chairman all for being here at the hearing that we are going to have today on investing in the future r and d needs to meet america's energy and climate challenges in the select committee on energy independence and global warming america is a nation of innovators from the founding fathers to the youtube creators our country has always cultivated entrepreneurs with an idea about the next big thing since world war ii the federal government has recognized that it is in the nation's interest to invest in fundamental research and development to help keep the economic engine of innovation running today we are confronted with challenges to  national security our economic security and our environmental security that all stem from our over reliance on fossil fuels the imperative to move to a clean renewable energy system is clear the need for robust science to guide our way is obvious because of past investments in energy and climate research and development we have the tools and technologies to begin tackling the climate crisis now energy saving technologies abound alternative energy sources are looming wind solar and geothermal energy sources are taking market share away from fossil fuel hurricane tracking and forecasting helped us prepare for the arrival of  and now ike but in order to achieve the significant reductions in carbon dioxide necessary to avoid truly catastrophic climate change and respond to the serious impacts that we can no longer avoid we must invest in furthe research and development the united states once led the world in the development and production of renewable energy technologies just as the united states once led the world in broadband technologies after years of neglect we are now losing these races struggling to stay close to our competitors in japan europe and even china the bitter truth is that now we are buying technology from abroad that in many cases were developed here in our own universities in twenty five years u energy r and d has fallen from ten percent of total r and d down to two percent instead of building our r and d endowment we have been slowly chipping away at it this trend must be reversed some have argued that it is premature for the united states to adopt a domestic cap on global warming pollution because we lack the technology to achieve it that view is wrong as a factual matter but more fundamentally it reflects a view of america that i do not recognize as we have heard at numerous select committee hearings technologies exist now that will allow us to make tremendous progress enacting legislation will provide a driver for the deployment of the existing technology and an incentive for the development of new technology america is a can do nation we answered the call to put a man on the moon to crack the human genome to build a national information infrastructure with the resources generated by a cap and invest system we can increase our energy and climate r and d investment climate legislation will also send a strong signal to our most vital resource our nation's students as we have seen here on capitol hill and today's witnesses from our top universities can attest young people today are bursting with ideas on how to bring about the green revolution when i was a student the soviets launch of sputnik made us all want to study science the government responded with significant investments in r and d and trained the next generation of scientists and engineers once again there is a threat from above us the dangerous build up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere it is time for us to respond to that threat and unleash america's creative genius on this global challenge we heard the delegates at the republican convention chant drill baby drill what the nation should really be chanting to our students scientists and engineers is dream baby dream and in order to make these dreams a reality we must increase our investment in energy and climate research and development and adopt the policies to make it clear that the green energy revolution has begun that completes the opening statement of the chair we now turn to recognize the gentleman from washington state  united states when i consider our r and d budget we are investing i think less than one sixth trying to save the planet earth than we did trying to get to the moon and you know stephen hawking said we should prepare to go to other planets i would prefer just to save this one and i think we can even do it cheaper i had some good news and bad news a couple of weeks ago i went out to golden colorado and looked at the national renewable lab there which is a great place it was really intriguing saw some amazing things saw two plug in hybrid cars parked underneath about a fifteen by twenty pv cell array and the two plug in hybrids could be powered by eight hours apiece just on into the janitorial locker of the pentagon and it was sort of the focus of the nation's efforts to save the planet from you know potential doom due to global warming and all the security threats we have and it really put in perspective to me how the middle chart shows our r and d budget in health care that has gone up from you know one or two in sixty up to about twenty eight dollars billion now and then you compare it to our entire energy budget this budget is not just for clean energy but ourselves from foreign oil and yet we have this pathetically small it has actually gone down since the mid s you can see this decline from here to here so even though we have this triple threat security global warming and job loss we have a pathetic r and d budget and this has to be ramped up exponentially i believe to take advantage of the technologies that are now in pre commercialization stage so i think this is a very timely hearing we have a lot of work to do and we have got to have a source of funding already mentioned is that the r and d spending has been abysmal and i think one of the roles that this committee should play is continuing to sound the alarm in addition to securing as much factual information as possible martin luther king in one thousand nine hundred and sixty six said it may well be that the greatest tragedy of this period of social that our generation may have to report that our generation did not do what it should do we need to speak louder as the children of light than the children of darkness and so i think that we must continue to call out what we see as a diabolical misdirection of our nation we are not spending the kind of money that we need to spend on research and development if we are in fact serious about saving this planet and i am i have children and i want all of them to have children and i would like for them to have children then i think we need to do what is necessary there is no nation on this planet with the capability of doing what  discussing an issue that i feel very strongly and passionately about i spent my entire career in the new energy technology business and i had the opportunity and privilege of participating in the development of wind energy technology from its very infancy into what it is now a successful business so i see that as an example of the kind of opportunities that are available for our young men and women who get involved and are willing to do the hard work that it takes to master these sciences in order to inspire them we need to be willing to spend the money here in the federal government we have authorized a doubling of r and d budgets over the next ten years but the appropriations aren't following those authorizations so we are not meeting from the congress from the united states government we are not meeting our responsibilities and we need to have a panel of such experts to convince us to do that so  please feel free to say what needs to be said inspire our young people to participate and let's get the show