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CLIMATE CHANGE TECHNOLOGY RESEARCH: DO

WE NEED A ‘‘MANHATTAN PROJECT’’ FOR THE

ENVIRONMENT?

HEARING

BEFORE THE

COMMITTEE ON

GOVERNMENT REFORM

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

ONE HUNDRED NINTH CONGRESS

SECOND SESSION

SEPTEMBER 21, 2006

Serial No. 109–197

Printed for the use of the Committee on Government Reform

(

Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.gpoaccess.gov/congress/index.html

http://www.house.gov/reform

(II)

COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT REFORM

TOM DAVIS, Virginia, Chairman

CHRISTOPHER SHAYS, Connecticut

DAN BURTON, Indiana

ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN, Florida

JOHN M. MCHUGH, New York

JOHN L. MICA, Florida

GIL GUTKNECHT, Minnesota

MARK E. SOUDER, Indiana

STEVEN C. LATOURETTE, Ohio

TODD RUSSELL PLATTS, Pennsylvania

CHRIS CANNON, Utah

JOHN J. DUNCAN, JR., Tennessee

CANDICE S. MILLER, Michigan

MICHAEL R. TURNER, Ohio

DARRELL E. ISSA, California

JON C. PORTER, Nevada

KENNY MARCHANT, Texas

LYNN A. WESTMORELAND, Georgia

PATRICK T. MCHENRY, North Carolina

CHARLES W. DENT, Pennsylvania

VIRGINIA FOXX, North Carolina

JEAN SCHMIDT, Ohio

BRIAN P. BILBRAY, California

HENRY A. WAXMAN, California

TOM LANTOS, California

MAJOR R. OWENS, New York

EDOLPHUS TOWNS, New York

PAUL E. KANJORSKI, Pennsylvania

CAROLYN B. MALONEY, New York

ELIJAH E. CUMMINGS, Maryland

DENNIS J. KUCINICH, Ohio

DANNY K. DAVIS, Illinois

WM. LACY CLAY, Missouri

DIANE E. WATSON, California

STEPHEN F. LYNCH, Massachusetts

CHRIS VAN HOLLEN, Maryland

LINDA T. SANCHEZ, California

C.A. DUTCH RUPPERSBERGER, Maryland

BRIAN HIGGINS, New York

ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, District of

Columbia

———

BERNARD SANDERS, Vermont

(Independent)

DAVID MARIN, Staff Director

LAWRENCE HALLORAN, Deputy Staff Director

BENJAMIN CHANCE, Clerk

MICHAEL GALINDO, Clerk

PHIL BARNETT, Minority Chief of Staff/Chief Counsel

(III)

C O N T E N T S

Page

Hearing held on September 21, 2006 ..................................................................... 1

Statement of:

Eule, Stephen D., Director, Climate Change Technology Program; and

John B. Stephenson, Director, Government Accountability Office ........... 27

Eule, Stephen D. ....................................................................................... 27

Stephenson, John B. .................................................................................. 42

Lane, Lee, executive director, Climate Policy Center; Richard Van Atta,

senior research analyst, Institute for Defense Analyses; Martin Hoffert,

emeritus professor, New York University; Robert Socolow, former director, Center for Energy and Environmental Studies, Princeton University; and Daniel Kammen, director, Renewable and Appropriate Energy

Laboratory, University of California at Berkeley ....................................... 77

Hoffert, Martin .......................................................................................... 124

Kammen, Daniel ........................................................................................ 156

Lane, Lee .................................................................................................... 77

Socolow, Robert .......................................................................................... 149

Van Atta, Richard ..................................................................................... 99

Letters, statements, etc., submitted for the record by:

Cummings, Hon. Elijah E., a Representative in Congress from the State

of Maryland, prepared statement of ............................................................ 206

Davis, Chairman Tom, a Representative in Congress from the State of

Virginia, prepared statement of ................................................................... 4

Eule, Stephen D., Director, Climate Change Technology Program, prepared statement of ........................................................................................ 29

Hoffert, Martin, emeritus professor, New York University, prepared statement of ........................................................................................................... 128

Kammen, Daniel, director, Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory, University of California at Berkeley, prepared statement of ........... 159

Lane, Lee, executive director, Climate Policy Center, prepared statement

of ..................................................................................................................... 79

Maloney, Hon. Carolyn B., a Representative in Congress from the State

of New York, prepared statement of ........................................................... 22

Socolow, Robert, former director, Center for Energy and Environmental

Studies, Princeton University, prepared statement of ............................... 151

Stephenson, John B., Director, Government Accountability Office, prepared statement of ........................................................................................ 44

Van Atta, Richard, senior research analyst, Institute for Defense Analyses, prepared statement of ........................................................................... 102

Waxman, Hon. Henry A., a Representative in Congress from the State

of California, prepared statement of ........................................................... 12

(1)

CLIMATE CHANGE TECHNOLOGY RESEARCH:

DO WE NEED A ‘‘MANHATTAN PROJECT’’

FOR THE ENVIRONMENT?

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 2006

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES,

COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT REFORM,

Washington, DC.

The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:25 a.m., in room

2157, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Tom Davis (chairman

of the subcommittee) presiding.

Present: Representatives Tom Davis, Shays, LaTourette, Waxman, Lantos, Maloney, Kucinich, Clay, Watson, Van Hollen, Higgins, Norton, Cummings, Platts, and Bilbray.

Staff present: David Marin, staff director; Larry Halloran, deputy

staff director; Jennifer Safavian, chief counsel for oversight and investigations; Mindi Walker, professional staff member; A. Brooke

Bennett, counsel; Michael Galindo and Benjamin Chance, clerks;

Greg Dotson and Alexandra Teitz, minority counsels; Earley Green,

minority chief clerk; and Jean Gosa, minority assistant clerk.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Good morning, and welcome to today’s

hearing on climate change technology. As we sit here today, the debate over climate change science continues, but this committee, as

well as the administration and many others in Government, already have recognized the important facts: that global mean temperature has increased over the past century, and that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has contributed in some way to this warning.

With that in mind, our committee seeks to move away from debating science to finding solutions. The purpose of today’s hearing

is to learn about the Federal Government’s climate change research

and development programs, specifically those dedicated to exploratory or innovative technology. We are also going to discuss the

best ways to steer these initiatives.

Right now, the administration spends nearly $3 billion on climate change technology research. Ostensibly, this research falls

under the umbrella of the President’s climate change technology

program. The characterization of the CCTP, however, is misleading, because the CCTP has no budgetary authority. The billions of

dollars that fund CCTP actually are dispersed directly to Federal

agencies without CCTP approval. In fact, to date the CCTP has

only received $1.5 million in program support to supplement the

creation of its strategic plan, which outlines the current research

and future priorities of the program.

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Without direct funding, CCTP does not employ full-time staff,

and both Director Stephen Eule and Deputy Director Robert

Marlay hold other positions within the Department of Energy. Currently, CCTP employs neither administrative nor analytical staff;

it shares personnel with other offices on an as-needed basis.

Additionally, thus far the Federal Government has yet to engage

in any exploratory or innovative technology research on climate

change. Under the current funding structure, only near and midterm technology research programs receive R&D dollars. Climate

clinicians that lie outside of existing technology, such as geo-engineering and artificial photosynthesis, remain unaddressed.

Although CCTP is capable of commenting on technology-focused

projects conducted across 13 Federal agencies under the program,

in its current state CCTP simply does not have the authority to allocate funds for climate technology projects, begging the questions:

one, how well are we coordinating climate change technology research? And, two, because of the present configuration of Federal

climate change technology research, is it necessary to create a central, authorized body to command exploratory research, an ARPA

for climate change?

The Defense Advanced Projects Agency, DARPA, was created to

turn innovative technology into military capabilities. The agency is

highly regarded for its work on the Internet, high-speed microelectronics, stealth and satellite technologies, unmanned vehicles, and

new materials, all of which produced not only military advancement but commercial benefits, as well.

Unlike the CCTP, DARPA can segregate itself somewhat from its

governing body, the Pentagon, and remain a small and flexible

agency capable of quickly exploiting emerging technologies and

adapting to immediate military circumstances. Conversely, CCTP

remains under the strict direction of the Cabinet-level Committee

on Climate Change Science and Technology Integration [CCSTI],

reducing the likelihood it will support novel concepts in climate

technology research. Given its strict structure and limited authority, would the CCTP be the appropriate body to potentially manage

a free-thinking and innovative exploratory technology agency?

To date, the under-funded and administratively barren climate

change technology program has yet to sufficiently coordinate and

influence the technology research initiatives conducted by the multiple Federal agencies under its charge, let alone manage potential

new exploratory technology research programs such as the Climate

Change Advanced Research Projects Agency [CCARPA].

It is time to say CCARPA Diem and seize the opportunity to take

technology research to the next level by bringing CCTP to the forefront of the U.S. climate change agenda. Or will the full initiative

of CCTP prove sufficient to guide climate change technology research into the future? These are the questions that we hope to

begin resolving today.

The committee has invited several highly qualified individuals to

address these uncertainties. We will hear from Dr. Stephen Eule,

the Director of CCTP, on the status of climate change technology

in the United States and on his role in overseeing climate change

technology and potential budgetary or organizational obstacles to

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the full implementation of a centralized climate technology program.

We will also hear from the GAO on the ambiguity of the appropriations to agencies with regard to climate change and the need

for more clear disclosure of the nature of climate change research

and development funding.

Also, we will explore the merits and challenges of creating a Federal climate change exploratory technology program and will hear

from experts on DARPA about the applicability of instituting a

CCARPA for exploratory technology research and development.

Global climate change is one of the most serious environmental

concerns of the 21st century. This committee has taken an important step by discussing how the Federal Government can better

arm itself with technology to address this worldwide problem.

I would like to thank all of our witnesses for their invaluable insights in this issue.

[The prepared statement of Chairman Tom Davis follows:]

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Chairman TOM DAVIS. I would now like to recognize our distinguished ranking member, Mr. Waxman, for his opening statement.

Mr. WAXMAN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Today’s hearing will begin to examine what policies Congress

should consider for addressing the major threat of global warming.

We will hear from some of the Nation’s leading experts on global

warming and technology. They will present their views of how we

move forward to take carbon out of the world’s economy.

I believe almost all of us agree that global warming is occurring

and action must be taken to avoid potentially catastrophic impacts

to our country and the world. Our position reflects the scientific

consensus which only a small cadre of oil-industry-funded propagandists are still denying. But, despite this committee’s interest, it

would be a serious mistake for anyone watching this hearing to

conclude that either the administration or the Republican leadership in Congress is willing to tackle the problem. That is why I

would like to take a moment to review the past 6 years.

President Bush and Vice President Cheney came into office determined to radically change the Nation’s energy policy, and that

is what they did. They crafted their policy with oil companies like

Exxon and Mobil and refused to meet with consumer or environmental groups. Their plan bestowed countless favors on oil, coal,

and other polluting industries and it abandoned the President’s

pledge to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, under the plan

they developed, we have wasted precious years and exacerbated

global warming.

During the last 6 years there have been many constructive ideas

put forward. For example, in July 2002 the Pugh Center on Global

Climate Change released a report on designing a climate friendly

energy policy. In July 2003, the Energy Future Coalition released

an energy plan to fight global warming and address the political

and economic security threat posed by our dependence on oil. In

January 2004, the Apollo Alliance, a coalition of labor unions, environmental groups, and other public interest groups proposed an energy policy to modernize America’s energy infrastructure and fight

global warming. In April 2005, the Natural Resources Defense

Council released a paper proposing an energy policy that would enhance our national security and reduce air and water pollution

while curbing global warming and creating jobs. But these ideas to

move us forward fell on deaf ears. The Republican Congress was

simply uninterested in learning about the problem, let alone addressing it.

In December 2004, the bipartisan National Commission on Energy Policy released a plan to address the Nation’s long-term energy challenges, including oil dependence and global warming. The

commission was composed of Republicans and Democrats, industry

and environmentalists, and they had figured out a way to come together, yet the chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee

would not even hold a hearing on the plan.

Recently the administration has begun to change its rhetoric on

global warming. Unfortunately, it is only the rhetoric that is changing. They are sticking with their policy of denying the urgency of

the problem and delaying any real action.

