will be larger for tighter targets in previous studies of proposals for u s and national limits my colleagues and i have estimated annual losses that range from about three times a percent of g to about one point nine percent of g d p in two thousand and twenty four kind of proposals actively under consideration in every case exactly the same mechanisms are at work the need to adopt more costly methods of electricity generation to invest in producing more expensive low carbon fuels and to undertake investments to increase energy conservation divert resources that would otherwise be available to produce the goods and services that make up g d p higher energy costs raise the cost of u s or even other industrial countries are also unlikely to make much difference in global temperatures over the next century there are two fundamental reasons first virtually all projections agree that the vast majority of nations over the next century will come from developing countries in particular china and india and second with today's technology it's simply not economically feasible to achieve emission reductions on the scale required to stabilise global temperatures these two points suggest to me that the highest priority for climate policy have to be developing countries in r and d both require immediate action and are immense challenges but without involvement of developing countries and a dramatic new commitment to our india strikes me will be nearly impossible to reduce emissions sufficiently to manage climate risks effectively holding the growth of emissions from developing countries will not be an easy task for these countries and consistently opposed any attempts to initiate discussion of limits on their emissions in international negotiations they fear that such limits would contend would condemn them to continue poverty they also deign competitive advantages of from having industrial countries go first and take the lead in reducing emissions but this is creates additional resistance on their part to limits on a mission and finally developing countries generally have who are legal and mark institutions it's pretty clear they couldn't implement efficient policies to reduce emissions even if they desired to do so right now without much more deep economic reforms nevertheless some solution must be found if developing countries continuing their current course it would not be possible to stabilize temperatures i think it is possible to reconcile their desire for improve living standards with lower emissions but what it takes at the start is much more rapid and deeper economic reforms to unleash the market technological options and necessity if that stabilization goal is to be economically feasible one study estimates that get on a path toward stabilization within the next fifty years the world will require twice as much energy from carbon free sources as the total amount of energy we produce today i don't think that could be done and affordable cost with today's technology or with incremental improvements massive program of r and d focused on breakthrough discoveries leading to new approaches and technologies is required even mandatory limits on emissions over the next decade or two do not believe will provide a citation or credible incentives for that kind of r and d so many transfer of new technologies also critical to the role of developing country if we can reduce the cost of reducing their emissions transport technologies that help their economic growth as well as reducing their emissions we can reduce their resistance to doing something what does all this imply for near term emission limits the choice of how much to do today and how much to plan on doing tomorrow to reduce emissions involves the high cost of immediate reductions against the price potentially much lower cost reductions of exactly the same magnitude in the future with new technologies that we can produce among the relevant community of academics at least as to which of these ways or what combination of them will work best so i personally can't give you some very highly focused vice but secularly on closely with economists and we've written a number of joint papers on just exactly these questions and i guess i could characterize the the the bulk of the comments i hear from my an economics colleagues is they generally tend to have preferences for carbon taxes to other factors on the grounds of simplicity and reduce transaction costs but those are still debated within the community nearly all of them would agree with david montgomery statement that you have to look both across time and other places for the cost option but in my own personal work one of the things that we did is we tried to take a look at how using the in the context of very simple economic model how a range of carbon taxes imposed in this model would have fact emissions and then how that affects the probability of dangerous climate outcomes where you have to define that according to how many degrees of warming there is it is absolutely no question that if you don't have the shadow ice on carbon that you end up with a much higher probability of being in the upper range of risk and if you do have controls on carbon then you substantially lower that likelihood it's just like ron prince will without some form of policy incentive whether it's cap and trade or or taxes that's important one final remark that i have heard in these debates and not just some economists more likely political scientists or sociologists or people in the political world is that whatever the policies that we implement they will have impacts differentially on different groups we know that it was not the richest people who were harmed and in into training in the in the aftermath of the floods just as we know it was not the younger people but the elderly that were hurt in europe in the heat wave and we also know that there is a differential impact on people according to each policy so we not only do we have to look to reducing the overall magnitude of our footprints on the earth who are a variety of possible policies that you examine but we also have to take a look at the distribution of the impacts of climate or the impacts of policy on special groups and see what side of events we may need to do to get them to participate more willingly that means try to explain a little bit about the pew center when we work very closely with forty two major corporations and they cover a wide range of sectors i mean we have  utilities that are primarily gas fired we have utilities that are primarily coal burning we have forest products chemicals a lot of energy intensive industries and as a group both based on the analytical work we've done and from there or from their own analyses i think there is a clear preference for a cap and trade system rather than a tax a carbon tax and there are a number of reasons for that the the most important being that in a cap and trade system it is the markets that sets the price whereas in a tax system it is the government that sets the price and it is not clear exactly what the right price should be to draw new technologies into the market so as a group they much prefer cap and trade and the second reason they prefer a cap and trade system is because there are cap and trade system in europe and that may extend into parts of the developing world and the larger the market the cheaper it is to find inexpensive productions and so were we to go one route on the rest of the world to go another route i think we would not realize the kinds of cost savings that we might if we all did the same kind of thing so there is clear preference for a cap and trade that's had we also agree as a group that you not only need rules that set limits and you can be modest and how in how you start and become more stringent as time goes on but that you also need tax incentives and carrots to help get the technology developed and into the marketplace neither one of these by themselves will do what we need to get done but the combination is probably where we need to go recovery thank you there are three points i'd like to make on this the first one is in terms of prices use of prices like carbon taxes versus  strong economic arguments for considering the price of crude then the mandatory caps approach we have done some studies where we have looked at how various uncertainties that would affect the price of carbon in the cost of meeting in a mission can work out and we don't we can never be sure what's going to happen for example to electricity demand over the next few years it's driven by all sorts of things we don't know economic growth temperatures  which things like to sell in potentially destabilizing influences on the economy that can be avoided by the choice of a by a price approach or by hybrid policies such as a safety  valve which limits how high the price of a an allowance can go under a cap and trade system all of which can be very important for reducing overall cost the second point which i think i agree with miss causton is that the analysis we've done in looking at the effects of long term the emission caps or announcements of future carbon prices suggests that they will not provide an effective or credible incentive for r and d taking place today therefore we really need to think about how to place current incentives and programs to provide encouragement for the kinds of law in particular for the kinds of long term r and d that necessary to give us new technology we're not going to see that without active money put into it today thank you so much with thank you mr chairman and i want to thank the panel you've provided some some excellent testimony today not all of which is in the jurisdiction of this committee but certainly you contribute to our broader understanding of the problem and how we might fit into the solution dr graham or in his testimony brings up some very important questions and i think his testimony is most relevant frankly to the operations of this committee i think most of us are convinced that the scientific evidence presented by these three scientists on the panel are the two scientists and the pew foundation which i'm sure has scientists on board is accurate and we don't quarrel with that  question though for this committee is how do we use tax policy to help with the human effort to allay this or delay or overcome  potentially this dangerous increase in the earth's temperatures and dr gummer you talked about how if we impose some solutions either from a tax standpoint  or from a general call standpoint we shift competitive advantages from the united states to other nations and this is something that another of your boston colleagues michael porter has written about competitive advantages of nations and how those create jobs or opportunities for job creation economic growth and we certainly don't want to do anything i think that a newly shas those competitive advantages to other nations that would have an impact on negative impact on our economic growth and job creation here in this country so the question i guess that we have to ask ourselves is how far can we go and terms of implementing policies here in this country without some kind of comfort level that other nations are going to participate in this effort to bring down global warming and it's kind of a chicken and egg thing i guess i mean how do you get to agreement unless we agree but certainly  concerned