on the road thank you the chairman i thank the gentleman all time for opening statements has been completed now like to recognize our first witness doctor susan hockfield the president of the massachusetts institute of technology during her time at mit doctor hockfield has encouraged collaborative work across traditional discipline boundaries in order to pioneer new areas of interdisciplinary study and keep the institute at the forefront of innovation she has won many awards it is our honor to have you with us here today  the overwhelming importance of funding basic energy research i will echo the comments of all of yours and my own as you know since before world war ii mit has served the nation as an honest broker on complex technical issues and also as a source of breakthrough research in the past year as part of the mit initiative on energy we have delivered landmark reports on coal nuclear and geothermal energy which have helped to inform congressional action our faculty is now preparing similar reports on cap and trade policy on solar energy on natural gas on nuclear infrastructure and waste disposal and overall energy technology policy as well as continuing our pioneering work on technologies that will help make those options real today however i am here to talk about the research funding required to achieve an energy revolution we all know the united states is tangled in what we call a triple knot of difficult problems first we have a shaky economy that has been battered by volatile energy prices a loss of good jobs and threats to our global technology leadership second we face a geopolitical situation weighed down by issues of energy consumption and security and third there is mounting evidence that global climate change is upon us each knot is daunting on its own and the three are profoundly tied together fortunately i believe that we have the power to loosen all of these knots at once with a dramatic new level of federal investment in energy r and d if one advance could transform america's prospect it will be having a range of clean renewable and low carbon energy technologies ready to power our cars our buildings and our industries at scale while creating jobs and protecting the planet if we want to own those future technologies there is only one path and it is research yet in the last several decades federal funding for energy research has countries also diminished their investments but at an average of thirty nine percent but in the u s our cuts were more drastic we reduced r and d support by fifty eight percent and we cannot count on private industry to do the job either since efficient mature technologies around fossil fuel based energy it is wildly out of step with any industry that depends on innovation pharmaceutical companies invest eighteen percent of their revenues  d semiconductor firms invest sixteen percent even the auto industry invests three point three percent but u s energy companies invest less than a quarter of one percent of revenues in r and d with that level investment we can't expect an energy revolution and while we would and we do welcome a recent surge in venture funding for green technologies the fact is that venture money flows not to revolutionary research but to near market ready ideas the very end of the d in r and d what is the lesson here it is a simple one it is that while industry must support development and commercialization only government can prime the pump of research congress funded the basic research that spawned the it revolution and the biotech revolution today to spark an energy revolution congress must lead again now why should you or the taxpayers believe that this investment will work it is because the same kind of research investment has paid off so spectacularly before i could call on any number of examples but let me just give you one over the past thirty years congress has allowed the nih has supported the nih to invest four dollars per year per american in cardiac research that investment has cut death from stroke and heart attack by sixty three percent imagine the same payoff measured  electric cars safe nuclear technology or a smart new grid the potential here from the economy to global security to the climate is absolutely boundless yet of course we are not the only ones to have noticed if we fail to make major strategic investments in energy research now we will swiftly forfeit the advantage to our competitors from china and india to germany and japan other countries have the money and the motivation and they are chasing the technology almost as fast as we are we must make sure in the energy technology markets of the future we have the power to invent produce and sell and not the obligation to buy so how much should we invest in energy r and d let's start with how much or frankly how little the federal government spends today we saw your charts congressman and i will say just repeat it with some numbers the total depends on which programs you count but recognized authorities put the number for two thousand and six at between two dollars forty cents and three dollars forty cents billion just to scale that for comparison it is less than half of what our major pharmaceutical company spends on r and d every year less than one half of every company's expenditures in today's dollars it is about two percent of the total price of the apollo program a range of experts including the business led council on competitiveness reports  federal energy research must climb to three or even ten times the current level in my view the nation needs to increase energy r and d sharply moving promptly to triple the current rates and then increasing further as doe builds the capacity to translate basic research to the marketplace to establish firm funding guidelines i believe that industry government and universities must come together to create a detailed energy r and d roadmap speaking f mit and i know for other research universities we would be honored to help design a strategic plan let me close with a short vignette in one thousand nine hundred and forty when germany invaded france president roosevelt had  visit from a man named vannevar bush who was then chair of the national advisory committee on aeronautics and was formerly vice president and dean of engineering at mit his message to president roosevelt was simple for america to win the war it had no choice but to make aggressive focused investments in basic science the case was so compelling president roosevelt approved it in ten minutes from radar to the manhattan project the investments in innovation that decision unleashed were the military tools that won the war what is more that same presidential decision launched the enduring partnership between the federal government and the nation's great research universities a partnership that has vastly enhanced america's military capabilities and national security it has launched many of our most important industries produced countless medical advances and spawned virtually all of the technologies that define our modern quality of life vannevar bush's essential insight was his appreciation for the value of basic research in powering innovation i believe that we stand on the verge of a global energy technology revolution and the question before us is will america lead it and reap the rewards or will we surrender the advantage to other countries with clearer vision today as we face the deeply linked challenges of economic insecurity energy insecurity and global climate change we should see in this little bit of history a profoundly hopeful practical path to who is the vice president for research at the university of michigan he is a physicist by training he has made many important contributions in the area of communications semiconductors and more recently highly efficient lighting appliances