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That has to change. We have already lost 6 years. Mr. Chairman,

that is why our committee holding these hearings stands out in

stark contrast to what the rest of the Congress has been doing.

Today we are going to hear about the administration’s 100-year

strategic plan. The name is impressive, but inside the covers the

plan has no time line for actions, no goals for what we need to

achieve. Thinking about technology research and development is

very important, but by itself it will do nothing to solve the problem.

Thank you.

[The prepared statement of Hon. Henry A. Waxman follows:]

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Chairman TOM DAVIS. Thank you, Mr. Waxman.

Do other Members wish to speak? Mr. Shays.

Mr. SHAYS. Thank you. Mr. Chairman, thank you for holding this

hearing.

We are failing to deal with this problem not because of Republicans; we are failing to deal with this problem because there is not

a bipartisan effort to move forward on this issue, and it goes back

a long ways. It goes back to when President Clinton was President

and he negotiated Kyoto and there was a bipartisan resolution in

the Senate that passed 100 percent. It said don’t leave India and

China out of Kyoto. They left India and China out of Kyoto. The

treaty was negotiated. It was brought before us and President Clinton never ever submitted it to Congress because he only had five

or six supporters in the entire Senate.

It is fascinating to me. I wish this President had submitted it so

all the Senators who criticize him now would have been faced with

voting for it, because at the time they weren’t going to support it.

There is a bipartisan effort to kill what is so logically something

we should do: making better use of the energy we have. Minivans,

SUVs, and trucks should get the same mileage as cars, but the

dean of the House, Mr. Dingell, in a bipartisan effort with other

Members who represent the automobile manufacturers, not the oil

industry, labor unions who oppose getting minivans, SUVs, and

trucks to get the same mileage as cars opposed it. That is our problem.

We can make it a partisan issue and it is great for an election,

but it is not the truth. The truth is we need to work together, Republicans and Democrats, to solve what is a huge problem.

I introduced a bill with Maurice Hinchey supported by the

League of Conservation Voters—not a very partisan group, I would

say. The purpose is to get minivans, SUVs, and trucks to get the

same mileage as cars, to take out of the energy bill that I voted

against, to take out the dollars and tax write-offs that were going

to the fossil fuel industry and put it into alternative fuels.

That bill remains to be supported by Members on both sides of

the aisle. It is bipartisan. It would move the agenda forward. But

because we have decided that this is a tough election year and we

are going to target certain Members, we are going to tell Members

on the other side of the aisle they are going to be told by their leadership not to cosponsor legislation supported by any Member who

is targeted.

So when we get all of this political garbage that you are going

to hear from Members about how this is a partisan issue, when we

can get beyond that and we can get the election done with, I hope

Nancy Pelosi will, as my own leadership, say that we need to work

together instead of the Democrats going further to the left and Republicans going further to the right.

Hopefully we will start to hear Members on both sides of the

aisle start to be bipartisan again, talk bipartisan, and stop trying

to make such a serious issue a partisan issue when it isn’t.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Thank you very much.

Mr. Lantos.

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Mr. LANTOS. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I want to

thank you and Ranking Member Waxman for your leadership on

this issue.

My approach to this whole subject stems from my possession as

the ranking Democrat on the House International Relations Committee and the ramifications of our energy policy or lack of energy

policy on our international position. I will have a word or two to

say about that later.

I have been disappointed and dismayed by this administration’s

position on climate change. Despite overwhelming scientific evidence that global warming is taking place, the administration has

basically removed itself from the international conversation and

worked to stifle Government scientists. This is willful ignorance

about the severe challenges and strengths that will be placed on future generations by the results of climate change.

Coupled with an alarming lack of foresight for the national security implications these effects will have on our world, the administration’s policies have significantly weakened our efforts toward the

solution of this problem.

The science on the issue is incontrovertible and the need to respond is immediate. The actions taken by the President and this

Congress thus far have been woefully inadequate. It is my hope

that this hearing just might be the straw that breaks the camel’s

back against the misinformation campaign engineered by some key

energy companies which have sown seeds of doubt and have slowed

a legitimate debate to occur.

Our Nation’s reliance on foreign oil, which is my principal concern, means that we are providing the enemies of freedom with the

resources to oppose the United States or even to wage war against

us. If you heard last night Chavez at the United Nations in New

York you know exactly what I am talking about. But whether it is

Chavez, Ahmadinejad of Tehran, Putin in Moscow, or the Wahabis

in Saudi Arabia, the amplified voice of these forces of anti-democracy and anti-freedom must be enormously enlarged by virtue of

their incredible oil income which they have gained largely as a result of our policies.

The United States is a leader in scientific research and technological discovery and we have witnessed the extraordinary results

of what happens when our Nation harnesses this intellectual resource with the Manhattan Project, which made us the first project

to harness the energy of the atom, or the Apollo Project that put

an American on the moon.

The most abundant source of new energy, Mr. Chairman, is conservation. Although we must provide the impetus for research and

development into new technologies, the most immediate and effective means of reducing our reliance on current fuel sources is to be

intelligent about cutting back on their use. That is not a matter of

creating new technologies but making people more conscious of existing ways to reduce energy waste.

The time has come for America to rise up and face the challenge

of relieving itself from its dependency on carbon-based energy and

the pollutants that come with it. We need to reach beyond our current energy policy and achieve this goal through a nationwide efVerDate 11-MAY-2000 12:49 Nov 30, 2006 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00021 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 D:\DOCS\30692.TXT HGOVREF1 PsN: HGOVREF1
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fort combining both conservation efforts and increases in research

and development of alternate energy sources.

Mr. Chairman, while this hearing is ostensibly about American

Government policy and the need for a nationwide project to make

America a carbon neutral nation, let me speak for a moment on the

international relations aspect of this project and the imperative

need for us to reach out to the global community on this issue.

We must re-engage the international community in order to seek

successful solutions and best practices. The interconnection of

international energy policy and the effects on climate change will

only continue to increase in the years ahead.

I hope that our President and our Congress can have the vision

of a Roosevelt or a Kennedy to see over the horizon. We need to

lead the American people to work together to unshackle us from

our dependency on foreign energy and to preserve the environment

for the sake of those who will inherit this world from us.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Thank you very much.

Are there other Members who wish to make opening statements?

Yes, ma’am, Ms. Watson.

Ms. WATSON. Mr. Chairman, thank you so much for convening

today’s hearing. I commend your timeliness on the issue pertaining

to energy policy.

This hearing explicitly highlights the administration’s research

and development activities, or lack thereof, on technologies to address global warming and the administration’s strategy on addressing global warming. I am haunted by the fact that the year before

last, when we attended a conference in Cutter, there was someone

from the Department of Commerce that made the idea of global

warming into a myth. It was a Dr. Lash. Just recently we got into

quite a warm discussion after his remarks, because it said to the

world that we were hallucinating if we thought global warming

was a real thing. Just recently he ended up in the newspapers as

one who killed his 12 year old son and himself. I saw indications

of a hot-headed approach there in Cutter.

Energy is essential to the American lifestyle. The United States

has only 2 percent of the world’s oil reserves, but accounts for 25

percent of the world’s energy demand. Of the global supply, we consume 43 percent of motor gasoline, 25 percent of crude petroleum,

25 percent of natural gas, and 26 percent of electricity. Currently,

American demand for all these commodities is rising dramatically,

while climate change is on the rise, as well.

On the production side of the issue, the generation and delivery

of energy is a serious challenge. Procurement of energy is a challenge of engineering, a challenge of planning, and a challenge that

evokes the most serious aspects of our foreign policy. Moreover, energy is a key factor in the environmental challenges we face in

modern America and in the world. Reliance on fossil fuels causes

serious air and water pollution and it is the source of constant

pressure to exploit our last precious wildlands.

As the petroleum demand intensifies, Americans will remain exposed to the environmental cost and the harmful public health impacts associated with the dependence on oil. Global warming is occurring at a rapid pace today, and the consensus of the worldwide

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scientific community is that it will accelerate during the 21st century.

Global warming and our related energy policies also raise national security concerns. One such concern is the prospect of international destabilization caused by the consequences of global

warming such as the loss of land area of the loss of water resources.

Mr. Chairman, I have stated in previous hearings, we have a

chance to start again to create adequate climate change research

and development that can help our world in the future, so I look

forward to today’s hearing and I look forward to hearing from the

witnesses and I think that you are beginning and we are beginning

to play a vital role on environmental safety in our world.

Thank you so much.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Thank you very much.

Mr. Bilbray.

Mr. BILBRAY. Yes, Mr. Chairman. I want to thank you for holding this hearing and want to publicly thank you for letting me participate on this committee for the rest of this session.

Mr. Chairman, you may know but other Members may not know

that I had the privilege of serving for 6 years on the State Air Resources Board for the State of California. I was very proud to participate in that agency because California has the distinction of

having an agency that has done more to reduce emissions than any

agency anywhere else in the world. The Air Resources Board in

California is second to none. It has led on many, many issues, as

the ranking member will remind us, many times, both in his presentations and his writings.

But one of the reasons why that agency has been so successful

in the past and I am sure will be successful in the future, the Air

Resources Board in California does not allow partisan bickering to

stand between getting to the answer. They don’t allow the fact of

posturing to be the primary motivation there. I have been very,

very pleased to work with Democrats and Republicans in that body.

But I have to tell you, since coming to Congress and leaving that

body, I have been frustrated with the fact that science gets put on

a back burner in Washington all too often for partisan fighting, but

at the same time people don’t want to look at the fact that the guilt

rests on both sides of the political aisle.

I was very frustrated with my first term in Congress here when

I saw that the Clinton administration talked a lot about global

warming, a lot about this issue on emissions. At the same time, the

only policy I saw really being pushed at that time was the decommissioning of zero emission generators such as hydroelectric and

nuclear. I saw an obsession with the destruction of zero emission

generators without any identifying where the alternative power

was going to come from without contributing to the global warming

and the emissions issue.

So I am very excited to be able to say that there are opportunities here. I hope that we join together. I have been frustrated with

the discussion that global warming and Kyoto are somehow tied together. I do not see how any of us can take care of the global

warming without working together, but I also do not see how we

are going to justify any global warming policy that exempts the

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Third World, and especially China. I see that Kyoto was a nonstarter, and we should have been brave enough to be able to recognize that there is a problem out there but the answer that was

being proposed was not an answer to the problem.

I hope to be able to take some of the experience I have been able

to bring from California and hopefully work with both sides of the

aisle to try to address this issue, but I think that we need to stop

finding barriers to getting to answers and quit finding excuses just

to fight about it.

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I yield back my time.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Mrs. Maloney.

Mrs. MALONEY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would like permission to place my remarks in the record——

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Without objection, so ordered.

Mrs. MALONEY [continuing]. And just ask to be associated with

the comments of Mr. Waxman and Mr. Lantos and Ms. Watson. I

think Ranking Member Lantos’ statement of the danger this poses

in the world community and in our search for peace was very relevant.

Ms. Watson, you talked about how many skeptics are out there

that have kept saying that it is not a problem. I appreciate the

comment on the other side of the aisle that science too long has

been put on the back burner. Scientists have been telling us for a

long time that this is one of the gravest challenges that we confront, and there have been many skeptics, such as the one she described from the Commerce Department, that have made light of

this very serious challenge.

I would like to place in the record this photograph of the Arctic

climate impact assessment of 2004. It shows the extent of the surface ice melting in Greenland between 1992 and 2002. They say

one picture is worth a thousand words. It truly shows that we are

losing the snow in Greenland, and other photographs of the Antarctic, even Florida, shows a very changing coastline with the

multi-meter rises in sea level. This is a very serious problem.

I congratulate former Vice President Al Gore on his book An Inconvenient Truth and the movie The Inconvenient Truth. It was inspiring for me to see a documentary literally have people standing

in lines waiting to get in to see it. I think he helped beyond a shadow of a doubt to close the mouths of the skeptics whom I think are

just people who don’t want to do anything.