about the united states moving forward with punitive measures such as that suggested by the un yesterday which calls for a carbon tax and here in the united states of something in excess of fifty dollars per tonne and i question whether we should go unilaterally in that direction but not from a grammar also offers i think some direction for us supported by ms clawson in terms of encouraging the development of new technologies that could help us deal with the problems associated with the use and increasing use of carbon fuels and our society around the world and in fact i'm optimistic that if we appropriately develop those technologies that could actually become an economic bonus for us but we've got to figure out how we do that without micromanaging that development here from the federal government has we don't have a very good track record of industrial policy from here in washington so i'm encouraged by the testimony that you've given us today i hope you will help us sort through these questions and develop with us some approaches  that provide the greatest opportunity for both addressing the global climate change challenge and not diminishing and perhaps even increasing economic growth here at home that's the challenge that we face lot of us have been pondering for some time in the mccreary mentions it to is increasing consensus that there is climate change global warming but i want to ask you this  the issue of urgency which relates to what we do why do you think there's been such disagreement what  caused it you've worked with other people all of you done so broadly it in addition to perhaps the use of science there seems to be something was very easy to have debate we were just sorting out the cooling effect of dust and smoke from the warming effect of greenhouse gases and it took a lot of studying by the mid to late one nine hundred seventy s the warming became the clear winner we were uncertain about the effects of clouds if you increase heating evaporate more water you make more clouds that could cool the earth back down it's what we call a stabilizing feedback on the other hand if you make the clouds taller they trap more heat they make it worse that's part of the reason why we've had that uncertainty so there's been a lot of of those kinds of arguments and naturally scientists enjoy looking at the cutting edge trying to make their reputations by finding a new way to see it however over the last thirty years the proponents of evidence it's become virtually overwhelming that the warming is real is that at least the last several decades of it are proposed currently due to us and that they'll be substantial change in the future though as i which been motivating would have been motivating force who's clearly there are interests in the world and those interests are ideologies have very different perspectives on their personal worldviews about whether it's more important to protect planetary commons or deal in long term risks or protect nature or whether it's more important to maintain market share for selected clients or producers or protect entrepreneurial rights so what's happened is that the climate problem has also partly gotten mixed up with ideological politics where somebody from the deep ecology groups grabs out of context the where the end of the world case and somebody from an enterprise institute grabs out of context so it's good for you so you get into the world and good for you extremes of too low as probability outcomes getting big play in the media then proceed with that when in fact the vast bulk of the knowledge community believes them to be low probability and everything else in the middle  concern i guess that's not a foreign concept in this town as well that we we have that tendency scientists find it very distasteful frankly getting engaged in that we like to fight with each other over the nuance of the details of the theory of the data are rather than link it to ideology but unfortunately when you're in a science which has a lot of public involvement and has stakeholders with very opposite views it's never surprising that you get legitimate debate is the obvious uncertainty in simulating and forecasting climate you can look at that wheel that i showed and you can look at a little sliver there that shows almost no warming with no policy and you'd say if you're comfortable with that then you can argue from that little sliver that it's not an issue you can argue from the other side of the wheel where it says that there is some probability of even much greater than five or six or seven degrees people say another why or why do people line up in the camp of the two camps to the two i think there's been a difficulty amongst for some scientists to to decide to look at this is an issue  just working out the odds happens to be the sea snyder and i agree very strongly in the need to embrace the uncertainty and to see this as a decision making process if you like under that uncertainty the uncertainty is such that it's a double edged sword double edged sword you can look at it and say on one side the possibility that they may be very little warming arguing for inaction and on the other side lots of warming arguing for action i think the truth lies largely in the middle and that's the point that i tried to make in my presentation here and i think also dr snyder making the same point i personally will have evolved in my own view as i mentioned that ten years ago evidence i think that process is going on it looks like a glacial pace to some but slowly but surely the opposition to the notion that humans are making very significant impact on climate and particularly in the and thank you very much you know i can understand why people would be concerned and why people might change dr perry and you just mentioned that your your opinion changed the last ten years we archaeologist tell us we went from a over a lot period of time over millions a year from a from a dinosaur stage where it was very warm to an ice age back to where we are now and i remember i'm just thirty years ago scientists some of you were telling us it was cooling remember we weren't going to warm it was cool i mean this is yes in thirty years and i think if you look as i and what limited information i have you look over a period of a hundred a year you actually have several hundred year period where it'll be colder then i'll be warmer and really the really understand what's going on you really need to take several thousand years to relook at it because we have a  that's not really the focus of my question mr clawson i'd like to ask you if i could you testified today that the united states must take the lead in addressing climate change by unilaterally imposing a mandatory emission reduction program in the u s after taking this initial step you suggested we should then work with other countries and encouraging them to reduce their emissions this view is contrary to mr mcgowan mari's testimony where he argued that unilateral action by the us actually increases the incentives for china and india to resist controls in addition the financial times reported just yesterday that quote china's surge of investment in heavy industry and power capacity since two thousand has seen energy efficiency levels retreat and pollution measurements so or china added power capacity last year equal to the entire grids of the u k and thailand combined ninety percent of it coal fired the fetus growing stack of steel aluminum and cement plants and ally china is home to sixteen of the world's twenty most polluted cities close quote mr clawson based on this recent history what is the basis for your belief that if the u s act unilaterally countries such as china and india will follow let me try to answer that by putting it in a little bit of context there are twenty countries who account for about eighty five percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions and if we're going to find a real solution to deal with this problem at least those twenty have to be engaged so point number one the second point is that there are other countries who have actually taken steps to reduce their emissions most of them are in europe they do not include the large developing countries as you point out but we have been absent from the global table to try to talk about what the framework should be over the past eight or more years and i think that's a problem i do not think that we have sufficient credibility to design a framework that would include those twenty major emitters unless we at least take some steps on our own don't forget we are still the world's largest emitter we are still responsible for most of the concentrations of greenhouse gases that are in the atmosphere but that's changing is all right and it is yes and in a few years china will go to be number one well they'll be number one and in current emissions but looking historically at even a few years after that at the rate they're going they will become number one and i'm not arguing with you that china's emissions aren't really important here i'm just saying that i think we have a responsibility to take some actions now i do not agree with the assumption that it may be unilateral when i do not agree with the assumption that if we take some action we are necessarily going to cause great economic harm to the united states and i would like to just suggest that the committee take a look at some of the actions that major companies have taken to reduce their emissions there are twenty or thirty big corporations that have set targets for themselves on a voluntary basis and that have reduced significant amounts of emissions much more than the kinds of levels that are being talked about either in the house or in the senate at the present time and not one of them has found that to result in a cost most of those reductions have taken place because of efficiency improvements most of those have actually been beneficial to the bottom line so taking some steps here i believe will give us the credibility to work with the big emitters in the developing world could you need them you can't solve it without them and to try to design a framework that in the right direction but i think without some leadership from us it won't happen and without some action in the united states we will not have the ability to lead well i agree with what you just said your last and i am but i think it comes down the common fance it comes down to not bankrupting our economy by unilaterally going out when we look at what the rest of the world is doing and doing things that do make sense and when we do that i think it's a win win but not if we do it the other which we're going to move and mr just use the word bankrupt which i think is not helpful in the discussion when we get out on those in the the question that i want to ask i'd like to reframe what m er mccreery said he talked about the problems if we lead in all this and what it would do to our economy i would like to talk to our hear from you about what happens if we do not lead in this world change and let me give you the example is a tiny one it's a really a minor one but it's instructive i think we had wind incentives here in this congress which were allowed to expire and now if you go and look at when generators across the face of the earth almost all of them are made in denmark a country of six or eight or nine ten million i'm not sure exactly if