carbon emissions and low energy costs nevertheless america's research universities homes to the highest risk innovation and discovery are ready and eager to join in a partnership with government and industry to solve what is the largest single problem confronting us in the st century unfortunately the u s has not responded proportionately to the magnitude of the crisis today alternative energy research is only two percent of our g in comparison for example to japan where it is four times that amount in fact only one point six percent of all federal r and d goes to energy research to put this in perspective the past five years of the doe budget which includes money that  nearly two dollars trillion industry is bigger than either health or defense given how underfunded we are at the present and how unprepared we are to meet the urgent challenges facing us we can only conclude that federal investments are not nearly lighting program which supports both industry and academia already has produced successes that will soon make the very inefficient incandescent bulb obsolete for interior lighting however to face today's crisis doe's programs must be enlarged to include new initiatives that encourage collaboration and truly promote the transformation of our energy economy it will take more than just increased funding we also need better policy to make it easier and more efficient to collaborate across these sectors to make collaboration both streamlined and nimble even michigan with a manufacturing economy under siege can show what great opportunities we have before us innovative partnerships between universities government and industry are showing a clear path to win win situations we can come up with energy solutions and strengthen economies michigan and the great lakes regional economies are rooted in the heavy manufacturing base that fueled america's greatness in the last century we now can build on that to find new answers to our energy challenges look at the auto industry for example where fuel costs and carbon emissions dictate that the automobile must be reinvented internal combustion engine will give way to cars powered by electricity and hydrogen this change will not only solve energy problems it will also spawn new business and a new economy my home state already is moving ahead to change our economic base to one focused on knowledge and en ergy industries the governor's centers of energy excellence matches companies universities and training facilities so that research innovations can make it to the market therefore to augment doe's expertise and strengthen the drive for alternative energy we must make two policy changes fully fund the advanced research projects agency for energy or arpa e and establish a network of discovery and innovation institutes last year congress established ar a e an independent agency at doe to serve as a critical bridge between universities that are the incubators of new ideas and companies establishing arpa e is truly a milestone but we must move quickly to fund it to the recommended level of three hundred million we have already lost too much time in our race to create a secure and clean energy future discovery and innovation institutes recommended by the national academy of engineering represent a second way to address multidisciplinary energy challenges diis bring federal agencies research universities and industry together as collaborative r and d labs diis will be regional ensuring that they will draw on local strengths to work in a system that seamles spans from basic science to commercialization and since it takes more than just science and innovation to build a sustainable energy infrastructure diis can also be equipped to address socioeconomic and policy issues this approach can provide unique training grounds for the next generation of technologists and leaders so the time to act decisively is upon us our national security the sustained health of the economy and our environment depend on our success in this mission thank director of the renewable and appropriate energy laboratory his work focuses on the analysis of national and international energy policy he is a member of the intergovernmental panel on climate  change and he has been working closely with the state of california as they implement their groundbreaking climate legislation ab thirty two we welcome you doctor kammen whenever you are ready please begin mister kammen thank you very much it is an honor to speak and i do have some key findings and then move from there to some of the details of what has taken place and what has not taken place in crafting our national energy plan the first and perhaps most troubling finding is that the global rate  which had been progressing at about one percent per year for the past three decades over the last eight years has now stalled in fact we have seen a flat line in the sense that the global economy has not been improving in its ability to generate dollars of gnp and gross world product without producing carbon this is a critical issue and the lead economies must take a role in reversing this trend if we have any hope of meeting our climate goals that is a vital first part of the story the second piece is that public money alone will not solve and will not even begin to solve the climate problem but pardoning the analogy it is vital that the public sector prime the pump in this area there are a number of features both in terms of the actual dollars spent and their impact on the private sector for which we have a great deal of data that if the public sector does not play a major role in this area the private sector cannot move ahead in the ways that it needs to do t powerful examples we have already heard about the story in the national health field where a concerted effort a planned effort to double the federal nih budget over about a decade resulted in a far larger increase in private sector investment in fact while public sector moneys doubled the stability and the path demonstrated resulted in a factor of eleven to twelve increase in the private sector money we have not seen any plan comparable to that in the energy field  fact a colleague of mine noted that what this means is that we will likely live long enough to see the error of our ways so a vital issue has been left before us in the semiconductor field where the united states was demonstrably trailing japan  coordinated public private sector effort resulted in sematech that charted a new course and in fact led to a whole range of innovations so powerful in fact that the public money was effectively no longer needed and this carried through at the private sector effort with a range of innovations and a vital part of the overall story the key message in this is that without a plan without a plan that coordinates energy efforts and ties it to our climate needs it is impossible for even a set of well crafted individual programs to get us where we want to go no matter how good a job one does with a particular effort on a subset of nuclear or solar or biofuel technology without that vision it is impossible to carry these things through in times of budget stress and in crises when money is needed for further areas that is the single most critical part of the story and that is why it is so critical the bill you proposed and the versions go forward that lays out a climate plan and ties the energy investments to it we have already heard about how critically small the energy investment has been as a part of our overall economy and in fact the energy field is investing at roughly the average rate of reinvestment of revenues back into research of the economy overall and as the president has already mentioned we have already seen higher levels in biotech and other areas where investments at ten to fifteen percent of total revenues have been