I welcome this hearing today on global warming technology and

research, but say that there is so much that we could do besides

research right now, such as put a cap on CAFE standards, such as:

switching from coal and oil to natural gas; increasing efficiency of

energy in use and buildings, transportation, and industry; transition to a lower energy intensity mix of economic activities.

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There are so many actions that we could take right now to address this, so I urge my colleagues not only to be looking at technology and research but looking at technical possibilities that we

can take right now to reduce energy intensity and carbon intensity

on our planet. I truly believe it is the most important issue facing

us for the future of our country and the health of our planet, so

I thank you for this hearing and would like to place in the record

these papers.

[The prepared statement of Hon. Carolyn B. Maloney follows:]

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Chairman TOM DAVIS. Without objection they will be placed in

the record. Thank you, Mrs. Maloney.

Mr. Kucinich.

Mr. KUCINICH. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

The title of this hearing is Climate Change Technology Research:

Do we need a Manhattan Project for the Environment? I would respectfully suggest this is kind of an unfortunate title for this particular hearing. The Manhattan Project harnessed the scientific genius of America for a purely destructive purpose, the building of

nuclear weapon, under conditions of assorted history of human experimentation and spawned a nuclear industry which drove up utility rates and gave us nuclear waste forever. Nuclear weapons now

constitute a threat to the survival of our entire planet, and certainly, as Jonathan Schell pointed out in his book, Fate of the

Earth, a threat to the common global environment.

Now, if we are talking about saving the planet, maybe we should

come up with an analogy that is not so obviously contradictory.

Asking whether we need a Manhattan Project for the environment

begs the question don’t we already have one. Everything about our

energy policies are destabilizing. Oil runs our politics, bringing

with it not only the injurious effects of climate change but war, environmental ruin, economic decline, manipulation of prices, oil politics are visiting us right now on the eve of an election. You see the

prices dropping at the pump trying to lull the public to sleep about

the game that is being played by the oil companies in cooperation

with the administration.

Global warming? Until recently, scientists for hire were ready to

discount the result of our destructive energy policies and urging administrations to refuse to participate in the Kyoto Climate Change

Treaty. I would agree with the colleague that we ought to talk to

China, but wouldn’t it be good if we had trade agreements that

held environmental quality principles as one of the bases for international trade.

Mr. Chairman, I have to submit for the record here a study of

the Manhattan Project called the New and Secret World of Human

Experimentation. I also have my statement, which calls for new direction with respect to sustainable energy choices like wind, solar,

ocean, geothermal, and with a call for investment to match the intention of changing our energy policies. We really ought to change

the title of the hearing though.

Thank you.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Thank you. Maybe we ought to call it a

Marshall plan. Do you like that better?

Mr. KUCINICH. You know, yes, like rebuilding after a war. Yes,

that is a great idea.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. OK.

Next, Mr. Van Hollen.

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you for

holding this hearing, and to Ranking Member Waxman for his

leadership on this very important issue.

I agree with statements made by my colleagues really some on

both sides of aisle here with respect to the importance of moving

forward in a bipartisan manner, but to do that we are going to

have to make decisions based on science and based on the facts.

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Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but everyone is not

entitled to their own set of facts. Unfortunately, here in political

Washington people seem to think that they can make up the facts

as well as making up the policy. There is an absolute scientific consensus that global warming is real and that there is an important

human contribution to the problem, and so, though we have settled

science and settled facts on that question, we continue to have a

lack of political leadership on this very important issue.

We continue to have, for example, the chairman of the Environment and Public Works on the Senate side say that the whole global warming issue is the greatest hoax ever perpetuated on the

American people. We had a Member of the House on the Science

Committee in a hearing yesterday saying that the whole thing was

made up, as well. Even the President of the United States, when

he talks about this issue as he did in July in People Magazine, sort

of said there is an open question with respect to whether or not

there was a human component to the global warming question. He

said it was a question of debate.

So, until the political leadership in Washington begins to deal

with the facts, we are not going to be able to move forward. We

can have disagreements with respect to what the best policy is, but

we need our political leadership to begin to take responsibility for

accepting what the scientific community has told us with respect

to this very important issue, and then we need to move forward,

and we need to move forward quickly, and we need to stop passing

energy legislation that continues to provide big subsidies to the oil

and gas industry and channel those funds instead into renewable

energy and energy efficiency areas.

So I welcome the comments on both sides of the aisle about the

need to move forward on a bipartisan basis on this issue, but, unfortunately, we have on the one hand people who continue to misrepresent the facts with respect to the science, and unfortunately

the reality of the situation is the legislation that is passed out of

the Congress has not demonstrated that people have come to grips

with the reality of the science on this issue.

I hope we will begin to turn that situation around and begin to

have policy coming out of here and political leadership that

matches the facts with respect to this very important issue.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Thank you, Mr. Van Hollen.

If there are no more opening statements, we will now proceed to

our first panel. We have Dr. Stephen Eule, the Director of Climate

Change Technology Program, and Mr. John Stephenson, the director of Government Accountability Office.

Thank you for bearing with us through our markup and opening

statements.

[Witnesses sworn.]

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Mr. Eule, we will start with you. Thank

you for being with us.

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STATEMENTS OF STEPHEN D. EULE, DIRECTOR, CLIMATE

CHANGE TECHNOLOGY PROGRAM; AND JOHN B. STEPHENSON, DIRECTOR, GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABILITY OFFICE

STATEMENT OF STEPHEN D. EULE

Mr. EULE. Thank you, Chairman Davis, Ranking Member Waxman, and members of the committee. Thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today to discuss the climate change

technology program and its strategic plan, which was released yesterday.

The administration believes that the most effective way to meet

the challenge of climate change is through an agenda that promotes economic growth, provides energy security, reduces pollution,

and mitigates greenhouse gases. To meet these goals, the administration has established a comprehensive approach, major elements

of which include policies and measures to slow the growth in greenhouse gas emissions, advancing climate change science, accelerating technology development, and promoting international collaboration.

Since fiscal year 2001 the Federal Government has devoted near- ly $29 billion to climate change programs. In 2002, President Bush

set a goal to reduce the Nation’s greenhouse gas intensity—that is,

emissions per unit of economic output—by 18 percent by 2012. To

this end, the administration has implemented about 60 Federal

programs, and recent data suggests we are well on our way toward

meeting the President’s goal.

While acting to slow the growth of greenhouse gas emissions in

the near term, the United States is laying a strong scientific and

technological foundation. In 2002, two multi-agency programs were

established to coordinate Federal climate science and technology

R&D activities, the climate change science program [CCSP], and

the climate change technology program [CCTP].

CCSP is an inter-agency planning and coordinating entity

charged with investigating natural and human-induced changes in

the Earth’s global environmental system, monitoring understanding of predicting global change, and providing a sound scientific

basis for decisionmaking.

CCTP, which was authorized in the Energy Policy Act of 2005,

was formed to coordinate and prioritize the Federal Government’s

investment in climate-related technology, which was nearly $3 billion in fiscal year 2006, and to further the President’s national climate change technology initiative [NCCTI].

Ten R&D agencies participate in CCTP. The program’s principal

aim is to accelerate the development and lower the cost of advanced technologies that reduce, avoid, or sequester greenhouse

gases. CCTP strives for a diversified Federal R&D portfolio that

will help reduce technology risk and improve the prospects that

such technologies can be adopted in the marketplace.

In August 2005, CCTP issued its vision and framework for strategy and planning, which provided broad guidance for the program,

and shortly thereafter released its draft strategic plan for public review. More than 250 comments were received and considered.

This revised strategic plan articulates a vision of the role for advanced technology in addressing climate change, establishes strateVerDate 11-MAY-2000 12:49 Nov 30, 2006 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00031 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 D:\DOCS\30692.TXT HGOVREF1 PsN: HGOVREF1
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gic direction, guiding principles, outlines approaches to achieve

CCTP’s strategic goals, and identifies a series of next steps. The six

CCTP goals are: reducing emissions from energy use and infrastructure, reducing emissions from energy supply, capturing and

sequestering carbon dioxide, reducing emissions of non-carbon-dioxide greenhouse gases, measuring and monitoring emissions, and

bolstering the contributions of basic science.

The strategic plan defines a clear and promising role for advanced technologies for the near, the mid, and the long-term; outlines a processes and establishes criteria for setting priorities, such

as those in NCCTI; and provides details of the current climate

change technology portfolio, with links to individual technology

road maps.

CCTP’s portfolio includes realigned activities, as well as new initiatives, such as the President’s advanced energy and hydrogen fuel

initiatives, carbon sequestration, and future gen.

CCTP agencies also periodically conduct portfolio reviews to assess the ability of these programs to meet CCTP goals and to identify gaps and opportunities. In addition, CCTP uses scenario analyses to assess the potential climate change benefits of different technology mixes over the century on a global scale and across a range

of uncertainties. When comparing the costs of achieving different

greenhouse gas constraints, the cost savings for the advanced technology cases were 60 percent or more.

The administration believes that well-designed multi-lateral collaborations can leverage resources and quicken technology development. The International Partnership for the Hydrogen Economy,

Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum, Generation Four International Forum, Methane to Markets—all U.S. initiatives—and the

ITER Fusion Project provide vehicles for international collaboration

to advance these technologies. The new Global Nuclear Energy

Partnership seeks to develop a worldwide consensus on approaches

to expand safe use of zero emission nuclear power.

Of course, through the Asian Pacific Partnership the United

States is working with Australia, China, India, Japan, and South

Korea to accelerate the uptake of clean technologies in this rapidly

growing region of the world.

The United States has embarked on an ambitious undertaking to

advance climate change technologies. CCTP’s strategic plan, the

first of its kind produced by any government, sets out an overall

strategy to guide these efforts and provides a long-term planning

context in which the nature of both the challenges and the opportunities for advanced technologies are considered.

I thank you for your kind attention. I will, of course, be delighted

to answer any questions you may have.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Eule follows:]

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Chairman TOM DAVIS. Thank you very much.

Mr. Stephenson.

STATEMENT OF JOHN B. STEPHENSON

Mr. STEPHENSON. Mr. Chairman, thank you for inviting GAO to

testify today on our report issued last year regarding Federal funding for climate research.

As you know, in 1992 the United States ratified the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, which has as its objective the

stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the Earth’s atmosphere but does not impose specific goals or timetables forlimiting

emissions. Since that time, 14 Federal agencies have provided billions of dollars for climate change activities.

OMB, at the direction of Congress, annually reports on expenditures for these activities in four broad categories: one, science,

which includes research and monitoring to better understand climate change; two, technology, which is the subject of today’s hearing, which includes the research, development, and deployment of

technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or increase energy

efficiency; three, international assistance, which helps developing

countries to address climate change; and, four, tax expenditures

which are Federal income tax provisions that grant preferential tax

treatment to encourage emission reductions such as renewable energy uses.

The climate change science program, which is a multi-agency coordination body, also reports on the science portion of these expenditures.

In analyzing overall Federal climate change funding, we found

that OMB and CCSP reported that climate change budget authority more than doubled from $2.4 billion in 1993 to $5.1 billion in

2004, with almost all of this increase in terms of real or inflationadjusted terms occurring in technology; however, it was difficult for

us to determine if this was real or a definitional increase because

of numerous changes in reporting format from year to year without

adequate explanation.

We found that in some cases OMB and/or CCSP added new accounts not previously included and expanded the definitions of

some accounts to include more activities. For example, $152 million

NASA research program to reduce emissions in aircraft was included for the first time in 2003. In addition, we found that over

50 percent of the increase in technology funding between 2002 and

2003 was the result of DOE expanding the definition of two accounts to include over $500 million in nuclear research. OMB explained this difference by stating that the prior administration did

not consider nuclear programs to be part of its activities related to

climate change, but that the current administration does, as explained in yesterday’s released strategic plan on climate change

technology.

Also, the merging of direct research, that specifically for climate

change, and indirect research, that research primarily for another

purpose with residual benefits in climate change, in the 2002

through 2004 reports in our opinion made the reports more confusing and less useful. For example, this merging, in effect, caused

carbon sequestration research, a direct activity, and grants to help

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low-income families weatherize their homes, an indirect activity,

appear in the same technology reporting category at the summary

level.