population they took the lead and ran with it left us in the dust and my feeling is that the american that there is a cost to not taking hold of this since we all agreed across the panel that something must be done we really there is going to be a cost and i'd like to hear you talk about the other areas in which we are behind the rest of the world in terms of our moving whether it's solar panel ing in germany or rather it's  weather many places that were some of us are aware of but i'd like to hear you talk about it in terms of the places where we are our industry is losing jobs and losing opportunities because we have not taken the incentive and use the government i happen to think that the answer to mister levin's question about why change was never made was because people were afraid in our industrial concerns that if we admitted there was a need for a reaction of climate change the government would get involved and they didn't want to disrupt the laissez faire system but clearly we're beyond that i'd like to hear you talk about what that what i am really concerned about the united states being behind on is something the rest of the world is equally far behind which is the scale of investment that's required in r and d at a fundamental stage to create the kind of breakthroughs that are needed to give us twenty or thirty years from now technologies that we can't conceive of today but which are absolutely necessary if we're going to get on a path to really much there are much larger issues and i only use it as an illustrative indicator of what we've done before and no no i understand i agree with you i think they really looking across the board at the technologies that are available today maybe cost a little bit more than generating electricity with coal but would provide lower emissions that a that there's a difference between providing subsidies for those technologies which is really just buying current emission reductions versus providing incentives for r and d which sets the stage for much larger emission reductions with future which can take off on their own that's where i think we're far behind i don't think we're losing much by you know in the in terms of the current technology incentive those are areas where putting a price on carbon can bring such things into the market and bring about reductions in emissions but where we're buying but that's not really so much and us something but the real investment for the future is in the r and d side the rest of bill let me try to make a couple of points if we look at where the greenhouse gas emissions come from  they come from electricity and transportation i mean that together is about seventy percent of the problem we aren't going to find a technological solution unless we tackle those two big things because when you look at something like  manufacturing and there's a price and if there is a price on carbon you're going to get efficiency improvements and process changes and i think those industries are going to go ahead and do that so the big issues we really have to deal with are electricity and transportation electricity i do not think there is a single solution i think we are going to use nuclear i think we are going to go into into more renewables i think we are going to burn coal and actually coal is the thing that concerns me the most because we have vast reserves of coal china and india have vast reserves of coal they are industrializing they're all going to burn coal so the real question is how do you find a way to burn coal that doesn't harm the climate and what does it take to get you there  there are some technologies being developed that are going to make it easier to capture the carbon stream we have done very very little work on exactly how to do it from the range of technologies and even less on how you might sequester that carbon stream and keep it in deep geologic formations for a long long period of time so i would say if we were going to concentrate on anything it would be both demonstrating those technologies in a major scale not not just one demonstration here that'll give you some results and fifteen years but a lot of demonstrations that could both prove that it works assuming we can make it happen and bring down the cost because the cost now is actually very very high and then dealing with transportation and again i think there are lots of lots of things to do there i wouldn't put all my money on one particular technology there i mean it maybe that's hydrogen fuel cells will be that the answer to this but i'm not convinced i think we need to make sure that there's some competition and that money goes into a variety of these technologies so you can actually get the best one to deal with a problem now when you look at other countries a lot of them are starting to move along those same lines  think if we were to do this in a vigorous way put in a certain amount of money create the kind of thing at a price on carbon we could really do the job that needs to be done here and get our industries to be the most successful at it but if we just wait others will find the space out there and they'll do it before we do this to get up thank you very much mr chairman i just appreciate it just the remarks you made because i do think we need to go beyond just implementing kioto which is often what we get to when we talk about global warming or climate change now i guess to take into account that we are hearing canceled because of the ice storm and coble warming in congress but you know i i think that there is an economic cost to kioto and did geophysical research letters published about ten years ago estimated that if every nation on earth lived up to the un's protocol on global warming it would prevent no more than a tenth of a degree missions down to those centrally being nonexistent is to look very to be accompanied by the burning of the coal and i personally think that will be significant one way or another significant effort has to be put in to see whose is economically feasible i think it's technologically feasible but is it geological and if the economics works out and the technology as i say i think is logically there then coal can be continue to be an important source of electrical energy for the nation but the utilities right are faced with a dilemma they need to perhaps build a few more power plants what are they going to do they are going to continue to build conventional coal fired power plants that may be very with great difficulty and cost converted to c capture or not it's whole or do they look at nuclear power do they begin to think that renewables biofuels will power utilities into the future i think i've got great difficulties in front of them and the more but there is some leadership on this issue for the nation to say this is where we're going we're going to reduce the emissions it will help utilities make those very very expensive disposal and there has been a lot done particularly in the auto industry the automakers have  majority of them have already committed to achieving at least a ten percent reduction in greenhouse gases by two thousand and twelve and that's from a baseline of two thousand and two and we had some testimony about the seventy's and i will just say that vehicles today are ninety nine percent cleaner than they were in the seventy's and that's just one particular industry looking at another industry in the refrigeration industry for example home appliance they're much more efficient than they were just a few short years ago but i do think the economic cost of it was something we should look at the estimates show it could cost two point four million u s jobs double the cost of electricity raise the cost of gasoline by an additional sixty five cents a gallon reduce the u s output by three hundred billion which is greater than the total expenditure on primary and secondary education so i do think we have to look at the costs and tradeoffs and my question would be is the cap and trade program a viable  program to reduce admissions and i guess i would just ask each of you quickly to answer i know i don't have much time left potentially yes i realize the debate i think is going to be between taxes versus cap trade the short answer is yes but like anything that complicated the devil is in the details and how it's structured from the point of view of incentives and fairness will matter both politically and from the efficiency point of view all right yeah so widely supported by those in industry who would like to see us take on some kind of requirement here dr montgomery no if the purpose is developing the new technologies and bringing down radically the cost of technologies like carbon capture and sequestration a cap and trade system can get the technology we have available off the table and india use but it can't get the new technologies on to the table that we're going to need in the future and i do agree with my colleague that we need to take a longer view of the the warming issue and i i want to thank the chairman for his time with the nails thank you very much mr chairman my former life i was much involved as you know with with issues that are pretty monday and the level of local government like taking the pressure off the landfill so we constructed the time in springfield massachusetts the largest regional recycling facility in america one hundred three communities participated and as part of an integrated approach we did waste energy and it certainly worked but now we're sitting back and we're looking  at what's next and what's new and for you dr brende i'd like to ask it's difficult even based upon the hearing that we've had this morning as we look at alternative energy it's hard to gauge what the next great breakthrough is going to be in terms of innovation is not true i certainly agree i think you know most of us believe that we're going to have to have about ten or twenty solutions that there's not going to be a single one and depending on the part of the country as indeed the  nation the various nations around the world able to use among least handle a twenty options that there isn't a single one one who i think you know some breakthroughs would be very nice to see on the renewable side on the issue of biofuels called something where we would like to see a breakthrough i would also say for solar energy that increasing the efficiency of the solar panels will make a very very big difference and lowering of course their cost with the exception of the clinton health care plan the most strident debates that i've participated in during this committee's or my time on this committee it was the debate between ethanol and oil i don't have to tell you it brought out the worst in some of the members of the committee but we've really moved beyond that haven't we and i guess the specific question dr brende that i'd like to raise with you is how would you suggest that we proceed with tax policy based upon as you've indicated the next round of innovations are i was certainly see this is an area where tax incentives could work because an initially companies private entities that would want to do the necessary research to make these breakthroughs are putting up a lot of capital and with  tents that are make nothing because they don't make the discovery so tax incentives i think would help certainly for the development of new inventions if i can call them that but getting those new inventions