put back into some of the areas of biotech this is the sort of investment that is possible in the energy area and in fact this is the sort of investment that is critical in the energy area to meet the goals ahead of us we have a number of key things that we have done relatively quickly right now we have a relatively poor program to transfer technologies from our national labs and from some universities into the public sector we have had times in the past where various arrangements like credas have been successful in bringing these technologies to the market and we need to unleash that potential again we also have a wide range of international initiatives where the united states could profitably partner both in terms of technology research and development sharing and in outreach and dissemination there are important opportunities for the u s in india the u s in china united states and europe to move ahead and in fact the most compelling message you will hear when talking to european leaders is how critical it is for the united states to re engage and to reap the lion's share of the benefits in this area this is not a selfish endeavor this is one where we critically must see those investments and i will highlight one item on this final slide this shows the  composite aggregate growth rates in investment in clean energy when you look at europe north america and asia it is notable not only that we are seeing high rates in other parts of the world but in fact the rates have increased in europe and in asia are far outstripping the current investment rates in the united states this is a shame and this is bad for our economy we see the world's largest wind company in denmark a country of five million the next google of wind  solar of fuel cells should all be u s companies we actually have the technology innovation centers silicon valley route one hundred and twenty eight the austin area areas evolving in the detroit area are all primed to do this but without that strong federal signal that public moneys and public investment and universities will focus on these areas you send a very mixed message to industry that we will move ahead in these areas so i urge us to use as the basic part of this equation the need to push dramatically ahead on funding as all of us i believe are advocating for but also to set the critical policy environment where a price for pollution will be part of the equation where efforts will be targeted at lowest cost programs not at pet programs and a program where the federal government will take the lead by beginning to do carbon based cost effectiveness analysis of federal programs both on the research side and on the deployment side and it is vital to link those two parts of the equation while the vannevar bush story is an awesomely powerful one and we cite it for good reason in many situations the immediacy of climate change kammen very much the chairman our final witness is doctor jack fellows he is vice president at the university corporation for atmospheric research he worked in the white house office of management and budget where would like to thank the committee for this opportunity to testify today also and i commend the committee for your tireless efforts on this important topic including chairman markey your introduction of the recent icap legislation as you said my name jack fellows i am the vice president of a nonprofit consortium of over seventy universities that are very interested in this hearing every member of the committee actually has one of my university members either in your state or in your district will respond to the steering committee questions in just a minute but i want to emphasize that my responses are based on a community document that provides advice to the next administration and congress on making our nation resilient to severe weather and climate change it was created by eight organizations that represent thousands of experts in the public private and academic weather and climate enterprise and i have submitted that document as a part of my testimony our fifty states are battered by billions of dollars of weather and climate related damages and losses each year and it isn't clear how these impacts are going to change as the climate changes i am talking about floods tornadoes hurricanes drought sea level change and adapting to these changes will be crucial for economic and social stability and in particular making water food and energy supplies reliable and sustainable into the future our country has made substantial investments to improve weather and climate tools and information and we have made tremendous progress over the last forty years we are very grateful for this support but due to the complexity of this problem and years of declining budgets these community partners who wrote this document are concerned that our nation does not have all the tools we need for an effective energy and climate strategy in particular one that helps local and regional decisionmakers deal with climate change one that supports the implementation of carbon emissions reduction proposals like icap and one that helps actually build a prosperous carbon free economy including making forecasts for green industries like wind and solar our ability to provide the right scale and type of information in these areas is hampered by the lack of key observations computing research and modelling and effective coordination regardless a lot of local and regional decisionmakers are moving forward with inadequate information in the face of substantial climate feedback uncertainties that may prove very costly to civilization for example how quickly the polar ice caps are actually melting given the urgency of the situation the community partners have actually provided this document mccain campaigns and also collected nominations for weather and climate positions in the next administration let me address the questions that the committee gave me the first one was what are the current earth observing and climate modelling investments and how do they compare to the past and with other countries there is really no effective inventory of these activities in the u s right now that is one of the recommendations of the community document to create that kind of inventory there is something called the climate change science program that provides the best estimates that we have this is a program that involves thirteen federal agencies and we hope has about one dollar ninety cents billion appropriated in two thousand and nine in my testimony i actually provided a funding history of the climate change science program but a brief summary the funding is roughly back to where it was in the early s so whatever gains we have made over the last couple of decades we lost i am not familiar with the current funding in other countries right now but in the past it has been roughly equivalent to the u s investment the other question you ask is what investments are needed to meet our energy and climate challenges now these community partners are making recommendations in the areas of observation computing research modelling societal relevance and leadership and management and in that document it includes a budget table with specific program and budget estimates that total nine dollars billion over the next five years well within the kind of seven dollars to nine dollars billion that the icap legislation is trying to raise for domestic climate adaptation activities each year  third and fourth question i was asked is what policies are needed to optimize these investments and what should be the private public and academic roles in this effort the community partners provide an entire section in our document on leadership  management recommendations and how these three sectors ought to work together leadership will be a key ingredient to optimize these