In our report, we, among other things, recommended that OMB

and CCSP use the same format for presenting data in its annual

reports, explain changes in report content or format when they are

introduced, and provide and maintain a crosswalk comparing new

and old report structures. OMB and CCSP generally agreed with

our recommendations and have tried to incorporate them into this

year’s climate change expenditure reports.

However, OMB told us during the course of our work that the

short time line required by Congress for completing that report

within 60 days of the budget submission limits its ability to fully

analyze data submitted by agencies. As a result, OMB must rely

on funding estimates quickly developed by each agency in order to

produce the report within a specified time.

It seemed to us that the fact that we don’t yet have a clear expla- nation and understanding of the Federal Government’s $5 billion

annual investment climate change portfolio and the fact that it is

built from the bottom up instead of the top down is very relevant

to the purposes of this hearing. We at GAO are strong proponents

of setting goals, measuring performance against those goals, and

reporting publicly on progress.

We believe that this framework is the cornerstone of good program management and sound investment decisions. Although we

have not formally reviewed either the CCSP or the CCTP strategic

plans, we believe that as an implementation of these plans move

forward there needs to be clearly articulated relationship between

the Government’s $5 billion investment portfolio and the goals of

both programs. In addition, there needs to be a mechanism to ensure that agency investment decisions directly relate to the goals

and priorities expressed in the plans.

Mr. Chairman, that concludes the summary of my statement and

I will be happy to answer any questions that you or members of

the committees may have.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Stephenson follows:]

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Chairman TOM DAVIS. Let me start quickly. What I will do is get

to questions, Mr. Waxman, and then we are going to have to recess

to go over for three votes. Mr. Eule, the Federal Government spends about $3 billion on climate change technology research. Isn’t that about it? Which I

might add is the same amount of money that British business

mogul Richard Branson on Thursday announced, $3 billion that he

was going to put in personally to combat global warming over the

next decade. But does CCTP play any role in determining how

those funds are used?

Mr. EULE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Yes, good question. We

have set up a process in the strategic plan. We have a process in

the strategic plan and some mechanisms to do that. CCTP has a

series of working groups, each of which is matched to one of the

strategic goals in the plan, so we have a working group on reducing

emissions and—

Chairman TOM DAVIS. So you are advisory, but you play a role?

Is that it?

Mr. EULE. We are advisory. We have working groups that are the

people that actually have influence on agency budgets. We also

have outside experts come in and provide advice. And we also work

through the management structure that the administration set up

through the Cabinet-level committee on climate change science and

technology integration and, more directly, through the box under

that we call the blue box, which is the deputy level structure.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. But the plan that was released yesterday

does not provide clear criteria for determining which program to

fund, when to fund them, or how much funding to provide; isn’t

that right?

Mr. EULE. It provides a process to do that.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Right. Not a plan, but a process. Who has

the ultimate power to determine that?

Mr. EULE. The agency—

Chairman TOM DAVIS. You have a process, but ultimately who

has the say-so? I mean, you get input into it, but CCTP is not the

ultimate decisionmaker, right?

Mr. EULE. No, CCTP isn’t designed to be the ultimate arbitrator;

it is designed to coordinate and to help prioritize the budgets that

the agencies produce, with input, obviously, from the Executive Office of the President.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Do you think it would be helpful to have

like an ARPA for climate change?

Mr. EULE. Well, I think the Department’s position on ARPA is

clear. We think it would take funds away from other programs. But

I think in the case of climate change what you have to consider is

that climate change isn’t just about energy. Energy is a big part

of that, obviously. About four-fifths of all greenhouse gas emissions

are energy related. But there are other aspects of climate change

technology, and expertise is in other agencies. For example, our expertise on non-CO2 gas is at the Environmental Protection Agency.

Our expertise on measuring and monitoring is in NASA. Basic research, Department of Energy.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. I guess the ultimate question is, on an

issue of this magnitude are we better off having this expertise disVerDate 11-MAY-2000 12:49 Nov 30, 2006 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00075 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 D:\DOCS\30692.TXT HGOVREF1 PsN: HGOVREF1
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persed across different agencies with no sole authority, or are you

better off having it under one roof with a strong focus and decisionmaking tree that is clear-cut? I think right now it tends to be rather process oriented.

Mr. EULE. Well, we think in the strategic plan we have set out

a process that can do that, and we have set out some goals, longterm goals that will provide that. So I think we are satisfied with

the plan that we have. We think it is a good structure, one that

is workable through the management structure that the administration has developed.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Mr. Stephenson, how much exploratory

technology and research is being conducted by the Federal Government?

Mr. STEPHENSON. I don’t know the answer in total.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. OK. Can you get back to us on that?

Mr. STEPHENSON. Yes, I will.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. We want to put something in the record.

How does the administration identify spending on climate change

related R&D?

Mr. STEPHENSON. It is a matter of looking at the individual agency budget submissions and accounts and rolling them up. I think

the press release yesterday from the Department of Energy announcing the release of the plan summarizes it best in that it says

that the plan organizes, not directs, not manages, but organizes

roughly $3 billion in Federal spending.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Do they differentiate between direct

spending, such as polar ice cap research versus indirect spending,

which would be, like, R&D with just kind of an ancillary climate

change benefit?

Mr. STEPHENSON. No. There are no clear definitions to distinguish between direct and indirect climate change funding. It all

gets merged at the summary level in the reporting.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. How comfortable are you with OMB’s

overall climate funding trends? It seems to me there are a lot of

questions whether OMB’s data is comparable over time.

Mr. STEPHENSON. It was very hard for us to tell whether the increases were due to inclusion of new programs or redefinition of existing programs, so we can’t answer that question concretely, although most of the real increase, as I said, occurred in the technology portion of the climate change report.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Has OMB agreed to all of your substantive recommendations, or have they just agreed to the suggested changes to report content format?

Mr. STEPHENSON. They have essentially agreed with all of the

recommendations, although we haven’t looked at this year’s report

to see how effectively they have been implemented. Our recommendations were more to get additional clarity and explanation

in the reports so that they are more useful.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. OK.

Mr. Waxman.

Mr. WAXMAN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Eule, in a hearing on climate change in July, Mr.

Connaughton, the chairman of the President’s Council on Environmental Quality, insisted that the administration is taking meanVerDate 11-MAY-2000 12:49 Nov 30, 2006 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00076 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 D:\DOCS\30692.TXT HGOVREF1 PsN: HGOVREF1
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ingful action to address global warming, and you have tried to

make the same argument here today.

There are some basic facts we must recognize if we want to avoid

dangerous global warming. One, we can’t avoid dangerous global

warming unless we sharply cut emissions of global warming pollution. Two, sharp cuts in emissions require significant changes in

energy production, energy use, deforestation, and other activities.

Three, as eminent climate scientists such as NASA’s Dr. James

Hansen keep telling us, we must start now. We have about a 10-

year window to start controlling emissions and we need to achieve

large reductions by 2050 or the planet will be locked into irreversible dangerous global warming. Four, as the single largest emitter

of global warming pollution and the wealthiest country in the

world, this isn’t going to happen without U.S. leadership.

The administration’s climate change goal allows U.S. emissions

to rise by 14 percent by 2012. Achieving that goal just locks us in

more to do later. To be blunt, the administration’s claim of meaningful action are simply nonsense, and the so-called CCTP strategic

plan is simply a longer version of the same story—lots of talk but

no action and no results.

Mr. Eule, the ultimate goal we must achieve is to stabilize the

level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at a safe level. Does

your plan set a goal, any goal, for stabilizing the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere?

Mr. EULE. The plan does not set a level. It was never intended

to be a mitigation plan. It was always intended to be a strategic

plan to develop cost-effective options that could, over the long run,

contribute to mitigating climate change.

Mr. WAXMAN. In fact, your range of stabilization levels include

very high levels that would allow devastating global warming to

occur, such as temperatures that would melt Greenland, raise sea

levels by 20 feet. If we don’t pick a goal and the right goal, we may

be aiming for disaster.

You say your plan is not to achieve a goal but to give some ideas

for technology. In order to achieve stabilization we need to reduce

our emissions. Does your plan set any quantified goal or timing for

reducing U.S. emissions of global warming pollution?

Mr. EULE. The plan in the summary chapter, chapter 10, does

lay out some broad overall goals for the mitigation potentials that

we think the technologies in the program could achieve. We have

looked at these potentials not only in terms of the amount of carbon or amount of greenhouse gases they could mitigate, but also in

terms of the timing of these technologies, when they would be

available. So while we don’t set a goal, we have done scenarios

analyses to look at different technology mixes and see how they

could contribute to mitigating greenhouse gas emissions across a

range of different scenarios.

Mr. WAXMAN. Well, as I see it you have a 100-year plan with no

goal for where we want to end up and no time line for getting

there. The plan also fails to address how we will get these new

technologies into the marketplace. If people don’t use the technologies, we are not going to avoid any greenhouse gas pollution.

Mr. Eule, I want to ask about the scenarios modeled in this report. The report relies on modeling to determine when the techVerDate 11-MAY-2000 12:49 Nov 30, 2006 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00077 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 D:\DOCS\30692.TXT HGOVREF1 PsN: HGOVREF1
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nologies could be deployed, and, even though you don’t mention

this in the report, that modeling assumes that there is a price on

emissions that drives the use of these technologies; is that right?

Mr. EULE. It doesn’t assume a price, it assumes carbon constraints.

Mr. WAXMAN. Well, even though your plan assumes that something beyond research is necessary for these technologies to be

adopted, the Bush administration continues to strongly oppose any

policy that would actually constrain emissions. The CBO pointed

out in their report that research and development alone won’t be

cost effective or any way effective to reduce global warming. Dr.

Kammen will testify today technologies do not adopt themselves.

There aren’t any clear action items in your plan to implement,

but even if it was faithfully followed over the coming decades, global warming pollution would continue to rise dramatically and global warming would reach dangerous, irreversible levels. A so-called

strategic plan that utterly fails to address the problem isn’t strategic, and I have to tell you it is not much of a plan, either.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. BILBRAY [presiding]. Thank you. We are going to have to adjourn until the end of this vote. The chairman said he will return

immediately after that.

[Recess.]

Chairman TOM DAVIS [presiding]. Thank you for bearing with us.

We had hoped to get you through.

Mr. Bilbray.

Mr. BILBRAY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

This question can be for either one of you: I was sort of taken

by a comment by one of the Members, about the issue of transferring generation facilities from heavy oil and coal over to natural

gases being a net benefit, but that doesn’t reflect a consideration

of a new facet of this whole issue that we are not talking very

much about. The issue that I would like to ask: are you including

in your strategies consideration for global dimming? And is global

dimming being accepted as being one of the thresholds we need to

consider when we are talking about global change issues?

Mr. STEPHENSON. That is really a DOE issue.

Mr. EULE. Are you talking geo-engineering?

Mr. BILBRAY. No. I am talking about the effect of particulates on

the global warming issue and the benefits of particulates and what

is called global dimming, the shadowing effect.

Mr. EULE. I think that would be an area of research that would

probably be done under the climate change science probably but

not the climate change technology.

Mr. BILBRAY. OK.

Mr. EULE. If I could get to your issue about coal switching, fuel

switching from coal to natural gas, when we look at these technologies, the administration’s climate change plan also looks at energy security and air pollution and climate change, so we combine

the two. We look at it in a context, so, I think from an energy security issue, simple fuel switching from coal to natural gas, you also

have to ask the question what impact is that going to have on your

energy security, as well. So I think what we do was we take a more

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holistic approach in how we approach these technologies and start

to consider these other factors.

Mr. BILBRAY. OK. An editorial note; North America still has substantial natural gas reserves. This is a big issue.

Mr. EULE. It does, yes.

Mr. BILBRAY. The other issue is, are we including—and I don’t

know if it is your department or should be the next panel—the

issue of bioconversion and how much we are focusing on genetic alteration in our biofuel strategy. Arrangement we specifically including in our strategy the concept that we may want to be talking

about bacterium and enzymes that have been genetically altered to

be able to produce not only the fuel we want but also in a manner

that is cost effective.

Mr. EULE. Absolutely. The Department of Energy has just announced recently that it was seeking $250 million to fund some

centers that would look at those sorts of issues, using biotechnology

not only to improve the feed stocks but also using biotechnology to

improve the conversion process.