once they are there from comment much more intelligently on that and i would ask ms clawson that right now the nature of the tax policy here at the committee level has been really to do temporary tax incentives do you think that's the way that we ought to proceed or do you think that  we ought to be doing something that's much more consistent with the future yes i do because i actually think things that go into effect and then i'm gone in the year are gone in two years are very disruptive and they do not get you to the longer term investments that you actually need to make the difference so if there is some way to do these things over a long period of time in a consistent way i think we're going to see a much different picture coming out of companies and in the private sector in the kinds of technologies that we need for the future dr snyder dr mark emmert you feel free to comment as well yes i think if we if we look back at history the degree to which people believe something is inexorable is really very important to whether they take a long term reaction or hunker down and wait it out when the opec price embargoes took place in the seventy's most people believe that was real and that's when the the u s turned to a combination of the fish and sea standards and automobiles air conditioners refrigerators which is given us indelible benefits ever since you can calculate in the many billions of dollars we save from those when we have short term fluctuations people wait it out and they just go for business as usual so a signal from the congress that they were serious and that even if the start was slow it was going to ramp up inexorably i think would lead to substantial performance change structure grammar yes i think that permanent tax incentives especially for r and d are critically important the difficult part is they really need to be very broadly defined rather been targeted to specific activities because i think it may actually be general agreement on that that we don't want even the ways and means committee picking exactly which technology and how and of course the problem with that is you know make the tax incentives very expensive because it makes it easier to qualify you may end up giving some money to something that would have happened anyway you and mr mccurry for convening this hearing this morning i believe that climate change is real i also believe it's caused by human activity if you look at the maps of the fifteenth century used by the european explorers when they came to our own hemisphere one believe human activity is clearly having an impact on the climate and causing climate change i also believe mr chairman that the solution requires a global solution we can't go alone and addressing the issue of climate change and as my friend mr herder noted china will soon eclipse the united states in any missions so clearly they need to be involved as well and i also want to commend my colleagues and noted there is an economic impact of this as we look at what policies we may want to adopt manufacturing's important my district and some policies advocated by some would drive the jobs of manufacturing jobs currently in my district to china and asia because i'm moved to places where these policies don't exist as a place to do business and so we need to take that into account i also hope mr chairman as we move forward that we consider energy independence as part of our strategy to compliment our goal of addressing the issue of climate change and i hope will build on that what i believe are the successful policies that were included in the two thousand and five energy policy act what many of us call the energy bill i've seen in my own district the tax incentives for promoting alternative sources of energy such as wind and biofuels the impact they've had in clearly rural illinois and rural america where the winners of that energy bill because we've had hundreds of millions of dollars in new investment when the energy in the district i represent five new ethanol and biodiesel plants in the works moving forward with construction and there's over a billion dollars in additional wind energy investment alone in the district that i represent plan and moving forward over the next couple years so clearly the energy bill of two thousand and five is made a difference in promoting renewable and alternative sources of energy and i hope as we move forward that we do look at making permanent the renewable production tax credit and look for a tax incentives that reward investment new technologies such as marrying the hybrid and flexible fuel technology vehicles that soon will be coming on the market encouraging consumers to buy those i over tax a lot of discussion today as gone been fairly broad well beyond the ways and means jurisdiction as we look at energy independence initiatives climate change initiatives and i hope we can do both that you know a lot of us advocate renewable and alternative sources of energy as part of that solution how would you structure tax policy when it comes to that area as attracting greater investment that will be part of our effort on climate change i tend to think about this question in terms of the continuum of activities from basic laboratory research development demonstration and commercialization i actually see the role for the ways and means committee and tax incentives the kind you're talking about mostly at the end where we're talking about the basic research and the r and d i think it and in making the two making the scientific breakthroughs creating the technological options at some point in that process and the really hard part of the xining anything is figuring out where that point is i think it becomes the private sector's responsibility that the technology is never going to be developed or deployed effectively if it continues to be owned and pushed by the government and so there we need to be thinking about market oriented sent incentives for giving a an incentive deploy the technology  part of the solution absolutely and to others in the panel agreed nuclear power is part of the solution of yes and i certainly do we need to look at it and regard it as a possible significant solution particularly for utilities and the other two on the comparable answer to what i said before it all depends on how you do it questions of cost and safety and there i certainly am not an idealogue who has ever said no nukes i just want to compete it against all the other alternatives and that also has to include costs for for how you're going to deal way particularly waste that might go to countries that we may not be so anxious to have access to those wastes and that's part of the faculty and the other question is there are legal federally mandated liabilities on their insurance risk which is a subsidy and i'm not arguing the subsidies are giving is it's all part of the cost factor testimony i've been in and out of your testimony this morning because of a hearing where the chairman of the federal reserve is testifying in the next building over the budget committee and i had a chance to ask him questions about the topic you're testifying on  encouraged by his response on the cap and trade system indeed it seems to me that the number of true goldman global warming deniers is shrinking by the day and more and more responsible  businesses are coming forward way ahead of this congress and suggesting that we need prompt action to deal with the realities that you've described to us we need more to come forward and we need more to not only admit there is a problem but encourage us to take meaningful action about it unfortunately in my home state of texas we have one of the most irresponsible corporations that is out of the mainstream and that's texas utilities which has gotten a great deal of attention in its desire to use outdated technology and get in as dr schneider said in his earlier testimony i think is a good example of use the term and that's certainly applicable to texas utilities and sneaking in under the wire  even with the encouraging developments of the last few days that prospective new purchasers texas utilities would go forward with only three of the eleven plants that it originally proposed just the growth plan alone would burn two and a half million pounds per hour of the dirtiest texas lignite that i think we've got and on its first day of o peration as projected it would suddenly become the fourth largest emitter of mercury in the country together the three plants that are proposed for online would commit approximately twenty two million tons of carbon dioxide annually  texas utilities under old are hopefully better though it could hardly get worse management is not the only company that is proposing to build for the past instead of for the  schneider about whether it isn't necessary we've heard various members ask about carrots but there's also the stick side of tax policy and don't you think that we need some immediate and serious action to do stand in your own state we want to try to make certain that what we do as i said earlier has a degree of inexorability in it because when we say that the united states is not a party to the k protocol and irony through the capitalist system we in a way already are that many investment banking companies believe there's a fairly high i probability that there will be a shadow price on carbon which therefore means carbon emissions as a liability against the balance sheets of companies whether it's through cap and trade taxes or other policies and therefore they're already affecting those rights and i think that might be a way that the committee could consider dealing with people in that sneak under the wire mode which is if you have a retroactive date at which the baseline is is set that not only rewards the people who had the courage to be early adapters but it prevents the idea of trying to maximize your emissions so that you can then have a baseline that is high and cut below it so i think there may be ways that you could do that because then if they had a high liability their own investment banking community may vat not be very willing to give them the kinds of loans costs that they'd be willing to pay so i think there are instruments that you could use short of direct command and control that probably would take advantage of market forces and reduce the likelihood of the sneak in under the wire that we're going to see not just there but in many other places these businesses are competitive they're not interested in and having a competitor have an unfair advantage and they need some certainty and you believe  that taking some action while perhaps even before we can get the administration to agree to a cap and trade system to provide a little of that certainty that you can't sneak in under the wire while you're lobby for an action that that would be would be something that would be helpful to the forward looking businesses that want to address climate change as our chair and i was that we actually talked about doing those kinds of things twenty and thirty years ago and now that the that the evidence is so abundant we're finally moving to do it what's unfortunate is had we taken small steps earlier it would be cheaper and easier to do it now so we're rushing and looking at more cost than we otherwise would have had but the more we delay we are all referring to carbon emissions carbon dioxide is clearly the most