investments and that is why the community partners are actually collecting nominations for leadership positions in the next administration this section also includes a set of policy and management approaches that build on proven management tools that were available in the s and that includes a climate leader  at a level equivalent to the president's national security and economic advisors an effective interagency coordination and oversight mechanism an annual integrated weather and climate program and budget review and evaluation mechanisms to kammen do you believe that we have adequate technologies to begin reducing global warming pollution now even as we increase our investment in r and d in the years ahead i do very strongly believe that we have an adequate base to begin we clearly have areas where we need research a number of individual technologies on the balance between investing in efficiency now and some of the low carbon technologies in the long run enthusiastic about it we can't give them enough we have a student led energy club that was established just three years ago and now it is over seven hundred members this is largely a graduate student organization and it was established by graduate students across all of the different schools at mit who recognize that in their desire to be energy professionals they are committed to working in the field that their educations that they were receiving in the department of mechanical engineering or in their mba program at the sloan school of management was insufficient to make them well educated energy professionals and so they have linked resources across the entire institute to educate one another about all of the things they will need to be powerful advocates and powerful facilitators of a bright energy  future the students interest is absolutely deafening and one of my fears is that if we don't fund the kind of research that will fuel innovation these very brilliant students will see that a bright future actually lies elsewhere even despite their passion for solving what i believe is the greatest challenge of our era the chairman thank you doctor hockfield let's talk a little bit about the r and d budget in terms of how it compares to  past r and d budgets and just kind of get your sense across the board of what needs to happen does it need to be increased from a doubling to a tenfold increase in order to deal with the magnitude of this challenge could each of you give us a sense of what you believe is the most appropriate mister forrest if i can jump in i would like to go back one step and talk about climate change and energy and then get and if i may then go to that other question but the issue of do we have enough tools for climate change and pursue energy at the same time i think is a vital one it is not an eitheror proposition we have to take them both on we do have the and the best analogy i can give was in the second world war we didn't have a choice to say will we go after germany or japan it was both and that is the same situation we have today in terms of the budget  i think the overwhelming opinion of this panel i can certainly speak for myself is that we are woefully underfunded so if we talk about a ten times increase yes but we also have to also build the capacity so you can't do it overnight we have a very large reservoir of student interest as president hockfield has mentioned and i think that we just have to really get on with it right away and start to fund some of these which is a comparison with the nih budget the nih budget is close to thirty dollars billion and that is a lot of money but we have gotten a huge bang for that buck just think about it i gave the example of heart disease and stroke look at aids in the beginning s this was a disease that had no cure it was a death sentence and we projected that every hospital bed in america was going to have an aids patient in it this was a very tough problem a new disease we didn't understand anything about it we have turned it through investments into a chronic manageable disease the costs to health care savings are one hundred and forty times the investment in research dollars and that doesn't even begin to account for the economic benefit of these people being in the workplace we can do the same thing around  energy and it will fuel you know federal investments can fuel an innovation economy that will be good for everyone now we talk about how much money you know i say three times right now let's do that immediately and whether it is ten times you know over a ten year period or gets to the nih budget level i think it has to these are problems that we can solve and we know how to solve them and it will have the added benefit of you know fueling the young people of america right now we kind of wring our hands over our young people's lack of interest in science and engineering and mathematics well when i was growing up it wasn't that i had an abstract interest in these things i had a real interest in these things because we are going to win the race to the moon and i think we could power up our young people today with the same kind of enthusiasm for solving these taking not only to energy but health and other issues because these are the real threats to ordinary american families much greater actually than the likelihood that a terrorist will come to their hometown these are the issues that are actually going to impact their families future my time has expired the chair recognizes the gentleman from washington state mister inslee mister inslee thank you i would like to ask about how to structure this imminent exponential increase in r and d that we will imminently obtain maybe in march next year i hope one of the concerns i have is structuring it so that r and d goes into stovepipes into favorite programs which is a thing i think we want to resist and i would just like your comments maybe i can start  doctor kammen about that would it be an issue right now frankly about whether to create a revenue stream that would fund just r and d just in coal sequestration which i have heartburn about because i don't think we should limit r and d to any one particular technology we should have a broad based recognition that some of these technologies will succeed and some of them will fail and we should not put our eggs in any one basket doctor kammen any comments mister kammen i very much appreciate th academia is actually about four to five years for a doctoral student to come to fruition and then in the industry side it is actually often another four or five years for them to become technologies in the market so this tripling is a good starting point in our papers we actually advocate a five to ten percent increase based on the climate challenge but this issue of stovepiping is a vital one and in fact we have had a series of interesting individual program areas in the department of energy at epa et cetera but we have not had the kind of cross technology comparisons that you are speaking towards and by far the most effective tool we have now is to examine technologies in batches there are things that are nearer term where a carbon cost effectiveness can be performed but there are also areas which are further off higher payoff high risk where we are going to need to have some areas where we look at with longer term missions the most important lesson we have seen from past efforts is that for both the near term and for the longer term ones stability and a plan is the most important future the private sector cannot ramp up in the broad set of areas we need if we don't see that stability so the long term budget increase part of the story and targeting individual ones early on especially those already have a large market share has not proven to be an effective use of money in the past and so targeting money in the coal area is a