Currently we make ethanol from cornstarch, essentially, the sugars that are in the ear of the corn. We are working now on what

you call a cellulosic technology where we construct these from other

parts of the plant. We think our Office of Science is working it out.

We think there is tremendous potential in biotechnology to make

that process much more efficient and thus make bio-refining much

more cost effective, so it is something we are looking at very closely.

Mr. BILBRAY. The issue of getting away from virgin products and

going to ‘‘conversion’’ of trash products I think has just been grossly

underestimated how important that is to make it work. A lot of

people forget that gasoline was a trash product. It was a leftover

trash from kerosene production. That is the only reason why we

are driving around with gasoline now, not because gasoline was a

secret formula that was developed somewhere down the line.

Mr. EULE. A couple of years ago USDA and DOE did a joint

study called the Billion Ton Study to take a look at the amount of

biomass that is available in the United States, and it came to the

conclusion there was about 1.3 billion tons of biomass available in

the United States annually on a sustainable basis. That is a huge

resource, so if we can develop a cellulosic technology to tap into

that resource we can significantly reduce the amount of gasoline

that we use in our transportation fuels, for example.

Mr. BILBRAY. Go from that to the other end of the spectrum, the

adaptation technology and theories or whatever. We have been getting reports that basically the Federal Government is walking

away from adaptation concepts or technology. Where are we going

with the whole concept of that other end of the spectrum?

Mr. EULE. Adaptation?

Mr. BILBRAY. Yes.

Mr. EULE. Adaptation is an issue that is handled in a number

of agencies. CCSP, for example, climate change science program,

does take a look at adaptation. Really what we need to help us

with adaptation is regional level models that have much more specificity than they do now. We have made a great deal of progress

in those models. More needs to be done.

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But there are some what we call synthesis and exception products coming out of the climate change science program. They are

looking at those sorts of issues. One that has relevance for the Department of Energy is a synthesis and exception product on the impact of climate change on energy production and use. So those sorts

of things are being considered through the climate change science

program. EPA has programs, as well as the Department of Interior

and others.

Mr. BILBRAY. Mr. Chairman, I apologize, but there is one very

simple but very big question I have that I don’t think our colleagues on the other side of the aisle will bring up. Is there one

major industrial nation in the world that has substantially reduced

greenhouse gases? And, if there is, what technology did they use

to do it?

Mr. EULE. That is an excellent question and the answer quite

simply is no. We have taken a look at data that EPA reports to the

U.N. Framework Convention, other countries report this data, as

well, and if you take a look at the numbers for 2000 to 2004 emissions growth in the United States was 1.3 percent at a time when

the economy grew by about 9.5 percent and population expanded

by about 4 percent. The EU 15, which is essentially Western Europe, their emissions grew by 2.4 percent, so they performed worse

than the United States. So I don’t bring that up to denigrate all

the things that are going on in the EU. They are all helpful. But

it just goes to point out that no country is significantly cutting its

emissions at this point.

Mr. BILBRAY. Who do you think is doing the best?

Mr. EULE. Well, I have a chart here. I could look. The Japanese

are doing quite well. But, you know, we have heard a lot about cap

in trade. I would point out the Japanese are doing well but they

don’t have a cap in trade policy in place. The Canadians don’t have

a cap in trade and they are not doing as well as the United States.

So there is a mix but everybody is pretty much in the same place

as far as emissions go.

Mr. BILBRAY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. I want to thank this panel. Thank you

very much. This has been very helpful for us as we move forward.

Thank you.

We will take a minute break and get our next panel.

We have our next panel: Mr. Lee Lane, the executive director of

the Climate Policy Center; Mr. Richard Van Atta, the senior research analyst at the Institute for Defense Analyses; Dr. Martin

Hoffert, emeritus professor, New York University; Robert Socolow,

the former director, Center for Energy and Environmental Studies

at Princeton University; and Dr. Daniel Kammen, the director of

Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of

California at Berkeley.

It is our policy to swear you in.

Dr. Van Atta, your daughter is where now in school?

Mr. VAN ATTA. UVA.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Excellent.

Mr. Van Atta. Thank you.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Excellent.

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Mr. VAN ATTA. Your remarks about Jeb Stuart are very well

taken.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. I knew you would appreciate it.

Mr. VAN ATTA. It is a wonderful model for people to look at in

terms of how a school has been resuscitated and turned into a

model.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Yes. Excellent.

Mr. VAN ATTA. It is a real asset for our area.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Well, I had two through there. One, Shelley, is at William and Mary, and Pamela is at Swarthmore, so they

have done well.

[Witnesses sworn.]

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Mr. Lane, we will start with you and we

will move on down. There is a light in front of you that is green

when it starts, then it turns orange after 4 minutes and red after

5, but we are going to try to keep within that because your entire

statement is part of the record. Thank you.

STATEMENTS OF LEE LANE, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, CLIMATE

POLICY CENTER; RICHARD VAN ATTA, SENIOR RESEARCH

ANALYST, INSTITUTE FOR DEFENSE ANALYSES; MARTIN

HOFFERT, EMERITUS PROFESSOR, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY;

ROBERT SOCOLOW, FORMER DIRECTOR, CENTER FOR ENERGY AND ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY; AND DANIEL KAMMEN, DIRECTOR, RENEWABLE AND

APPROPRIATE ENERGY LABORATORY, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY

STATEMENT OF LEE LANE

Mr. LANE. Thanks a lot. I really appreciate the opportunity to

appear here this afternoon, and I also really want to thank both

you and the committee, as a whole, for conducting this hearing. I

think this subject is one of tremendous importance. One of the attachments to my written statement is an editorial from the current

issue of the Journal of Nature pointing out the enormous importance of government-funded R&D as a potential source of solutions

to the problem of climate change.

As soon as we recognize that we really need government-funded

R&D, in particular, it raises the question that the record of the

Federal Government on energy R&D has been distinctly mixed,

and so we really face a serious set of questions about how to do

R&D to solve our climate problems in such a way that it actually

is likely to get the results that we are looking for. It is a very hard,

very big problem, climate change, as you know, so it is a very difficult problem and I think you are really to be commended for asking some of the questions about how to organize an R&D effort in

such a way that it really works.

We have a very distinguished panel of experts here and they are

going to discuss, I think, several of them, some of the more global

aspects of the issue of how to do R&D, but I wanted to open my

remarks by focusing on what I think are three pretty simple initial

steps that could really get us started, things that are not necessarily global in nature but things that would, if we could do

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them, would really have an impact in enhancing the cost effectiveness of our Federal climate-related R&D effort.

The first of those, which is described in attachment B in my

statement, would be to create a focused exploratory research program directed at finding new climate technology solutions. Several

of us, four very distinguished scientists, including Dr. Hoffert and

several others, and me, who is not a scientist at all, put together

this straw man proposal describing a possible way of organizing an

exploratory R&D program aimed at climate solutions.

I think that the two problems that such a program could solve

are, first, that it could reduce the rigidity of the Federal climate

change technology program. Bureaucracies tend to perpetuate

themselves. All bureaucracies do that. It makes them rigid. It

makes them slow to change. The program as we have designed it

would go outside of the bureaucracy to open up the search for new

ideas just as broadly as possible, and hopefully in doing that would

encourage the flow of new ideas into our R&D portfolio.

The second thing it would do would be to counteract some of the

tendency toward risk averseness, toward over-caution in the current portfolio of the climate change technology program. This is a

problem that has been noted by some of DOE’s own reviews of the

climate change technology program.

We think that the proposal we have sketched out offers a possible way of counteracting both of those problems with the existing

program. Our proposal for doing this—and there are other ways

you could do it, but our proposal is to create an autonomous, notfor-profit Government-funded corporation to organize the exploratory R&D effort. We think it is better to create a corporation outside of the DOE in order to make sure that we don’t simply perpetuate the same problems that exist within the existing organization.

Your opening remarks alluded to one of my other key points

here, which is the need for expanding the R&D portfolio of DOE

to include geo-engineering and adaptation in the CCTP. I think

those are extremely important points. We could find ourselves with

nasty surprises, and it would be much better to have done the research on those things beforehand.

I guess the third thing I will say, just in closing, is that it really

is important to give DOE the planning staff of CCTP the resources

that they need to do a better job of planning in the future. They

have actually done, I think, yeoman’s service given their resource

limitations, and if we want them to do better we have to give them

the resources to do that.

I conclude by just saying again I think that this hearing is enormously valuable. I thank you very much for your initiative in organizing it, and certainly the Climate Policy Center will do whatever

we can to be helpful.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Lane follows:]

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Chairman TOM DAVIS. Thank you very much. That is very helpful.

Dr. Van Atta, welcome and thank you.

STATEMENT OF RICHARD VAN ATTA

Mr. VAN ATTA. I am not an energy specialist. My background is

Defense and Defense research. I spent a fair amount of my career

looking at emerging technologies and how they are made to

emerge, and I teach a class at Georgetown on emerging technologies and security, and I emphasize the fact that emerging technologies are made to emerge. The question is the processes and the

means by which you do that.

DARPA is a unique example of an entity that was created with

that purpose in mind, and I think it is important to look at it in

terms of why it succeeded and what made it succeed. In my testimony, which I will read portions of here, I emphasize that the research that DARPA does is unique and different, and is purposefully so. The organization, itself, is designed explicitly to allow it

to do this unique and different type of research, and it has cultural

features within its organization and management style that allow

it to do that.

In the testimony I talk about the DARPA model and I also ask

the question of which DARPA model, because DARPA has done

many things in many different ways. It has been adaptive. It is

very malleable. One cannot just say there is a DARPA and that we

are going to take that and implant it some place else. You have to

understand what it took to make it do what it could do and why

it was able to change in those very effective ways. So it evolved

over time and it has many successes, and those successes, in fact,

were different because they were dealing with different problems.

We have to understand the way in which those successes were

made and what it took to make those successful, and I will talk

about a couple of examples of that.

DARPA’s program managers are the core. They are, in fact, almost individual entrepreneurs. They are encouraged to challenge

existing approaches. In the case of Defense, for war fighting and

to seek results rather than just explore ideas. In addition to supporting technology and the components of the technology development, DARPA has also funded integration of large-scale systems

demonstrations to look into what we would call disruptive capabilities.

There is a high-risk, high-payoff motif for DARPA that is a set

of organizational and operational characteristics that include its

relatively small size, its lean, non-bureaucratic structure, its focus

on potentially change-state technologies, its highly flexible and

adaptive research programs, but what is most important at the outset is that, in contrast to the existing Defense research environment, ARPA was manifestly different. It did not have labs. It does

not focus on existing requirements. It is separate from any operational organization elements. What is explicit is that its charter

is to be different so it could do fundamentally different things that

had not been done in a research environment.

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So when one looks at an energy ARPA or climate change ARPA,

the question is what are the things that it is trying to do that are

different and how do you set up an organization to do that.

DARPA was established as a research and development organization to assure the United States maintained the lead in the stateof-the-art technology for military requirements and prevent technology surprise. As one then looks at the characteristics of how it

did that, first of all it was independent of other organizations.

Second of all, it is lean and agile. It was risk-taking and tolerant

of failure, open to learning. You have to have a specific kind of research environment and organizational structure and a way in

which your link to the rest of the organization will allow you to do

that.

The program managers are, in fact, the technical champions who

conceive their own programs and have to then sell those programs

within the DARPA environment. The coin of the realm in DARPA

is promising ideas. Gaining notion is not that the idea is well proven, but that it has high prospects for making a difference on the

problem they are trying to solve. So you have to have an organization and culture that focuses on those kinds of innovations and

those kind of directions.

In my testimony I talk a lot about DARPA’s successes, and I

don’t have time to go into those here, but I will give you some key

what I consider to be elements of that success.

First of all, focus on creating surprise, creating difference, not

avoiding them.

Second, build what I call communities of change state advocates.

One of the key things that is unique to DARPA is it doesn’t create

and do its own research, it incentivizes and creates a community

of people to do that. If one talks about the current structure of

DOE in the national labs, they do their own work with their own

capabilities within their own operations. What DARPA did is it

found the people who could do that. It developed the community.