prevalent of the greenhouse gases because if you thought really important to isn't water vapor more prevalent than carbon that's  maybe the order of a week or so once that evaporates before convents isn't get back to the surface so it is short lived and its budget in the atmosphere is largely totally a lot i'd say totally unaffected by the direct emissions of water vapor by humans and other words we're not controlling that what we are worried about in the climate issue is we are beginning to indirectly control the levels of water vapor in the atmosphere when the oceans walmart does increase the water vapor at least in the lower part of the atmosphere so water vapor is indeed very important as a greenhouse gas it is incorporate all of these climate models that you have talking about it is a source of some of the uncertainty that you see in these forecasts and so on but it is there it is important what we are considering the climate issue here that being discussed here today is a long lived greenhouse gases whose whose emissions are being dominated by human activity and that's a big difference between the two what role does first play in your model what role does precipitation play in your model it's very important because it removes the water vapor from the atmosphere and keeps the atmosphere a lot cooler than it would otherwise be but there are many other complexities as well but evaporation and condensation and all of these complex processes that you think of to do with the water cycle we try to encapsulate in these climate models with imperfections of course in five years earlier it was much more confusing in one hundred seventy five newsweek wrote an article called the cooling world which i said the article stated that scientists are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century if the climatic change is as profound as some past most fear the resulting famines could be catastrophic what click between one hundred seventy five one hundred seventy six well i would guess that newsweek was probably a few years back in reading the scientific literature because when we write things it takes a while for them to get out back around one nine hundred seventy it really was not clear whether the increase in hayes's was going to reflect more sunlight away and cool the earth down relative to the amount of warming from encreasing c o two what happened and fact i personally thought that cooling was more likely in the first paper ever wrote nine hundred seventy one but i was proud that by seventy five i changed my mind and the reason was to fact one is that we found out that those hayes's were largely const traded in industrial and agricultural burning areas only one sixth of the of the world where is the greenhouse gases global so therefore they had less less impact and the second thing we discovered was it wasn't just c o two but methane and chlorofluorocarbons so i would say by nine hundred seventy five those inside the scientific tent had already pretty well switched over to warming and by seventy six i think that was the dominant theme in most of the of the hearings in this body of course media some lag behind that but recently there's been an article about research if you were to california but something to study the history the earth's climate not to find analogies since today i don't think we could because the continents were and if there is a concentrations of the atmosphere different different plants and animals but it's the backdrop against which we calibrate our understanding of how the system works and way back then there was a a change in the in the rate at which the ocean floor was spreading there a mid ocean ridges and there is lava going on und there this was discovered in the in the one nine hundred fifty s when we had a explosion of scientific research that went out and found it but when that floor spreads more rapidly then it puts up more c o two so the geologic time frames of one hundred million years ago to two hundred million years ago saw that very much larger sea floor spreading and a consistency in that is if you're making all that lava come up you're putting all the rubble in the oceans therefore the oceans of a smaller volume the sea levels would be higher and in fact most of the geologic evidence is one hundred million years ago for example sea levels were something like three hundred metres higher all the ice in the world today couldn't give you more than seventy eight had to be something else so then what we do is we take the same computer models we use to project the future and then we try to move their continents around we change the sea to try to see if we can we can get a new ending was near agreement to the  kind of scanty data we have from history and it's a mixed bag but by and large the model say one it's a lot warmer with a lot warmer they don't get the numbers right but they get the basic direction thank you very much chairman i want to thank you for holding this hearing for years i aspired to the ways and means committee only to find when i got here we really weren't talking about important stuff and i appreciate the leadership you brought to this committee where do have to have these hearings exploring the the depths of the problems and then the role tax policy might apply in addressing those problems document gomery i found your comments very interesting and i was want to see if i track them through because they don't tire and they strike me as consistent that you indicate that marketplace dynamics will and sent new technology innovation above all other things but you indicate that steps we might take well up to to global climate change unless i'm braced across the developing world would simply drive activity into developing countries and damage our competitiveness it seems to me the only thing you assert by way of pressure we can create driving technological innovations which may save us from this problem would be the r and d tax credit and i agree with you it's critically important and i agree with you ought to be broad based angry with you it ought to be permanent but it seems to me to be a bit of a slender reed to say this is it in terms of responding to global climate change have i understood you correctly or would you care to clarify where i'm not completely i think there in  me try to clarify three parts of it i certainly don't think that r and d alone will lead to stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations or temperatures we need three things we need  need r and d incentives and funding in order to create the technologies and put them on the shelf at an appropriate pace and over time we need barking market based incentives that could be provided by cap and trade systems by carbon tax by a safety valve by a number approaches to get those technologies off the shelf we need to think about the timing of when we want to do those two things because i think it's very important that we especially not have financial disince emissions until the technologies are available that make it possible to reduce emissions effectively and cheaply we don't want to get the targets ahead of the technology but i agree with you in part but in part in a sense that he is a motherhood of invention so if this is kind of an abstract undertaking gosh it'll be neat when we get this technology you've got one dimension of urgency versus holy cow the new deadline is approaching the the general thinking among economics sirus and my thinking and what i was publishing on since the one nine hundred seventy s was if we can just get a cap and trade system out in the market we don't have to worry about anything else i think that was overly optimistic the problem is that in order to create incentive for r and development new technologies we have to look at market conditions ten to twenty years from now i am now convinced that it's not possible for the congress to create a credible and in senate because of your inability to lock in future congress teacher administrations with this policy to think that what we ought to enact it today in terms of the cap and trade system will be convincing enough to the private sector to and about what's going to happen twenty years from now to their investments to induce the massive amount of r and d we need today on that but i would i do what i call it doesn't keep interrupting but i'm just in a dialogue sense here do you really think that business community is betting on the heat coming off of global talk climate change that the concentration of this congress may abate in the future congress you know but i do not think that they are willing to bet that future congresses will be taking a hard enough line to put very very to put the scale of resources that are needed are indeed today and the reason i mean the reason i don't think they are indeed is the splinter read is because we're probably talking about ten times as much  as much r and d investment as is taking place today across the board things that it's very difficult and where i think the ways and means committee is job and that makes brain figure out where in the world is all this money going to come from thank you for that i win my remaining time is just a putting c o two underground by the way north dakota hosts a fabulous demonstration of that with a gas cation plant in the c o two ship to canada pumped into their oil wells and had seen the oil recovery by their other credible technologies under development i've heard as viable places where we can store carbon in ways that we can have some control over in the future thank you so much thank you mr chairman and i appreciate your continuing effort i the expectation that somehow there's a lot of high tech solutions i appreciate document talking about there's probably some stuff out there on the horizon that we should be looking at how we might  accelerate the progress but it seems to me that for all intents and purposes there's an awful lot that we can do right now the reference from several of our experts you know seventy five eighty percent of this is transportation electricity and agriculture if we were to get serious and i'm from a region in the northwest where i have i represent a city that actually is about at its one nine hundred ninety emissions level right now that for the last twenty five years the largest single source of energy has been conservation and it has been achieved th thousand megawatt at half the price of a coal fired plant we haven't scratched the surface it seems to me in that area and i want to just throw a couple of ideas past the panel and maybe get a little feedback if we were to establish an oil import that would set a figure for oil in p at fifty dollars a barrel escalated with inflation if we were to move in an area of carbon tax if we were to have the federal government carbon footprint reduce i think it's safe to say we are the largest generator of greenhouse gases of any entity in the world and if we were to set aside one percent of our energy bill for conservation we would commit not to purchase any vehicles that did not meet a specific level absent some sort of waiver if we committed to have renewal portfolio standard for the federal government these are little things that are within our power and i won't even talk about the farm bill up for reauthorization with an opportunity through the farm bill through the legislation that we could use on this committee to change the carbon