concern as it would be in targeting a number of others  urge the committee to look at this broad portfolio approach and to use that to evaluate not only individual technologies but those that have critical synergies we have seen efforts where wind and natural gas can work well together and so structuring incentives on the deployment side to draw those technologies into the market is critical as well so again pushing on the policy and it is research based at the same time is the best way to bring th we don't know what they are going to be and we have to invest money you know in a number of technologies one of the problems is this kind of research is done across a number of federal agencies so how can we bring them together to get appropriate synergies and reduce unnecessary redundancy  i think it is important to enter into a very rapid strategic planning energize that pulls in government industry and universities to set out a game plan and i hope that there will be some kind of federal secretaries but perhaps it could be co chaired by the president's science advisor and the secretary of energy but some way of integrating approaches not just within a single agency but across agencies mister inslee i think that is an important way to think about it one quick question to get to this plateau where we need to  how do we build a real movement to get this job done as happened in the health care industry that really developed a uniform you know strategy to get this job done mister fellows well you know it is happening at various scales the rest of my day i am spending up here on the hill with the american geophysical union on a congressional visit today to talk about these various issues but the document i mentioned in my testimony was written by these eight organizations that represents thousands of experts in both the public private and academic sectors of the weather and climate community so it is starting to happen and we are writing these documents and providing them to leaders like yourselves to try to build these coalitions in our community we have about twenty years of multiple agencies working together and there is some good history here on how these kind of integrated programs can be done but leadership is key and getting the right leaders and the right kind of political focus on here is step one mister inslee thank you the chairman the gentleman's time has expired unlike  pursue a portfolio of technologies the current technologies that we are using are not going to you know go out of phase tomorrow and we have to work very hard to increase their efficiency and their economy while we can develop the technologies of the future we have work going on at mit across  range of technologies we believe that nuclear is going to be an important piece of the energy equation in the future we are very very excited about the opportunities around solar wind geothermal a technology that was about to be put to bed except for the mit geothermal report came out about a year and a half ago and happily rescued that at the last moment there are a number of technologies and frankly i believe there are technologies we don't know about today because we haven't unleashed that engine of innovation that comes out of  basic research so i don't think we can make that step yet there are enormously exciting things right on the horizon there are exciting things in hand that just need further development but it would be desperately premature to pick any one or a small set of them for development we are going to need everything we can get our hands on the current technologies have to be improved and then we have to innovate around the technologies of the future mister forrest if i could jump in on that if you look at what is price competitive today with fossil fuel in the renewable sphere the most competitive is wind but the source of energy which is unlimited out there is solar and the thing that holding us back from solar right now is cost it is the cost per watt that you pay which is depends on how you do it it is between double and triple that of fossil fuel today but it is marching down at an extraordinary rate so if you look at solar you look at biomass you look at energy storage which will transform the automotive industry you have several really strong incumbents that we can move forward with it is really just a matter of  expertise there is no question storage that is important there are some interesting efforts going on in this area but the basic backbone of this whole system is going to be our transmission distribution system and many universities have allowed this area to lapse so there are in fact no power range of things one is we need better regulation with what the federal energy regulatory commission does we also need ties into what the national academy of engineering does because the advances in power electronics come in from work in a variety of areas from everything from what is going on  cell phones to power management issues need to be applied to make the new grid that we are going to build in some form anyway as flexible and as smart as possible so it really becomes the clean energy superhighway and not yet just another build out of what we have as right now we have quite an antiquated system that one requires an integration with people who think of themselves as energy researchers and those people who think of themselves as electrical engineering and controls folks thankfully this country has a large resource vote to permit and to fund a five dollars billion superhighway for wind power essentially from west texas and eastern new mexico into the population centers and that sends a strong signal we need to get the basic research so that the new version of the grid is up to the task mister cleaver so it would help probably if we had an environmental protection agency mister kammen it would definitely help if we were protecting the environment and coordinating those efforts in what we do in terms of land in terms of environmental protection agency and i think such legislation should come forth in this congress doctor fellows mister fellows well i wanted to add a perspective from the climate community on priorities our current climate models reproduce a history of the climate quite well and we can tell you whether a continent is warmer or wetter but i recently had the executive director of the colorado public health and environment department come and visit and he asked me for the precipitation and temperature trends long term in the denver area and our models are operating on a grid cell size of one hundred kilometers at that level you can't even see the rocky mountains so i can't provide him those kind of long term precipitation and temperature trends in such a small area one of our highest priority areas is to drive down that modeling to a level that local and regional decision makers can actually get the information they need to have to make plans about water food get an idea you are asking for a fairly large amount of money how you see that money being allocated one of the reasons i ask is because a concern i have is young students that want to go to graduate school have to spend five six years after getting a degree and they are living at fairly low wages during this period and even when they graduate with a ph d they are still facing years of substandard wages compared to someone who just went for a bachelor's degree into finance for example one of the experiences i had lately was a math professor said there are plenty of math students now there are more than you can imagine and that was the good news but then he said they are all going to sound like a broken record research dollars research dollars research dollars but one of the geniuses of the vannevar bush appeal to president roosevelt and it was then articulated in science the endless