It found the new ideas out there and brought them together in a

coherent manner.

The third element is to find challenges, develop solution concepts, and then demonstrate them. We can show examples of that

in my testimony.

Finally, I would say if one were to ask the question what were

the key things about climate change that relate to DARPA and the

DARPA model, the first thing I would say is you have to understand the imperative that drove the creation of DARPA in terms

of national security, the Sputnik issue, and ask the question: do we

have the same imperative and understanding of imperative to

make an ARPA-like organization work elsewhere?

You also have to have the understanding that it will work because of the protection, oversight, and interest of the Secretary of

Defense and even the President to make it happen. Without that,

just naming something ARPA will not solve your problem for you.

Finally, I would say you need to deal with not only leadership

support but the issue of congressional oversight. ARPA has benefited from the fact it has a simple oversight structure, it is not

being managed by multiple congressional committees simultaneously, and with that kind of multiple meddling you are not going

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to get anywhere. You have to deal with existing lab structure. An

ARPA-like organization cannot succeed if, in fact, it was supposed

to support and integrate all those labs and use that as its basis of

success, and then they have to deal with the incumbent business

interests.

One of the key things, examples of DARPA, was how it created

information technology capability despite the fact that IBM dominated all of the information technology development at the time

that it created that very successful program, but it did it by not

having to directly address but create alternatives to those incumbent capabilities.

So my suggestion is that there is value in an ARPA energy that

could be created, but if you are going to do that you have to understand that first of all you need to have that galvanized focus, you

need to have an approach that is allowed to be independent, and

it has to have top-level leadership if it is going to succeed.

Thank you.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Van Atta follows:]

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Chairman TOM DAVIS. Thank you very much.

Dr. Hoffert, thanks for being here.

STATEMENT OF MARTIN HOFFERT

Mr. HOFFERT. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. You may have to bear

with me. I have a bit of a cold.

What I would like to do is outline some of the specific attributes

of the climate energy problem that make it a candidate for ARPA

or DARPA-like R&D, but I would also like to distinguish between

several contexts which are being used interchangeably.

A Manhattan Project or an Apollo Program Project is not the

same as a DARPA-type organization, and neither is an exploratory

research program, so let me just discuss what I think is the objective problem, the objective climate energy problem.

What we are faced with is a kind of existential challenge to our

high-technology civilization. Almost universally all the countries of

the world are in favor of continued economic growth, roughly at 2

or 3 percent a year. That is built into all of the models. At the

same time, those of us who have worked on the climate problem—

and that includes myself.

I have worked on this for almost 30 years. I was, in fact, a colleague of Jim Hansen’s at the Institute for Space Studies back in

the 1970’s. We have, over time, evolved a pretty good understanding quantitatively of this issue, and if we were to say that we don’t

want the planet to warm more than 2 or 21⁄2 degrees, which might

lead to irreversible melting of the ice caps, and at the same time

require that economic growth continue at 2 or 3 percent a year—

and that seems to be what everyone wants to do—that imposes

mathematical constraints on not only the amount of emissions that

we would be allowed to emit but on the amount of energy that we

would have to either produce by alternate energy technologies that

don’t emit CO2 or energy demand reducing technologies that would

give us the same end products but with less input.

We have written several papers on this. The first paper we wrote

was in 1998 where we first floated the idea of an Apollo or a Manhattan Project for energy. The week after that paper appeared in

Nature, the editorial writers of Nature said this is really a bad idea

because we know that the Jimmy Carter energy program had a lot

of boondoggles, it wasn’t really effective, and researcher is no substitute for political action. I want to come back to that in a minute,

but because it is so important I must be sure that I say this at the

beginning and don’t forget.

There is a perception in some quarters that research can be used

as an alternative to prompt implementation of things that we know

how to do right now. I want to as strongly as possible say that is

not the case. I favor a metaphor, a sort of World War II type metaphor. I think the problem we are facing is at least as challenging

as winning the second world war.

We didn’t stop fighting the second World War while the Manhattan Project was going on. We did the Manhattan Project, but by the

time the war ended it did deliver a remarkable piece of technology

that managed to change the shape of the world for the next 50

years, for better or for worse.

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So I think that, although I won’t refer to this any more, it is very

clear that whatever we do on the R&D front has to be done in parallel with implementing everything that we have on the shelf right

now.

Having said that, let me go to some specific problems that I

think could benefit from an intense R&D of—I believe that the

DARPA model might be very valuable in some of these problems.

What do we actually have in the coffers now to provide the levels

of energy that we need to run the world, which is something like

300 to 400 percent of the energy that we are using right now? In

order to stabilize at 2 degrees warming or less, we are going to

have to have some energy source X if we are going to do it with

supply that can provide between 100—or a combination of

sources—between 100 and 300 percent of all the energy that we

use now without putting CO2 in the atmosphere.

To put this into context, Fermi’s first nuclear reactor in 1942 was

farther in time than 2050 is from us, and roughly 5 percent of our

primary power comes from nuclear power. So whatever this energy

source is, it will have to grow something like 20 to 60 times faster

than the last revolutionary energy source we had.

That is an immense challenge, if you put it in that framework.

There are other ways of stating it. My colleague Rob Socolow uses

the metaphor of wedges. But it is a major, major job and it is not

going to get done, in my opinion, unless we have a targeted program to develop three classes of technology, each one of which has

a number of variants.

The first class is coal, with carbon sequestration or carbon capture. There is a lot of coal, and if it weren’t for global warming this

would really be a problem for the 22nd century or beyond. We can

make synthetic fuels out of coal, but CO2 and the climate problem

has moved it to the agenda where we have to start working on this

right now. In fact, 850 new coal-fired power plants are being built

right now by the United States, China, and India, and the emissions from those plants are going to overwhelm Kyoto emission reductions by a factor of five.

The U.S.’s response to climate change, as put forth by Negotiator

Harlan Watson at the recent round of Kyoto discussions in Montreal, was something called future gen, where DOE is going to

build a plant that will make hydrogen and electricity from coal

gassification. We don’t even have a location for that plant, and the

contribution that we can expect from that technology is very small

compared to what we are already doing. So, although coal is important, we are rapidly building precisely the wrong infrastructure

marching in the wrong direction, tying up capital for 50 to 75

years.

The second general category are safe or so-called green nuclear

reactors. Nuclear power has come a long way, although we haven’t

in this country built a new reactor for at least 30 years. We need

to come to grips with the issue of what it would take to generate

nuclear power sustainably, and it is not clear that once the reactor

is burning the U235 isotope can do it.

That is less than 5 percent of natural uranium. There are alternative ideas that involve breeders that may involve using folium.

Those were always parts of the discussion back in the 1970’s, but

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the institutional memory of that has dimmed, and I believe we are

far too modest in our plans for nuclear and could really use some

innovative ideas to drive us toward a sustainable energy source.

The third category and the one that I am most identified with

and favor the most is renewable energy, primarily solar and wind

energy. These energy sources are low intensity, intermittent, and

widely distributed. If we wanted to use these sources, if we wanted

to get, let’s say, one-third of our primary power from renewables,

one-third from green nukes, and one-third from coal sequestration,

we really need to invent and deploy entirely new systems for transmitting and storing this energy. Indeed, the transmission and the

storage of the renewable energy may become the cost pacer in the

implementation of renewable energy beyond the point where renewables can penetrate as a niche market. I think that is another

area that could benefit from a DARPA-like program.

This emphasis on technology, which in no way should be construed as an alternative to prompt action, I also think is a way

that we might entrain a bipartisan support for this. I had the

pleasure yesterday of appearing before a different committee, the

House Committee on Science, and Congressman Rohrabacher was

there and made some remarks to the effect that he doesn’t accept

the theory of global warming, which I know, and that was fine.

But I also know Congressman Rohrabacher to be a proponent of

space solar power, solar power satellites where one collects solar

energy in Earth orbit and beams it to the Earth. He has given

many talks in conferences on this that I have attended. On this

score, we are technologically simpatico. I think it would be very important to have an R&D program in space solar power. After all,

the world is spending $13 billion to build an experimental thermonuclear reactor that isn’t even going to generate any power.

There is essentially zero funding for space solar power right now,

although we did have a program in the 1970’s. It is another discussion, but the one problem is that, if that technology or other related

technologies like global super-conducting transmission lines, auto

gyros that might be suspended in the upper troposphere which

have the potential of providing all the electricity on Earth are not

being supported because there is no champion within the Government agencies, particularly the Department of Energy. How are we

ever going to start working on those ideas?

I think that I would imagine a sequence of events in which we

might start with a relatively modest exploratory research technology program that would examine the feasibility of these ideas

and start looking into experiments to test them. That might be

eventually correlated with an ARPA-E program and, if it looks like

it is very promising, it might transfer eventually to the Department

of Energy.

I don’t think I have very much time left but I have one more

point that I think is vitally important. Many Americans believe

that the job of the Department of Energy is to develop alternative

energy sources that would be sustainable and allow us to live harmoniously with nature and yet retain our high-tech civilization.

That is not the job, as you well know. DOE has two jobs, one is

called stockpile stewardship, which means to make sure that the

nuclear weapons we have will actually work if we ever had to use

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them, and the other is toxic waste cleanup. I put it to the committee that the Department of Energy, itself, should be reorganized.

This is not such a far-out idea.

As you may well know, NASA has recently been reorganized and

tasked with the mission of going back to the moon and going to

Mars, perhaps without adequate funding but certainly heads rolled

and there were internal reorganizations. I don’t bring this up because I necessarily agree with that direction. In fact, I am quite

unhappy about the loss of monitoring programs from space that

have applicability to climate change. But I bring it up because it

is not impossible for a Government agency to be reorganized and

to be retasked, and I cannot think of a more important task for this

century, a more important organizing principle than developing

sustainable energy sources in harmony with natural ecosystems.

Thank you.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Hoffert follows:]

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Chairman TOM DAVIS. Thank you very much.

Dr. Socolow, thank you for being with us.

STATEMENT OF ROBERT SOCOLOW

Mr. SOCOLOW. Chairman Davis, ladies and gentlemen, I have titled my remarks One Hand Clapping. You have heard a very

strong case for moving forcefully forward with technological responses that address climate change. We need early deployment of

technologies that we already know are matched to the job and we

need long-term research to expand the list of options. Congressional action is critical in both areas. To accelerate the deployment

of the technological strategies whose promise is already clearly

identified, requires price signals for carbon. To raise the energy

R&D effort to a new level requires greatly expanded, durable funding of research with a long time horizon. To do one without the

other, that is like one hand clapping.

I want to share with you work that I have done over the past

2 years with my ecologist colleague Steve Pacala that has added coherence to discussions of climate policy. Please look at the figure

on the screen. This, by the way, is in the Scientific American in

September 2006, the current issue. The upward trajectory envisions 50 years of inaction while carbon dioxide emissions double,

followed by aggressive action to hold global emissions constant for

the following 50 years. Following the upward trajectory, the world

will find it difficult to avoid tripling the preindustrial carbon dioxide concentration and a rise in the average surface temperature of

roughly 5 degrees celsius.

The lower trajectory, the blue one, envisions immediate action to

hold global emissions constant, followed in half a century by a second aggressive program to reduce global emissions roughly in half.

Following the lower trajectory will enable the world to beat doubling—that is, to keep the concentration below twice its

preindustrial concentration—with a rise of roughly 3 degrees.

The stabilization triangle is that orange and yellow area between

the two trajectories. You can see that it is divided into seven stabilization wedges. A stabilization wedge is a strategy that produces

a reduction of 1 billion tons of carbon and global carbon dioxide

emissions 50 years from now relative to what would happen in the

absence of attention to climate problem.

The size of the world’s job for the next 50 years is to achieve

seven wedges, if we can live with a 3 degree temperature increase.

If we want to stay below 2 degrees celsius, more wedges will be

needed.

I note that the climate change technology plan published yesterday, if you look at 2055, also has exactly seven wedges. They have

16 minus 9 instead of 14 minus 7, but there is a complete agreement about the scale of the job that is associated with avoiding a

3 degree temperature rise between the DOE and our own analysis.