footprint of agriculture in this country both to reward the right stuff and penalize some of the things that we don't want aren't there lots of simple common sense things that we can do that will make a difference now over the next five or six years let me let me try first the answer is absolutely yes i mean there's absolutely no question about it do we have a need for long term technology yes but can we do a lot in the short term i think there's no question and i and i think the easiest way is not only to look at the city of portland or some states that have done these things but just to look at what private industry has done because virtually all of the companies that have sent targets and many of them are much more stringent than the u s kyoto target was have found that they could meet those targets by efficiency improvements and they were many cases the sort of things that i would consider silly i mean thank you turning off the computers at night changing the lighting i mean doing all of these very simple things which actually are great for the bottom line and can result in significant reductions and that is why we allow the companies we work with would like to see a price on carbon because that would really motivate that kind of behavior and in fact we could make significant reductions without spent all on just thinking about it and then came up with a number like a trillion dollars was a pretty good return why does california do it it does it because it it adheres to what i like to call the seven eleven principle if you can do better than a seven percent return on investment typical of a mortgage rate or an eleven year payback it's something to consider mandatory control because you have a win win associated with that that in fact is why in california again about fifteen percent of the electricity demand has been reduced by these by these actions including about half of that in and utilities in private sector and the estimates about five billion dollars a year saves and again and eliminates by partisan bickering a great deal when everybody wins i also think that in the end though while we have a lot we can do to start and the sequencing should certainly be on performance standards first we've heard from everybody and i think we're in agreement that we also remember that the learning by doing which means that getting the costs and the prices down of alternatives not just exotic uninvented technology but hot tower solar and batteries that you could use a plug in hybrid the technology is here it's just not here at the cost we like learning by doing first takes and doing just as return on investment takes investment so finding the ways to encourage the investment in the doing is what will bring these online cheaper sooner and this is a time simply that i just ask a question mr chairman for requests from ten seconds i just if you have ideas of where the federal government can emulate emulate what you're talking about in the private sector or the state of california i would welcome a little brief you know or something of that nature thank you for your indulgence  to have a certain benefit of the or being c e o c o two and up in my district represent district in northern california there's an organization the pacific forests trust and they registered the state's first forest carbon project with the california climate action registry and they've got about twenty one hundred acres of working forest land that they have designated as this as this project and i and i highlight the fact it's working forest land and i'm told that that one project is expected to curb about five hundred thousand tons of carbon dioxide c o two emissions ration and seems like a pretty promising program and i'd like to know what in your view what role projects of this nature can play and if you believe this is the tax committee if you believe that in our effort to deal with this any comprehensive plan should take into account include incentives for these types of programs i don't i'm not familiar with the very specific project you mention but should seek restoration in forests and soils play a role in this i think the answer is yes i'm not exactly sure whether this is a solution for the long term and i suspect it is not but while we while we move forward in other areas and while we we deal with new technologies that can be more permanent why do you say it's not a solution for the long run because i think  medium term and should be a part of any comprehensive program and how do you quantify the value of the of the tax incentive off the top of my head i can't give you a good answer but what are your long term estimates on the impact of global climate change and no water supply for for everybody for minister bowl agricultural and natural resource priorities  on the west coast in western states i'll start with with california and the west because there's probably a legitimately larger concern there than in some other areas and that's because when you have a mediterranean climate where the bulk of the rain comes in in the winter and not in the summer if you end up with warmer seasons and a lot of our of our water is stored in snow pack not just in reservoirs something like i have and you start melting them sooner then you have a flood management problem earlier in the spring and you have less water availability downstream in the summer when you need it and if you are several degrees warmer you need it even more and you increase substantially the risk of wildfire and if there's been any unifying factor in california and i think in our again in washington in concern about not wanting to warm up more than a few degrees it has to do with the risk of wildfire associated with kind of mediterranean climate and the reduction of water supplies it's less clear in other places the i p c c collected the results in twenty models and roughly and while there was this agreement about many parts of the world where  rain more and less there was one area where they were all in relative agreement for obvious reasons you're going to get more absolute precipitation in the high latitudes both north and south because the atmosphere holds more moisture when it's when it's warm and that the mediterranean climates the mediterranean cell south australia south africa california west coast mexico will probably have substantial water resource problems because they're already stressed and they're already dry in the summer and adding heat is not a good thing products and things of that nature well there are studies that look at that water quality as well as want to water quantity there are not thousands of them we're still trying to collect the literature on this everybody admits that there is uncertainties from how many people in the world to the emissions to to what it means in those in those watershed but the one thing we know is that we're going to change the drought flood frequency probably going to increase it pretty much everywhere but the west looks like a particular problem because of its mediterranean climate and that would affect water quality as well because if you have runoff pesticides herbicides or other things of the time in the summer at a time when you have less actual runoff then the concentrations would go up but that can also be controlled by by local rules so it'll require a combination of federal and local action to protect those systems point seven billion u s tons simple math shows of that four hundred billion for ton tax would be about seven hundred billion dollars a year and seven trillion over over ten years so i have two questions for you the first is that cvo has a term in our g d p in two thousand and seven will be about thirteen trillion dollars and given that tax collections are already at a historical high do you believe that this tax a tax of this type is economically sustainable that's my first question and the second question that i'd like you to ask is how do you suggest you know being that we are a tax writing committee how do you suggest that we apply this tax to the american people and what form gas tax cetera et cetera thank you very much for that question because i can clarify that i certainly would never advocate a four hundred dollar a ton carbon tax snapped on the day after tomorrow what i was doing in that study was showing that even a tax that large which was presumably ramped up over time and using the standard growth rates that would be lowered in most economic models even a number that large and i acknowledge in the testimony that would be trillions of dollars you still when you look at it play out over a century again if you believe that we'll have a two percent per year growth rate in the economy only delays are getting five hundred percent of capital richer a year at two hundred years from now i also said in the testimony that it would be very important to take a look not just at who might be differential  injured by climate change such as i had said earlier people living on coastlines and high mountains in a with we also have to take a look at who would be hurt by any policy and deal in fairness to help them through the transition dr if i may though and i because i have limited here if not four hundred dollars than than how much i mean you know we're you know we didn't know you know if we're serious about writing this into law and taxing the american people with this carbon tax of us not four hundred dollars is it two hundred is it three hundred is it one hundred  fifteen where do you start and how do you apply the tax well what i would what what i would do personally and of course you are calling for what you know my values of the relative merits of these and in my system i want to try to set an  that we're going to slow it down but i don't believe that starts with a very very high number because of the dislocation it would have to people who are currently locked in to the kinds of work to which those taxes would be very very critical but just as a way of perspective several people had made comments politically and otherwise that kyoto or some other type policy would have bankrupt the u s yet gasoline prices went up two years ago by a dollar fifty a gallon which is the equivalent of two hundred seventy dollars a tonne carbon tax and didn't do very much damage the economy though it hurt individuals so i'm a believer in ramping things up slowly announcing it and giving people time to adjust but in the end the models themselves suggest if you want to control to three fifty that's current levels that the numbers are somewhere in the order of four hundred dollars and i would not personally advocate it is not in my book or my article to say that it was just simply scaling so i mean if we could just stick with a number though what would you think it would what would i well the market is somewhere all over the place these days from ten to fifty pending where you  are and i think you start small and you say i'm going to crank the knob up every year higher and higher and then when we get new studies to find out if we're lucky and we're coming out at the low end we might crank it back if we find out we're unlocking we're coming up with the high end let's crank it up or i will be surprised if it doesn't end decades sat somewhere well over one hundred dollars a ton as an incentive to to do both the r and d and to discourage wasteful use thank you dr thank  to thank our panelists for not only your