frontier which set out t blueprint for the american research enterprise was that we created these magnificent research universities that at their best really do integrate research and education together and frankly most of my facult not all of them but most of them could have jobs in industry and be making twice three times in some cases ten times what they are making but they are so motivated by this marvelous draw of invention innovation and being around young people we really do put research and education together so by investing in research we are talking about investing in graduate students we are talking about investing in postdocs the reason that the students in mathematics and in electrical engineering and computer science are going to wall street when they come out of mit is because that is where the jobs are when they look at their faculty who empower electronics is a great i am so happy you brought that up a great we have a couple faculty who are working in it but miserably funded so a smart young frontier blueprint was a real partnership between the research university and government and the government has abdicated that through these reductions in research funding and one of the places where it hurt the most is in funding for mathematics graduate education programs in the s during the last time we had this ramp up of energy funding my program the energy and resources group program at mit carnegie mellon penn or a number of the beneficiaries of that a number of these died out or withered away because of this t desert of funding we now see students back in droves when i came to berkeley from princeton in one thousand nine hundred and ninety eight there were forty five students in the graduate level energy class we capped the class this semester of three hundred and twenty and let you know i have a huge problem finding qualified teaching assistants because we have so swamped the potential spaces so there is good news in the pipeline as referred to at mit as well at michigan and texas it is all going on but we really do need to build out this business side this opportunity for them to go into as a number of people have mentioned and congressman inslee mentioned the need for a compact and the bones that could be offered out in the political dialogue in d c and there is no question that one of the advantages this field is showing right now is dramatically higher job creation numbers than the same amount of investment in fossil fuels now this is a transitory effect it will not go on forever but at the moment we are trying to dramatically increase the budget the fact that we see three to five times more jobs per dollar invested in the clean tech energy area and i am including energy efficiency that we have not mentioned explicitly here but it is vital to the equation this job dividend green collar jobs inner city jobs as well as the high end jobs is a critical benefit that we can capture and right now many of those jobs are going to germany norway portugal so we are losing out in fact up during the space race my father was head of the design team that built a camera that took the first live pictures from the moon when neil armstrong walked on the moon and my brothers and i got used to having a blackboard over the breakfast table and solving equations that he would scribble out for us while we were downing our cereal we benefited from a generation that pulled us out of the depression the greatest generation the end of the american century that the second half of which i lived through  the generation that won world war ii it took great determination and vision and hard work and investment for that generation to win a war and for us to put a man on the moon but that wasn't all their effort was backed up by the resources that put into place an incredible investment at the time in pure research i just came back a couple weeks ago from denver and one of the most exciting things that maybe the most exciting thing for me was not the political goings on although those were for somebody who had never attended a convention before very exciting but i got to go to nrel the renewable energy laboratories to encar the atmospheric research center and  far to my knowledge and biofuels that are being created from nonfuel sources like wood chips and cornstalks and husks not the corn kernels that are the food everybody is worried about and then the next day after seeing the good news i got to go to ncar and noaa and see what would happen to the planet if we don't do anything and to anybody who hasn't been there and seen this i highly recommend it because i have already read the statistics and i a believer and i have been working on renewable energy issues for thirty years and it was like being hit over the head with a x to see the graphic demonstration of what happens when the growing latitudes for food move into the alluvial plain of canada where there is no soil and i said to the director of noaa i guess we will go from being a net exporter of food to being a net importer of food and his answer was yes but from where and he pushed the remote control to revolve that big globe they had up there and showed that all continents are the same color red all the continents will be if we do nothing will be pushing the growing latitudes toward the poles at the same time that we are projected to have twelve billion people on the face of this earth so we are looking at a situation that cannot be dismissed but the good news is that at the same time we do have the technologies and we need to make the right choices mister inslee covered some of the ground that i was going to ask about in terms of making choices and st epiping and i am particularly interested that we not favor some industries as we do i mean there are costs that are not included in the kilowatt hour price that are charged for electricity generated from nuclear and from fossil fuels whether they be the cost of wars in unstable areas of the world that have oil or the fact that the taxpayer has subsidized the insuring of all nuclear plants since the price anderson act and so i would prefer to see either a level playing field or some kind of equal subsidies for renewables but that is just my opinion i am also concerned that i have been buying wind power in my home at dover plains new york for several  years the company that the wind firm that i am buying it from was just bought by a spanish conglomerate iberdrola a good company but not an american company so now my dollars are going for the profit of a foreign owned corporation and when i was in colorado saw one of the largest new photovoltaic installations there built and installed by american workers but the solar cells were made in china so if we go from buying fuel from overseas to buying solar cells from overseas we really out of the frying pan and into the fire economically and we are also not putting our brainpower to work in the way that we should that is enough rambling from me but i just wanted to ask in terms of funding climate observation to the degree that we have a shortage of funds here we will be looking at trying to make a choice between preventing climate change or focusing on mitigation  well in terms of observations whether you are doing mitigation or adaptation you need observations for mitigation you will be monitoring the carbon levels to see if you are achieving them for adaptation it is more about what a processes that we need to understand to adapt to so it was last year in two thousand and seven the national research council actually produced a study that laid out all the missions that observational missions you need to take all the vital signs of the united states there are seventeen of them and even in the document that i provided in my testimony out of the nine dollars billion those that fall in the next five years are