Date: 2000-10-04
Speaker: GEORGE MILLER (democrat)
Chamber: H
State: California

I thank the gentleman very much for yielding. and I thank him for taking this time that we might have an opportunity to discuss both the environmental challenges that are presented in this election season and by this Congress and by the differences between Governor Bush and Vice President GORE. I. as many Americans last night. was shocked when. although I guess we should not have been surprised but shocked when Governor Bush suggested that the way out of our energy crisis was to simply drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and that would in fact solve the problem. As was correctly pointed out by Vice President GORE. if you simply do that. you do nothing but add a couple of months of oil supply to the total consumption of the United States. but you have done nothing on the other side. which is consumption. conservation. new technologies. all of which are necessary if we are going to use these oil resources in a wise fashion. It is unfortunate that the first thing that Governor Bush would suggest to the American public is that we ought to. in fact. treat the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge much as we would an oil field in East Texas. There is a world of difference between those two. and perhaps Governor Bush does not understand that. But the Arctic Wildlife Refuge is not just that. It is a refuge for wildlife. of caribou and other species. that are greatly threatened by additional development in the Arctic. and it is important that we understand that. because I think. again. as Vice President GORE pointed out. you need not destroy our environment to improve the energy situation in this country. We know that there are all kinds of additional energy efficiencies. whether it is the insulation of our home. whether it is the improved efficiency of the generators of electricity around this country. as we are replacing old and worn out generators. whether it is the improvement of the gas mileage of our automobiles. This Congress. the Republican Congress. has stalled year after year the consideration of improving the gas mileage of automobiles. So now where do we find ourselves? We find ourselves. essentially. where the fleet averages are going backwards to where they were in the 1970s. and now we see once again we are threatened with competition by foreign auto makers introducing hybrid cars. racing ahead on fuel cells. We know that 70 percent of all the energy thatis imported into this country is used for transportation. so to continue to waste it on the highways is a tragedy. and especially when people now are forced into paying. because of the cartel in the Middle East and the big oil companies in this country. are forced to pay in excess of $2 a gallon. I bet most Americans wish that this Republican Congress had not kept us from reviewing those mileage standards. so that if they are going to have to pay $2 a gallon. they might get 30 or 40 miles a gallon. as opposed to 19 or 20 miles per gallon. I think it is an important distinction. because I think it highlights the rather cavalier attitude of Governor Bush toward the environment. It is out of step with the American public. It is clearly out of step with the American publics desire to protect the environment. to clean up the environment where it has been polluted. and to keep it from being polluted where it has not happened. Clearly an overwhelming majority of Americans want to expand our National Park System and to protect the National Park System. They want to increase the public lands that are available to them and their families and their communities. whether those are neighborhood parks. city parks. regional parks or State park systems. In the State of California. where I come from. the State park system is oversubscribed on every holiday. on every weekend. by people who want to take their families out and enjoy that kind of experience. They want to protect the farmlands in our growing communities so there will be open space. so there will be an opportunity to protect the habitat of endangered species. so that they can use open lands to buffer the dramatic growth that has taken place in so many of our suburban communities. That is what the American public has said they want. and they have said that over and over and over again. Yet what we have seen in the agenda of the Republicans on the Committee on Resources on which I sit and in this House is to constantly attack the underlying basic national laws in this country that provide for the protection of the environment. the laws of the Clean Water Act. of the Clean Air Act. of the Superfund law. of the Endangered Species Act. Time and again in the Committee on Resources. the gentleman does not sit on the Committee on Resources. he sits on the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. and I think he has some similar actions that take place there. but we see constant attempts to try to override the Endangered Species Act. to try to approve projects without the consideration of the impact on the species. Yet we know that in all of the polling data. which is an indication of the American publics attitude. that 80 percent of Americans agree that protecting land. water and wildlife and other natural resources is extremely important to them and twothirds of them believe that the Federal Government. the Federal Government. should in fact be doing more to protect our forest resources. to protect our wilderness resources. to protect the national parks and the public lands of this Nation. In fact. they go so far as to suggest they would like the Federal Government to create more of these opportunities within our society. The gentleman from Oregon has been a leader in trying to explain that. As the Vice President pointed out last night. this is not about having to ruin one value in America to achieve another value. We would like energy independence. we would like energy efficiency. we want to make sure that we can meet the demands of our economy. but we do not have to destroy the environment in the process. So I thank the gentleman at this time for taking this time. and I want to yield back to him so he can participate. I see we have been joined by our colleague from Maine . But I want to point out that last night. to hear that that was the single strategy of Governor Bush to answer the energy question. was simply drill more. and to suggest that somehow we have not been drilling in the past. the hottest drilling area in the world is not in Russia. it is not in China. it is not in Indonesia. it is in deep water off of the coast of the Gulf Coast -of the United States of America. People have been drilling here. But it is the manner in which we have been wasting the resources. We have been wasting the resources. and we now say we are going to invade the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in some desperate attempt to achieve energy independence. We ought to achieve energy independence. and the gentleman knows more about this and I would hope he comments on this. If 70 percent of the imported oil in this country is going into transport. that tells you that maybe where you want to start thinking about the problem is with the automobile. to make it more efficient. to do some of the things the gentleman has talked about that have not come to pass. unfortunately. in this Congress. in terms of mass transit. in terms of the design of our communities. in terms of making them transportationfriendly to various options. whether they are trains or mass transit or buses or car pooling. these kinds of arrangements. Then you really send a message to the sheiks in the Middle East. if you will. who are running the cartel. that their market is not going to be as great because we are going to stop the waste of that energy. I thank the gentleman for yielding. and will ask him to yield later in this special order.