I’d like to associate myself with the remarks of the Budget Committee chair. As a member of the Budget Committee, I join her in expressing her strong view that this country does not need another shutdown or pointless fiscal cliff but needs us to listen and work together in this chamber and the House of Representatives and move forward on the agenda that all of our constituents want us to proceed on.
Mr. President, I rise today specifically to speak to the bill that is on the floor that has been the subject of debate and discussion, 1392, the Energy Savings and Industrial Competitiveness Act of 2013.
This is a broadly bipartisan bill. Its two primary authors, my colleagues from New Hampshire and Ohio, have worked tirelessly to make sure it respects the priorities of members of both parties. Its passage by a vote of 19-3 out of the Energy Committee, on which I serve speaks to its support across partisan lines.
Yet sadly, now that it’s on the floor, a few Republicans have decided they want to use it to carry out their own narrow or partisan political agendas. Rather than showing the American people that we are still capable of coming together across our differences of region and party to pass this commonsense bipartisan legislation, they would rather confirm the frustration and even disgust so many of our constituents feel about this body.
We were all home this last month. We all heard from our constituents. And I don’t know about my colleagues but what I heard from Delawareans about what they want, what they deserve, is not more displays of the selfish partisanship that frustrates them, but rather, that we can listen to each other and work together on bipartisan bills that moves this country forward.
Energy efficiency, the topic of this bill, the topic we should be moving forward on today, its only agenda is creating a stable, dynamic and prosperous future. And the Shaheen-Portman bill really has been written with only that goal as its north star.
It’s not about who’s right or who’s wrong, or about whether climate change is real or not, or about whose science you are going to choose to believe today.
It is something that fundamentally makes sense. It allows us to bridge competing interests and concerns because it promotes energy independence, it helps our environment, and it promotes American jobs – jobs today and jobs tomorrow.
When we need new equipment for our buildings – whether it’s Dupont’s Tyvek wrapping or Dow’s foam spray insulation, both made here in America – we create good manufacturing jobs in our country.
When we install the new energy efficient equipment in our homes and buildings, we hire Americans to do that work – sheet metal workers, electricians, and laborers.
When we set new goals for efficiency, as this bill does, we incentivize the kind of research and innovation that will drive job creation well into the future.
It’s simple, Mr. President, there is no reason we shouldn’t be able to get this done.
I come to this debate today as someone who’s seen energy efficiency’s power up close in the private sector and public sector in my work in Delaware.
When I was in the private sector, more than 15 years ago, I came to understand that power when our then-governor appointed me to chair the conservation and efficiency working group of her Energy Taskforce.
Over two years of meetings, I grew to more deeply appreciate how powerful energy efficiency can be for the commercial and industrial balance sheet of our country. It later translated into my work as county executive of New Castle County, Delaware, where I led a countywide effort to make our buildings more energy efficient.
We had old and energy wasteful buildings and we knew that by investing in energy efficiency upgrades, we could save taxpayer money and put Delawareans to work.
We started with our City/County Headquarters, a building constructed in the 1970s, almost designed to be monumentally energy inefficient. As we audited it, the auditor was stunned at how energy-inefficient it was: high ceilings, bad insulation, poorly sealed windows.
So we overhauled. We upgraded the lights. Put in new energy management systems. Replaced the boilers and chillers and cooling towers and got that building up to energy star standards. Did a host of other things on a constrained budget.
It was a resounding and lasting success. With improvements just to that one small building, the county saves $350,000 a year, and it will pay for itself over 15 years. And because of that success, the county has gone on to do retrofits to 20 more buildings, in total, providing work for more than 150 Delawareans and reducing emissions by 12 million pounds of carbon dioxide a year – the equivalent of taking a thousand cars off the road.
Those jobs, they can’t be offshored. These are jobs for electricians, labors and sheet metal workers. These are good quality building trades jobs. They are also sustainable because as each contractor learns how to do an energy efficiency retrofit in one building, they can go on and do it for more.
Once folks understood the impact, once they saw the difference we could make in that county, it became an issue that transcended partisanship or political loyalties, and that should have been the case here, if we had a healthy and functioning Senate, because this issue is no more partisan across the United States than it was in our county. It saved us money. It helped our environment. It put Delawareans to work. And the same is true for the Shaheen-Portman bill that should be moving forward today.
Earlier this year, I had chance to visit Dover Air force base, our largest air force facility in Delaware, and see what the U.S. military is doing to use less energy and employ alternative energy solutions. They have made dramatic progress, looking across every corner of that base to reduce their energy use and to be more efficient in how they transport material for the United States Air Force.
These are real ideas and real technology-based solutions that could be applied nationally. There are companies up and down our state in the private sector that have applied the same approach, the same initiative this bill would take, and seen real savings.
PPG, Kraft, others have all realized savings of hundreds of thousands of dollars that add to their balance sheet and their bottom line. This bill, Mr. President, has been scored as creating 136,000 new jobs by 2025, saving consumers $13 billion, and nearly three billion megawatt hours by 2030. This is exactly the sort of bill we should be moving to, exactly the sort of bill we should be coming together to pass. Instead, sadly, what I’m hearing is that it is likely that the partisanship of this chamber is going to defeat our opportunity to take up and consider this important balanced and bipartisan bill.
Americans are looking to us to take action to create jobs, save them money and build a better future for our country. This bill genuinely gives us a chance to do all of those things.
I am a proud cosponsor of this bill. I had hoped to have a chance to debate, discuss and vote on many amendments directly relevant to this bill that deal with energy efficiency and would strengthen it.
Instead, it seems we are again mired in partisanship as folks here seek to add to this bill amendments utterly irrelevant to the core of what should be the focus today – helping to create high-quality jobs for Americans, improve our environment and add to our nation’s bottom line on this commonsense matter. It is my hope, Mr. President, that we can get past the partisanship and back to the real work our constituents expect and demand of us in the weeks ahead.