In a world in 2056 that emits the same amount of carbon as

today, the United States will emit less CO2 than today, and the

trajectory that we will need to follow from here to there must depart from its expected business-as-usual trajectory immediately

and must peak in about a decade, and global emissions would peak

soon after.

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You must not underestimate the size of the policy intervention

required to turn U.S. emissions downward. A too-low price for carbon dioxide emissions will lead industries and consumers to treat

these expenses as routine costs of business. The required price

schedule for CO2 emissions must induce fundamental changes in

the energy system beginning within a decade or less. We figure out

how much we have to spend by how much will create action.

Pacala and I estimate that the price needed to jump-start this transmission is in the ballpark of $100 to $200 per ton of carbon,

that is to say $25 to $50 per ton of CO2. Arrangements, for example, would make it cheaper for new coal plants to capture and store

CO2 rather than to vent it. Based on its carbon content, $100 per

ton of carbon is $12 a barrel of oil, $60 a ton of coal, $0.25 a gallon

of gasoline, and $0.02 per kilowatt hour for electricity made from

coal.

Policy-induced scale-up of existing technology can only succeed if

accompanied by R&D to squeeze down costs and to solve the problems that inevitably accompany widespread deployment. Along

with such programmatic R&D, we will also need another kind of

research program that we are talking about here, more blue sky,

a program able to capture the imagination and the loyalty of the

world’s best scientists and engineers like the Manhattan Project

and the Apollo program. Both of those historic programs provided

dependable research support, which is a necessary condition to induce the most productive scientists and engineers, to reorient their

research careers, and to induce the most ambitious students to

adopt these retooling scientists and engineers as their mentors.

But energy research must be international and must heavily involve the private sector. Those are two characteristics that the

Apollo program and the Manhattan program did not share.

I repeat my main message: we need a serious expansion of highrisk R&D, but not only R&D. As Marty Hoffert also said. We also

need policy that elicits carbon responsive investments by industry

and carbon-saving practices on the part of consumers. R&D in the

absence of near-term technology-forcing policy is like one hand

clapping.

Thank you.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Socolow follows:]

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Chairman TOM DAVIS. Thank you very much.

Dr. Kammen.

STATEMENT OF DANIEL KAMMEN

Mr. KAMMEN. Chairman Davis, thank you very much for the opportunity to speak today.

[Slide presentation.]

Mr. KAMMEN. If we could move to the next slide, I share many

of the points in common with the two previous speakers. I would

like to highlight a number of what I think are the key issues of

a serious approach to this problem.

The first is a major commitment to energy. Leadership and sustainability is needed. It is long overdue and it would benefit this

country. There is a global lack of leadership in this area. We would

profit financially, as well as environmentally, by taking on that

role.

Energy environmental sustainability is a marathon. It is not a

sprint. Like in a marathon, where your worst of many miles times

can dramatically affect your performance, cutting the funding and

cutting support on a given year critically cuts programs that are

otherwise successful. The best graduate students leave fields. The

best researchers leave fields. Companies don’t see it as a serious

effort if funding levels fluctuate up or down dramatically, so having

a sustained, long-term program that is much wider than just DOE

is going to be critical to make this happen.

We have the scientific and technological foundation not necessarily to get us all of the way there but to make major inroads,

and we learn by doing. We must start that process in a much more

aggressive way than the CCTP even lays out the beginning of. I

would submit that the next serious stage is to do what the CCTP

has looked at within DOE in a much broader way across not only

other Federal agencies but also with those States and those foreign

governments that are making serious inroads here. That was largely lacking in the process.

The benefits of investing in innovation are well documented by

the world’s economists. They are significant. They reach across

many sectors of the economy. If we did this in the energy sector,

the so-called clean tech area, we would see those benefits.

Innovation leads to more innovation, whereas stagnation does

not. We need to invest and we need to make clear signals where

we want to get to.

Finally, the point that Congressman Waxman so kindly made,

and that is technologies do not adopt themselves. Programs that

are technology-only focused will not succeed in this area. A critical

difference not yet discussed with the differences between a DOE

program is that there was essentially a single client for DOE efforts. Our clients here are companies, homes, utilities in the United

States and around the world. It is not the same thing as having

a single client, the Secretary of Defense, and sending a project forward. We need a broad strategy that marries in a sustained way

energy R&D with efforts to bring technologies into the market.

That is a critical step.

On the next slide I highlight two things. One is the oft-reported

growing U.S. emissions in carbon. If we move ahead, that is our

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business-as-usual trajectory, depressing as it is. You will notice the

next point forward shows not only where the administration’s target, the so-called reduction in energy intensity, which in my view

is a false and misleading way to lead out the strategy. Nature does

not care how much we change our energy intensity; nature cares

how much we reduce our loading of the environment with carbon.

We need to have a target that is absolute and not a target that is

a function of a percentage growth rate change.

I highlight this with the Kyoto protocol target and a red line indicating what California has adopted through a series of measures,

Assembly Bill 1493, Assembly Bill 32, Senate Bill 1, the million

solar roofs measure that has near-term targets that we know are

achievable. We believe we can do and we know how to do 20 to 25

percent reductions in the State, and we have heard excellent comments from Congressman Bill Ray about how the California Air Resources Board tasked to do that has done it in the past.

The rest of the path we do not know how to do. The parts of this

line to bring our emissions down in this later part of the picture

we do not have a recipe for, but to look for single-technology solutions, very expensive individual programs, without building out the

first part of the curve is not to learn from the process of technology,

innovation, and development that has been successful in many

other areas.

Run the marathon through here and determine your strengths

down here. Do not delay until you think you have the magic bullet

to get you down to the target.

If you advance the slide one more time you will see a target is

dramatic. If you can advance one more slide, the stabilization regime is down here. It is an 80 percent reduction. It is a large, overall process. Notice there is a gap, as Dr. Socolow calls it, a wedge

here. If you go to the next slide there is a remarkable experience

in the United States. The top lines show the overall increase in

electricity use per person in the United States. The lower lines

show the California and New York experiences.

If we advance the slide, you will notice there is a remarkable

wedge of energy efficiency savings. That was not envisioned and

developed by a one-stop, one magic energy efficiency technology. It

was a combination of better light bulbs, water heaters, standards

for buildings, shading homes, etc. It was a cumulative process, the

same sort of process we can expect to see if we invest significantly

in energy efficiency in renewables as we do in energy efficiency.

If we move to the next slide, we are seeing now in the world of

ethanol, whether it is ethanol made from corn or ethanol made

from cellulose, a dramatic increase in ethanol production and use,

and many States are adopting more and more aggressive ethanol

targets, and our lab has been involved in that process through a

fairly high-profile paper in this area.

This is an effort of increasing R&D and market opportunities at

the same time. We must look for those in both areas, not just R&D,

not just markets, but those working in concert.

If we jump ahead a few more slides, this unfortunately is our

current situation. The top line shows Federal energy R&D, the $3

billion number we heard before, the number here, and the black

line below it shows private sector R&D. We have a mis-match of

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private sector spending in this area. In fact, this does not have to

be the pattern.

If we look at the next slide, in the area of health care private

sector R&D has been increasing for several decades, while in the

energy sector it has been decreasing. A friend and colleague of

mine, a former assistant secretary in DOE, noted sadly that this

means that we will be alive to see the folly of our lack of investment in the energy sector.

I conclude with the fairly simple but clear set of comments on

the last slide, and that is this committee, with a largely bipartisan

interest in these areas, has demonstrated that we are able to raise

our expectations and raise our standards for investment in this

area, that clean energy can be an area of tremendous innovation

for the economy, an area that we would export to the world and

benefit from. If we support States that enact aggressive policies

such as the New England States, the mid-Atlantic States, California, some of the northwest States that are adopting renewable energy content requirements for their power, we can assist those

areas undertaking experiments that we all want to see happen to

determine which policies are the most effective and not wait for a

magic bullet, single-size-fits-all, DOD-mimicked solution.

I would like to note, as well, if we jump to the next feature, that

over the last 3 years we have observed a carbon tax of roughly

$270 per ton in the run-up in gasoline prices. None of that has effectively gone into clean-tech R&D. We have paid this out of our

pockets with that money going overseas without capturing it, as

Dr. Socolow said, with a significant carbon tax. I recommend a

much more modest initial tax to gain experience with the process,

but that is exactly how we need to start to send the right signals

to industry that we are serious about it, that we expect performance, and that we will award the performance in this area.

I would like to again thank you for the chance to speak, and I

urge us to take advantage of the opportunity to be the environmental leader that the United States is currently not doing relative

to a number of other nations. It is our opportunity and our challenge to take on that leadership.

Thank you very much.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Kammen follows:]

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Chairman TOM DAVIS. I want to thank all of you for your testimony.

The first question you always ask is, regardless of what California or the United States does, if everybody doesn’t act together,

particularly with the emerging nations, you know, you are penalizing yourself economically in not getting the same kind of results,

but it starts here. I mean, all we can talk about in Congress is

what we can do.

Mr. Van Atta, let me just ask you. You stated in your testimony

that ARPA’s success is dependent upon a galvanized structure and

direct oversight. Where do you think a climate change ARPA could

be housed?

Mr. VAN ATTA. Well, the most natural place would be the Department of Energy, but I would agree with others that probably not

this Department of Energy. We have to find a way of having an imperative that is focusing on the energy and climate issues. If you

chartered the Department of Energy to do that as its primary mission and the Secretary had that as the primary mission from the

President, then an organization like this would be well housed

there. If it is not that, then it would not succeed.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. And right now, I mean, the report right

now, there are no lines of authority anywhere. You have all these

task forces and everything else. You know, my experience in government is that this is not the way to get anything done.

Mr. Lane, what would a CCRPA be able to do that the CCTP

doesn’t have the capacity for right now?

Mr. LANE. Well, I think if you organized it the way that our

paper proposed to organize it, which is to say as a not-for-profit

government-financed but independent corporation, I think it would

be insulated from the bureaucratic pressures for not very daring,

not very breakthrough oriented technology that I fear characterizes

part of the current DOE portfolio. I don’t want to exaggerate that,

but I think it all depends on insulating the entity doing the exploratory research to be able to operate the way Dr. Van Atta describes

DARPA as operating. I don’t think you can do that within the existing institution, so our proposal of a corporation was a way of trying to get around that.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Let me ask this. I come at it from a more

political perspective, because that is the way I have come up

through the ranks. I don’t have a Ph.D in physics. I am a lawyer

by training. But we find out when you put FEMA in Homeland Security it is competing for dollars with prevention dollars in Homeland Security and it gets starved. We found this in other agencies.

The Federal Information Security Management Act without information security gets starved when you put it in competing with everything else.

Making it a priority, that is one of the reasons, you know, you

talk about Cabinet-level positions to make it priorities where it is

not competing for precious dollars, discretionary dollars or anything. That is why I like the concept of an ARPA of some kind

where you get the focus. I am just afraid, despite some good intentions of some people across the bureaucracy and even the administration, the way it is set up today I just don’t see how we get from

here to there. I guess that is the major concern.

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Let me just ask if anybody else has any thoughts on that. Mr.

Hoffert, do you have any thoughts on that?

Mr. HOFFERT. Well, I mean, there are things that you can do immediately in the exploratory R&D program that we proposed.

There is not a lot of money. It is not a lot of money. I think we

were asking on the order of $30 million. What it would do is it

would be a first stage of analyzing what kind of ideas are out there

that aren’t really being captured by the present Department of Energy structure where you don’t have a champion. It is something

that could be done now.

Now, eventually, as I said in my statement, I really think the

Department of Energy has to be restructured and given a mission.

That is a very high-level decision. It is probably a Presidential decision. If you ask me what I would wish for, I would wish that, in

time for the next Presidential elections, that both major political

parties would realize that this is a vital interest of the United

States, it is vitally important to U.S. policy and to the world. If you

ask me, I think it is more important than terrorism and we would

be having public debates about it and both parties, from whatever

their ideological perspectives, would attempt to have a real energy

policy, not just pork and reshuffling. I think that is important.

That is something you guys can do.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. We can, but let me just tell you this place,

once you get this thing to the mish-mash between the House and

the Senate and Members with their employment opportunities in

their State it gets bogged down. It really has to start at the top.