funded so we have a very good road map of what kind of is that we are talking an awful lot about energy generation but there is a tremendous amount we can do with conservation as well and that also and we can do that immediately interior lighting takes up twenty percent of electricity that is in the grid today  and we are still using an incandescent bulb which is basically a heater that gives off light as a byproduct there are other sources in the automotive domain we can do hugely better so these are very quick responses that we can actually implement within a matter of a few years and that will really i think change also the growth of carbon in the atmosphere at a real rate we should never take our eye off the ball of conservation there are a lot of solutions  can i just add a little bit of reflection about energy research we are talking about funding energy research and ramping it up very rapidly i would just add caution that it should not be too clever there are a lot of technologies that are almost  and we very much want to move those along and get them implemented but i believe that one of our government's major responsibilities and one of the important reasons why we have done so well in so many new industries is that we have invested in basic research the kind of research where when you embark on it you don't know what is going to come out of it there will be new technologies coming along in the future only if we invest in basic research today so let us i am very enthusiastic about funding research that will deliver technologies for tomorrow and five years and ten years from now we have got to be thinking about what we need to put in place that we are funding the technologies fifty years from now and that has been the brilliance of frankly darpa the nih in funding early research that nobody could have predicted exactly where it was going to come out but has been so so important for the nation's success mister kammen a critical part of the story that we have to come back to again and again is that even if we get to this ten times increase in the federal money which is certainly the goal that  papers in my lab have cited it is going to be the private sector investment far many times that that we are going to need to do that we need to send a number of signals that this area is both stable as we have described but also we have opportunities now to help balance this field out a number of states have adopted so called loading orders benefiting clean energy energy efficiency and the low carbon sources before they would authorize new fossil fuel production that sends a strong signal a number of other utility areas have engaged in a process of decoupling the revenues from more electricity sales with their overall profit based on a mechanism that allows a forecast of sales and the amount you get paid per kilowatt hour to vary to that target that encourages conservation it encourages low carbon forms of energy so we have a number of mechanisms that aren't going to be seen as strictly research spending that can dramatically expand the industry's interest ability and rewards for going to the clean area that is really why at the legislation level we critically need to tie these at all points back and forth one last point on this is that we have effectively frittered away the last twenty years or so of knowledge of the climate change story the details are still coming in but the basic story has been known for some time and many of these technologies have been ready together we need to pull on the market as well as pushing on the research side and many of those market pulls do not require dramatic amounts of added money some do like a better grid but coupling clever policy tools and this much expanded r and d base really does send the signal that industry needs to make this a new national priority serious crossroads we have a lot of uncertainties that we are facing mister hall i have sat with sandy mcdonald before and looked at that large globe in noaa one of the big concerns we have carbon into the atmosphere there are thousands of gigatons of carbon frozen in the arctic as the arctic heats up and it will heat up quite a bit more than the rest of the world how quickly would that be released if it is release quickly it could be the end of civilization that is a kind of uncertainty that we don't fully understand i am not saying it will happen but we don't understand it so the kind of research investments that we are talking about in this community small down payment a very small brain trust to manage that huge industry it is exactly in keeping with the amount of effort we would need in this area and the fact that we do have such an important diversity of energy research topics and researchers ready to go should give every member of congress and the senate the motivation to stick with the plan to develop these carbon and energy plans and to bring them forth and to recognize that poll after poll of americans says that clean energy and secure low carbon power is something that people want they need the political leadership and they need the vision that this is going to be a plan we lack that plan we lack that go to the moon sort of mentality right now that is the vital lesson that will bring wealth and we can set our priorities almost at will if we choose to and i can't think of a higher priority everything is at stake here our national security we are currently buying our energy our least best friends in the world primarily it is a question of a clean environment what are we leaving for our children what are we leaving for generations to come and finally it is an issue of economic leadership  our standard of living really it is the issue of the st century if america does not seize this as a top priority as perhaps the top priority we will lose our position inevitably in the world and it is going to happen very quickly so i don't think that we have time to lose i think that responding just a wee bit to mister inslee's question of where do we get the political heft to throw this forward i think there is a rising chorus of voices it may not hit today in full or even tomorrow but it has got to hit within the next year or two because if we don't set this as the priority i can give you one example germany has set this as a national priority to get off of the foreign oil addiction and so on and they have invested through their tax structures and so on in large security energy insecurity and global climate change what we have been advocating for is a massive powerful important investment in research universities these kinds of investments have a double return we produce innovations and  innovators and what we are asking is please help us unleash the power of america's innovation economy to turn this global energy challenge into a wonderful energy opportunity thank you so much for holding this hearing the chairman well thank you it our honor to have such a distinguished panel and this is going to be a very important panel in terms of the information you have given us as we formulate the plan for january and february of two thousand and nine we  clearly at a point where the debate for president is revolving around this issue and as i said in my opening drill baby drill is not a long term strategy for the united states with three percent of the oil reserves we need to unleash this technological genius that is our strength and that is always what has led to the united states being the dominant power in the world and if we don't tap it then we will become ever more dependent upon those who not only are weak in technology but are strong in our weakness and that is something that ultimately i think can only be remedied by unleashing all the young people at universities you are finding want to solve this problem so we thank each of you for being here today the