testimony but your patience here today on an incredibly important topic i have just returned from a few days over in europe meet with the european parliament european union discussing this very topic along with some other matters and they're absolutely obsessed as you can imagine because whereas al gore says it's an inconvenient truth for us it's a matter of survival for them in regards to climate change the impact it's going to have throughout the region and they're wondering what we're going to do in the session to step up and start assuming some of the responsibility that we have to share on a global level with that in my let me ask you two questions for each or any one of you that want to address it but what's the most important thing that we should be doing right away to help us reduce the c o two emissions in this country and secondly what's the most important thing we can be doing to help the emerging and developing world to try to leapfrog over a lot of the mistakes that we've made in the past so that they don't becomes a significant problem for the rest of us  globally let me just leave it open any of you that wan to i think it is very important to put a price on carbon emissions even if it's stopped at a very modest level i think that needs to be done one way or another the issue of whether it's a tax o comes under a cap and trade is something that i think is not my area of expertise to two to comment on i think it's extremely important that we work together with the other major developing countries that the united states works carefully with china and india and these other big emerging economies to see the ways in which we can help them develop their economies we're not going to stop them doing that but in a way that's smoking very carefully at lowering the emissions that would otherwise occur from from those developing economies and with a clear understanding that some point they take on restrictions to their emissions they may not start in that direction and mission lee but at some point there's an agreement that they join in along with us and the other o e c d countries to make a global effort that lowering emissions the point it doesn't matter where the gas is a coming from we all live it's a global commons problem here dr snyder you have any thoughts and yes as i had said in my my written testimony i think that a lot of this is a sequenc problem it's probably easiest to start smart start where you get the the lowest cost and highest paid back which is performance standards not just have them selectively distributed around states to take a look federally i congressman made the comment which i agree with that we also better look at government procurement because it's always better to get your kid to believe you when you tell him to turn out the lights when you turn off the t v when you walk out the door so i think the government being involved is a part of not just symbolic but a good way to also have a learning by doing experiment and send market signals to producers in those efficient products part of performance standards is cafe part of it is appliances volves and housing i think next in the chain which i heard from everybody and i heard no agreement here though i might have nuances about how we do it is public private partnership so that we can get that learning by doing experiment going president bush won one send a lot of thousand flowers bloom and i don't think we need a thousand a dozen maybe sure we have to have that competitive market of learning by doing and it's not going to happen just on private investment returns it will take the public partnerships and after all there's a public benefit it is let me go to ms close on dr montgomery real quick before my time expires so yes i think a price on carbon and i would advocate through a cap and trade system would be number one in terms of the developing world i think we have to engage with them in a constructive way so that they can follow cleaner development path because obviously they're going to develop they obviously need electricity and transportation but there are ways to do it better and i think we can be helpful  i would make my first priority creating a stable and growing source of funding for effective r and d and sending it through an effective organization that's outside existing executive department outside the appropriations process is expanding that one second for the developing world i think it's absolutely clear the developing world is not going to be able to make a big difference in its growth in emissions without much stronger economic legal and market institutions and i would start with with pushing that read more to let me just end this and there really hasn't been delved into any great extent but i don't know how we can get there quicker or faster unless we have a mature nuclear energy policy as well in this country and something that we can share globally with nonproliferation concerns and in mine because everything else sounds great but that seems to be the most obvious direction to get the biggest bang for our buck in short term thank you all testified before this committee about the economic impact of various ideas that have been proposed to address climate change and it's kind of like a warning you better watch out what you're getting yourself into because it's to cost a lot of money that's going to cost a lot of money i have a question for you if we fail to respond to global warming if we fail to respond when there be economic costs associated with higher temperatures higher sea levels and changes in weather patterns would you ask answer that question mr government yes it would be economic tell us about those the economic costs are likely to be appearing the first is the economic cost that we need to worry about in these mining policies are where they are the economic costs we need to take into consideration in defining policies are the economic costs that we can avoid because of those policies they're made and turning the ship of the client is going to be a slow process no matter how rapidly we start doing things therefore we have to think about you know which you know in what time scales can we accomplish something given that we need the whole world to do things that are going to avoid some costs well now that we looking at or of where costs we're looking at avoiding certainly or are all of those things and they're going to be occurring over the next century will appear from what you all said today and what others have been writing lately that we've come a long way in six years last five or six years that we seem to be on the same page that we now we are dealing with sound science now miss miss klaus you talked about conservation and you gave us some very specific examples about how we can we missions et etc and in may of two thousand and one i want to i want your response to what the vice president of the united states said about conservation he said that conservation may be a sign of personal virtue but it is not a sufficient basis for a showdown comprehensive energy policy would you please respond to that statement by the vice president of the united states it's too easy your question here i actually think conservation is the basis of a sound energy policy it is the number one thing we can do it is a win win it is not the whole game but there is no question that that is where we should start by the way he said that just a little while after i get seconds here dr snyder said that just a little while after the president ren on a campaign promise that he made to all of us that he would emissions for coal power plants dr schneider yeah i do agree with the vice president it gives you personal virtue the point is it does more than that and the best example i can give you is that the initial california stated performance standards on refrigerators from nineteen seventy five in the opec embargo that would then picked up by many states and eventually the federal government it's been calculated out that the amount of electricity saved alone through those performance standards is not only substantial it's about a third of nuclear power it is twice the maximum potential of the production of the alaska national wildlife refuge which i think is something the vice president might know thank you d brief i think you get what you pay for if you are prepared to pay for energy conservation through tax incentives or subsidies and that means taking resources away because you're collecting taxes and and by expending those resources  it's certainly possible to bring about conservation i think that's the experience in california to california has incurred economic costs that it has chosen a particular path of industrial development and it has and  expanding those resources it's accomplished something in reducing its energy consumption you said on page three of your testimony when you were talking about developing nations and why should we ask this of ourselves that we're not going to ask this some others he said the implication of these observations is not that the united states should do nothing it is that gaining the participation of developing countries is probably the highest priority for climate policy because without that participation it is impossible to prevent large temperature increases that's what you said are you implying or would you accept or would you support this idea that with participating countries and whether they are developing or they've been well up that you could actually deal with trade agreements with those countries to work on these climate changes would you accept something like that that we be part of our trade deal with countries around the world yes i think that trade negotiations are an important route to doing something about climate policy trade negotiations are tricky enough i mean we have immense problems in the day around in dealing with things like the europeans insistence on subsidizing agriculture which is impoverishing developing countries i would be more inclined to go with regional trade agreements i think that bilateral or kind of for probably twenty years that the federal government and all the scientists who have spent twelve or thirteen billion dollars of told everyone that that site is safer barrier of nuclear waste and i said joe the other day if it was a saturday night live skit it would probably be pretty funny but it's actually too serious of an issue the yucca mountain it's a problem it's broken and i know that you believe the first morning support nuclear energy as do i but i please ask as you look at that as an option that when we use sound science it's not happening at yucca mountain now a loss also like to add i guess the food chain of this debate there's millions of not billions have been spent on both sides and that which makes it very difficult for the average american to cut to the chase of the debate and i'm not questioning your expertise today at all but i know that the american people are in question what can we tell the american people are residents in the right now one thing that they could do to help is i believe there is a problem and we need to find a solution but what's one thing a family can do to make a huge difference and i may be oversimplifying but i'm asked that question by schoolchildren by by businesses by individuals in the second part of it is  geothermal of course is huge for the country we're the largest in the