I am just telling you. I mean, I think all of us here have good will

in trying to tackle this, but trying to get it through the mish-mash

makes it very, very difficult.

But you are right. I mean, I agree with you. It is a serious problem. We ought to be talking more about this. We ought to have an

honest debate. There are differences of opinion about how we proceed, not just procedurally but what some of the functions are, and

we don’t even know scientifically everything we need to know in

terms of what some of the options are. I think we agree it ought

to be a priority.

Anyone else want to add anything on that?

Mr. KAMMEN. I agree that this needs to be a Cabinet-level position in time, but perhaps for a little bit different reasons, and that

is that the benefits that would accrue to Commerce, to Agriculture,

to Energy, to Defense come up in different settings in different conversations, and you discover that there is a security benefit by

bringing down your oil.

Mr. Socolow and I sit on a Defense Science Board looking at

these issues right now. Commerce discovers that there is an unmet

international need for importing high-efficiency power plants, not

because of greenhouse gas issues, because they are more efficient

and less costly to operate in the long term. These are all technological areas where U.S. companies are well set up to innovate but

they are not doing their share, A, because they don’t see the Federal leadership on this; B, because the Federal dollars flowing in

are simply too small to tickle enough of those interests, much different than we see, for example, in NIH, where private sector funding in the health field is far ahead of the public funding, so the

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public can fill a role and fill gaps. That is what a better mission

would be here, and that would require the sort of inclination that

the Cabinet-level would hold.

The benefits to our economy are very large. California is already

adding up the tens of thousands of jobs that we expect to pull into

the State because of the greenhouse gas requirements. Those are

things that the United States could also capture as a peace or a

green dividend by taking this on at that very highest Presidential

cabinet level.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. You think it is helping the economy in

California?

Mr. KAMMEN. It is documented. We have studies from universities, from private sectors——

Chairman TOM DAVIS. I would love to see that.

Mr. KAMMEN [continuing]. In and out of State. I would love to

send the copies along. The estimates are that to meet the AB32

greenhouse gas standards California will generate about 50,000

new jobs, largely high-tech, in-State jobs.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Because the general rap on California is

it is a job killer. I will keep an open mind. I am interested to see

it. I come from a District with a 2 percent unemployment rate out

here in northern Virginia, but I would be eager to see that.

Mr. Waxman.

Thank you all very much.

Mr. WAXMAN. I also want to thank all of the panelists. One of

the things you may not be aware of is that the hearings are carried

on the internal television coverage within the House, so I was away

but I was able to watch your testimony and to read it, of course,

from the statements that you submitted.

Dr. Socolow, the administration’s plan is to put off action on global warming for years to come. They continue to fund some research, but they would leave concrete action to address global

warming to future administrations. They seem to think there is little meaningful action we can take now.

You have done considerable work examining what technologies

are available today. Can you explain more about what you call stabilization wedges and give us some examples of available technologies that could be deployed to fight global warming?

Mr. SOCOLOW. I don’t think there are many people in the administration who would agree with everything I am about to say, and

it really infuses the climate change technology plan. I called it One

Hand Clapping. The program there makes no sense unless, alongside it, there is a motivation for early action, for trying things out.

I will take the example of carbon capture and storage at coal

plants. We shouldn’t be building any coal plants from here on that

don’t further the goal of carbon capturing storage in all of them

and keep as short as possible the transition from some of them to

all of them. The DOE has a program on carbon capture and storage, a wonderful one, one of the best in the world. They, themselves, know that it makes no sense unless there is a carbon policy

that goes with it, so we are not even going to get the taxpayers’

benefit of the R&D without the associated program. This is widely

understood. This is not a Democrat and Republican thing.

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Inefficiency technologies, again, the DOE has had a perfectly

simple program and substantially pushing the R&D element of efficiency, but we could have tougher appliance standards across so

many sectors and move these things out. The R&D goes hand in

hand with the policies.

In renewables, again, we have an incoherent renewables program

as far as I can tell. If we had stronger signals that were broadly

posed in terms of carbon price, for example, you would have better

sorting out of the alternatives.

We listed 15 wedges, each of which is a gigantic challenge worldwide to reach a point where you are contributing 15 percent to the

whole job 50 years from now. Each of these is a campaign. That

is another word I like to use, a campaign or a strategy. It has to

be globally coordinated. The United States is emitting one-quarter

of the emissions today. We have technological leadership. We are

slowing everybody else down by our inaction, which is another dangerous thing.

We will bring the world along if we join, and we will conjoin

along renewables, efficiency, and fossil fuel technologies in a very

important way.

Mr. WAXMAN. Thank you very much.

Dr. Kammen, we are proud of California for the leadership that

our State has shown in this whole area. To me, I strongly believe

in States experimenting, but this is an area where we need Federal

leadership. Maybe California’s actions will spur it.

You have testified that the administration’s climate change technology program’s strategic plan is seriously flawed. You state that

the goal it seeks to attain is too modest. I would appreciate it if

you could elaborate on that. And, moreover, if the administration

were to achieve its so-called emission intensity target, would we

have any confidence that we have meaningfully tackled global

warming?

Mr. KAMMEN. Let me start with your second question first. The

answer is absolutely not. The emissions intensity target, as I said

before, has no basis in the natural world. It doesn’t address the

fundamental question that we are putting in too much carbon, so

we have to have an absolute target here, one that is measurable

and quantifiable. California, as you know, has set up a carbon registry so that companies and municipalities track their emissions

and look at them not on an intensity basis, which is a sliding scale

based on how much you are growing, but based on overall emissions levels.

And the most interesting first conclusion from that is that just

by monitoring you discover some of the areas. I liken it to the frequent flyer effect. If you start to collect frequent flyer miles you

want to spend them. Companies that tally up their numbers and

discover they are saving this much, they could save more, want a

market to sell those credits. That is what California’s AB32 has in

place. It has a market mechanism that extends across the economy

and outside, because all electricity sold into California will be subject.

I know of six coal-fired power plant plans that were on the table

to be built in the mountain States to sell to California that have

now been shelved as a result of what California has done.

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So the reach is impressive. You are right, we do need to have

this go beyond not just California and the west but it has to extend

to all countries.

I do not believe there is a benefit, however, in waiting to act

until we get this. Those municipalities, countries that export and

have developed the best technologies will have the opportunity to

export them for a variety of efficiency gains, and that really is the

benefit that we are seeing in Scandinavia. We see parts of Germany and Spain doing the same thing, and Japan and California

and New England. The Reggie Coalition is also taking an aggressive role in that. That is where the economic benefit lies.

Mr. WAXMAN. Thank you very much.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Mr. Van Hollen.

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Thank you. Mr. Chairman, I want to thank all

of the witnesses for your testimony. As Dr. Kammen said in his

testimony, what we are measuring here against in terms of reductions is what has to be accomplished for the purpose of reducing

the negative impacts of global warming, the human contribution to

that to whatever level we feel is sustainable in terms of our own

needs. The administration, when they talk about just reducing the

rate of increase, that may not be enough if you are not reducing

the rate of increase by the amount necessary to achieve the goals

that we want.

I also, although I am from the State of Maryland, I want to commend the State of California for its leadership on this issue and

moving forward. I think you have already spoken to some of the

immediate economic consequences in terms of decisions that are

being made by coal-fired plants not just in California but outside

of California.

This is really a question for any of the witnesses. Because we

have had testimony from various administration officials and you

have heard their technology plan—there is no dispute about the

need to invest in technology and renewable energy and energy efficiency. I mean, on a bipartisan basis people can agree and we

should do it on an urgent basis and I think we should increase dramatically our investment in there. Where there seems to be disagreement, which is what Dr. Socolow really called the other hand

for clapping, in other words, it is the need to invest in technology,

but you really need that market forcing mechanism. You need to

bring them both together. That is where there has been no political

will. That is why the California legislation is important. That is

where the administration has nothing to offer so far.

So I guess my question for any of the panelists here, if you just

take the administration’s plan with respect to what they want to

invest in technology and renewable energy, what kind of reductions, if any, are we going to see? And what is the gap between the

reductions we will achieve if we just do everything they say as compared to where we need to be?

Mr. HOFFERT. I just want to make a personal observation. I live

on Long Island, on Great Neck Long Island in New York, a suburb

of New York City. Our family has signed up for green energy. We

get electric power from upstate New York. We don’t actually get

the electrons. It is basically an offset, but we have to pay extra for

that.

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Now, Long Island, where I live has a nuclear power plant called

Shoreham that cost $6 billion. There are only 3 million people.

That means every man, woman, and child is paying $2,000 for a

power plant that is never going to produce any kilowatt hours.

Most of the people don’t even know that is happening, and that is

one of the reasons we have a very high rate base. And then, when

wind power becomes available, we have to pay in addition to that.

I think there is a really big problem of educating people so that

they really understand where their utility bills go and how decisions that are made ultimately impact on them. I think there is

also certainly a role for the Federal Government in making it financially desirable to do something like getting your power from

green power, even though it means importing it.

There is also a lot that can be done with hybrid cars. I heard

Dan talking about that earlier. Probably the most effective nearterm thing that could be done to reduce our imported oil, in conjunction with biofuels like ethanol, which I might have some problems with, but the combination of plug-in hybrids and ethanol is

very desirable. You can’t buy a car like that.

I mean, I have a hybrid. I am not happy with it. It turns out I

bought this Lexus hybrid before it was available on the market and

the fuel economy is nowhere near what I was hoping it would be,

but there are a lot of issues like that that I believe there is a role

for incentives by the Federal Government that could really make

a difference to the average person.

Mr. KAMMEN. I’d be happy to. I’d actually like to defend the Department of Energy here. I believe that the language in the mission

statements that are in the CCTP were really a product of a little

bit of an earlier era, and that the sense of that document is what

are a set of individual stovepipe policies that are attractive. Many

of the individual things in the report are quite interesting, but

what I think we have heard broadly across the board here and

what I heard actually from the Members and their comments is

that an integrated strategy is needed.

Until you have the integrated strategy, in my opinion, with aggressive R&D, aggressive market policies, and a carbon tax you are

not going to get the kind of document out of a tasked agency to do

so, so I really think it is, and I would love to see a sense of the

committee statement, a memo coming out saying we believe the following is in the national interest and this is what we should push

for.

It is those sorts of sentiments coming back to a Department of

Energy, a restructured one or not, that will allow us to say what

is our goal. In my opinion the goal is the 80 percent reduction in

greenhouse gases, but over a very manageable period of time—a

big challenge, but a manageable period of time, five decades or so.

When those political statements come out, I think that the DOE

can actually move itself quite far in the direction they want.

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Thank you.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. I think that the committee will try to

work some bipartisan language on this. One of reasons we are

holding the hearings is to establish a pretty solid link. Most Members understand there is a problem and are concerned about the

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way it is being addressed. It is not necessarily the goal, but just

how you implement it. Where’s the priorities?

Dr. Socolow, we have just a second because I have a Cabinet Secretary waiting in the back. Go ahead.

Mr. SOCOLOW. I just wanted to say that there is a time warp, I

think, too, in the way in which we are all looking at this problem.

The climate scientists have raised the level of the alarm. I live

among them in my own office. They can’t believe we are going to

take the risks of going above doubling the CO2 concentration.

There isn’t any urgency if we live with three times. So we have to

keep reminding ourselves that there is a message coming from the

science community, and as far as how much carbon we can put in

for a given level, that is a completely agreed-upon area with very

small uncertainties.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. Thank you.

Did you want to make one last comment?

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. I agree with you, Mr. Chairman. It would be

important to get a sense of the Congress in terms of what goal we

are trying to achieve, but the other half of that, of course, is how

we get to the goal. I think, as I understand the testimony, just investment in R&D, alone, won’t accomplish that. Is that fair?

Mr. SOCOLOW. Absolutely correct.

Chairman TOM DAVIS. We agree. That is one of the reasons we

are doing it.

Thank you all very much. It has been very helpful for us.

The hearing is adjourned.

[Whereupon, at 1:20 p.m., the committee was adjourned.]

[The prepared statement of Hon. Elijah E. Cummings follows:]

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