world in the vat it is number two in production and i hear constantly from the business community that they need more incentives more incentives for solar and and geothermal so i guess th rock i have not seen a careful consideration of the cost of getting very large amounts of energy from geothermal and i think that has to be looked at very carefully obviously  don't have to worry about what we worry about of the cape wind project where rich people don't like to see these windmills and their horizons on the issue of what the individual person can do you know the way i answer this and then the many public talks i give is one that comes up about every four five seven years depending on how frugal you are as you buy a new vehicle and this is one way people can i think made a very significant difference they can go for a vehicle that gets twice  and they will have their gasoline costs right and doing so but in doing so they will have made an important contribution particularly if it then becomes a popular thing to do that's something everyone can do it is the way we run our households of course the ways we waste energy and we waste money in doing so and i that would apply in nevada and in massachusetts and everywhere else well i will leave it to others to thank you yes i too get asked that question all the time one young lady said i can't negotiate with the chinese what can i do and course i said do you turn your lights out when you walk out of the room she says well most of the time not all the time how about the computer so you begin with the things that you control you can control the number of trips you take you bother mom and dad to drive you downtown the second you want or with a little bit of planning to do two trips instead of four it's not just simply that those acts are symbolic they are but when a billion people do them ten times a day they go beyond symbolic plus the also create the mindset for being efficient and i agree with with ron printing that you have to take a look very carefully at the labels of the air conditioners the refrigerators the automobiles when you remodel your house you build to the minimum of the building code or do you build to a payback criteria like seven eleven you need to get some help to try to do that so i think there are a lot of things we can do and finally we need to get up organizations we need to talk to people of like mind or even differences but who agree in conservation afaik and we talk to each other we learn from each other and then we network to other groups because that's what makes it politically more possible for leaders  to have supporting constituents so i think there's a whole hierarchy of steps and of course then from the top down there's the taxes on the taps and tries i think we're all asked this question i usually give a three part response i mean when you make a purchase  it with carbon in mind and that could be whether it's your vehicle or your refrigerator or your washing machine i think it is important if you want to invest your money that you invest your money in companies that are taking steps in the right direction here and that are advocates for good public policy and i know i shouldn't probably say the third you know hearing but i always say it's important to you vote for because we need in the policy and i would say you should vote for people who are going to come up with a sound  you mr levin started the questioning by asking us about why there was such a huge divide in opinions on climate policy i actually think the advice i would give everyone in their homes and their families is to study the subject seriously think critically about the extreme statements that you hear from any side read everything run critters ever written for general consumption understand the subject because i think that and this really gets to the question of long term incentives for businesses well i think the expectation of what climate policy is going to be and what businesses need to do in order to prepare for it is driven less by what this congress vote expectation about what the electorate is going to expect and demand over twenty years that is not business isn't likely to be confident of that until we have much more consensus with among our citizens about what the climate problem is and how you can address it so i would say study it and encourage your children to study hard and do science and engineering because we need them in order to get that our indian and the and the the future that we were going to depend on this berkeley thank you mr chairman and thank all of our witnesses for being so patient and staying the extra forty five minutes i whenever i hear anybody talk about nuclear energy as a possible part of a solution and part of our future energy portfolio i get a little bit nervous like to echo some of the things that mr porter said nuclear energy has a very nasty byproduct and that nasty byproduct is nuclear waste only the only solution for its nuclear waste problem is to store ships and store seventy seven thousand tons of very toxic radioactive nuclear waste across forty three states to be buried in a hole in the nevada desert where we've got groundwater issues seismic activity and volcanic activity when people talk about nuclear energy being clean and cheap and safe so i'd like to disabuse everybody of that myth if it's so cheap it cost two billion dollars minimum to build another nuclear power plant that's why there hasn't been one in the last twenty years i don't think that sounds very cheap and if it's such a great source of energy how come the taxpayers me included have to keep subsidizing this energy source where already twenty years behind schedule after the so called screw nevada bill that nothing much has been done other than we've spent a fortune studying it  zillions of gallons of water for nuclear waste we don't have any water you may have noticed that you have to mountain is in the middle of the nevada desert we're now in the middle of our seventh year of a five year drought and we don't know how long this five year drought is going to last there's no water resources in the state of nevada for the storage of nuclear waste we know and actually congress labeled porter was the  subcommittee chairman when they were when we did an investigation that found over a thousand e mails and i while i don't have a direct quote let me paraphrase what some of these e mails were when we're talking about so called down science for yucca mountain i don't know any of the numbers so i just make them up that was one of the better e mails but there were hundreds others that said exactly that i don't whatever they asked me for i give them and i don't  make it up that's not exactly sound science the u s circuit court of appeals as you know overturned the e p a radiation standards that were a ten thousand years they said they were short by two hundred and ninety thousand years yet to come up with adequate radiation standards because radioactive nuclear waste has a half shelf life of three hundred thousand years there is water at yucca mountain originally and i was a youngster just that a law school when the screw nevada bill was passed but they told us that it was so dry that they would store the nuclear waste in the mountain would collapse over the nuclear waste and it would be encased in there for existing in the years the reality is the last time i took a tour of yucca mountain there was water dripping i mean it is not as dry as people say it is as our so called scientists say it is as far as an era of terrorism why why would we be generating more nuclear waste so we know there are terrorists out there that would love to get their hands on the nuclear waste and use it why to harm our country and then land hardly last but another issue is transportation there is no safe way to transport nuclear waste across this country for the seventy seven thousand tons that currently exists throughout the united states at the nuclear reactor site it would take a hundred and a truckload shipment one hundred  thousand truckloads shipments over a thirty five year period to now transport the nuclear waste that currently exists and now we're proposing to rely more on nuclear waste and cleaner energy and perhaps the most important thing to me is senator harry reid and i have already publicly said that if any nuclear waste gets transported to the state of nevada we will lay down on that railroad track i'm sincerely hope in front of me but nonetheless i can assure you that nuclear waste is not an option for this country it is a twentieth century technology in a twenty first century world and we'd better start figuring out how we're going to make up the extra twenty percent of our energy you and i will be brief i want to thank you all for your patience and your wonderful testimony i think it's refreshing to have a discussion where we don't talk about whether there is global warming but what we can do to address it and so i hope this will be the last time we have to come before congress to have a discussion about whether there is such a thing as global warming and what we have to do to address so thank you for that i hope as you go on and continue to give your expert opinions and your great advice and counsel on these matters that you also help us formulate policies that will address some concerns that i have that as we try to move towards cleaner energy alternative energies and alternative methods of implementing these new approaches that we don't forget that there are a lot of folks in america modest income folks who have a tougher time making the switches over to these new energies or the new methodology because it will cost them but i mean to do so i think everyone in america would love to drive one of these fuel efficient hybrid or love to have their hands on another kid vehicle but the reality is for a lot of folks they can't afford to get a newer cleaner burning engine car and they have to deal with  modest income americans the other thing i would mention is that i hope we will continue to talk about our responsibility as a nation because while we talk about the polluters that we see every time i go to one of these developing countries you see these large   conclude then by just finishing that remark and leaving a question for you to answer if you can for the record but as much as we see these big buses that are spewing pollution in these developing countries of reality as it were the biggest  per capita or as a nation in the world and i hope we continue to focus on the fact that we need to be leaders to make sure the rest will follow us and finally the question i would have is please let us know in your written comments the importance of predictability if we want to have the private sector invest in these large scale projects to get us more energy efficient what how can we provide them the predictability to make these investments and know that there will be a return on these investments into the future so the more you give us on that the better off we are with that i will yield as chairman thank you very much  testimony has been with this committee and i have just said that i would like to consolidate your testimony in this tribute to the house for us to have as a guideline for the things that we have to learn a lot if you do the things that we have to do i also let us say you for your patience for a very long hearing that we've had today but