Jeff Bingaman United States Senator from New Mexico

Senator Jeff Bingaman, Chairman

Committee on Energy and Natural Resources

United States Senate

      Our nation is the world leader in science, technology and innovation. The students and the faculty here at MIT, both past and present, deserve much of the credit for that leadership.  And anyone who pays attention knows that if we, in this country, have something akin to a war room where our energy challenges are being confronted, it is here at MIT.  Karl Compton himself said, "nowhere in the country [is there] such a concentration of scientific and engineering laboratories and personnel." I compliment President Hockfield and all of you who have worked to establish the MIT Energy Initiative, and I thank President Hockfield for her generous invitation and introduction. It is an honor to be here.

          One of the greatest lessons that I have learned in life is to seek advice from people who know more about a subject than I do. One of those people whose advice I sought before coming here today is former MIT President Chuck Vest, who now serves as President of the National Academy of Engineering.  He urged me to say a few words about the factors that have resulted in me—a lawyer and a politician—being so involved and interested in science, technology, and energy policy.           

The most important factor was probably my father's lifelong commitment to science. Both my parents were teachers. My mother taught elementary school and my father was the chemistry professor and head of the Science Department at Western New Mexico University in my hometown of Silver City, New Mexico. There is no way you can grow up in a house with a chemistry professor without gaining an appreciation for the importance of science.

          Another important factor was undoubtedly my uncle, who was heavily involved in the politics of our state and ran the political campaigns for a long-time senator of New Mexico, Clinton Anderson.

          Both my exposure to science and engineering through my father's career, and my exposure to politics through my uncle's avocation, came together to bring me to the Senate. Those influences are also responsible for my focused attention on the role of government and science and technology in meeting our energy challenge.

          I know many of you have similar influences in your own lives.  As you move forward with your education and your plans for future careers, I hope that you will carefully consider the ways in which you can use your MIT education to address the great challenges we will face as a society in this century.  Government at all levels, but especially in Washington, will need to have people with your qualifications and abilities if we are to understand and respond intelligently to those challenges.

          When we talk about those challenges in relation to energy, what do we mean?

          The energy challenge we recognize today is different from and more encompassing than what we recognized as our energy challenge even a few years ago.  Until fairly recently, at least in Washington, our energy challenge was seen largely as the need to reduce dependence on foreign oil.  For the past quarter century we have seen the amount of the oil we import grow.  And although relatively little has been done during these years to reverse that trend, that issue has dominated energy debate in Washington.

          Dependence on foreign oil remains a major concern, but today we see our energy challenge as larger than that and in many ways very different.  Different in nature, different in scale and much more urgent.

          The energy challenge we see today is global rather than national.  It is to change the way the world produces, stores, distributes, and uses energy so as to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  It is to shift, not just our own economy, but the global economy from dependence on combustion of fossil fuels to use of non-emitting energy sources.

          With the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere on a trajectory to unacceptable levels, our sense of urgency to take action has risen as well. Simply stated, it is not enough to commit to reducing greenhouse gas emissions beginning in 2025. We must act and we must act now.

          With respect to the scale of the challenge – it is immense.  We and the other nations of the world will need to overhaul the existing energy infrastructure on which we all depend.  That infrastructure did not develop overnight.

Two hundred years ago, the combustion of fossil fuels, primarily coal, produced the steam that turned the turbines that powered the industrial revolution.  Today our planet has more than 50,000 coal-burning power plants, accounting for nearly one-third of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. The normal rate of turnover for this infrastructure is at least 40 to 50 years. 

One hundred years ago, the decision was made to power our transportation sector by burning petroleum-based fuels in an internal combustion engine, rather than through the use of electric motors and batteries.  Today, we have over six hundred million vehicles using some version of that internal combustion engine, producing 14 percent of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide.

          But our challenge is not limited to just the power plants and vehicles we have today.

          We live in a world of growing demand for energy as billions of people are rising out of poverty.  As that demand for energy grows, it will require new energy production capacity.  Today, that new capacity generally consists of coal-fired power plants with the same high carbon dioxide emissions as our current energy infrastructure.  Just a couple of weeks ago, India announced that it is building a new 4 GW coal-burning power plant complex.  These plants will emit more than 23 million tons of CO₂ a year.  The justification?  That the need to bring electricity to one of the world's poorest regions is more pressing than the need to limit carbon dioxide from burning fuel, and this is the least expensive way to do it.  It is difficult to argue against such a statement, when most of us here have never known a life without electricity.

          As we struggle to develop alternatives to our current energy infrastructure, we must recognize that in order to achieve sustainable use of those alternatives worldwide they must become cost-competitive, so that they are the option of first resort.

          To accomplish all of this, we will need both a revolution in technology and major changes in our economy.  Our past technological choices are inadequate for our future.  The solutions we need can only come from new technologies.  And if the challenge of developing those new energy technologies, and implementing them worldwide, is immense, so too are the opportunities afforded by tackling this problem the right way.  If we see our most pressing environmental problems as an opportunity to reassert U.S. leadership in science, technology, and innovation, we have the potential not only to resolve those problems, but also to revitalize our R&D enterprise and to rebuild our manufacturing base in the United States.

          But how do we accelerate the development and widespread use of new technologies to address our energy challenge?

          One promising place to start is to adopt policies that put a price on emitting CO₂ and other greenhouse gases.  By levying a cost on putting greenhouse gases in the air, we will accelerate the private-sector development and use of technologies that avoid and minimize greenhouse gas emissions.

          In the Senate we are working to design a regulatory framework in the form of a cap-and-trade system that will recognize the real costs of continued emission of greenhouse gases and shift development toward low-carbon energy production. In the past few years, we have seen a dramatic increase in private-sector entrepreneurs who want to develop clean energy technologies.  Putting a price on the emission of greenhouse gases will stimulate that private sector involvement even more.

The proper design of a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gas emissions is not the subject of my talk today, but I do want to say that this is not a simple matter. Having been in the Senate for 25 years, I can assure you that we in Congress have the ability to design and enact a totally unworkable system.  Without the help of this country's best minds we could wind up doing just that.

          While putting a price on CO₂ emissions is an essential part of the solution, it is not the only tool we should be using to resolve this problem.

          We should also change the way we pursue technology development and deployment.  And it is here where I will focus my talk today.

          I will cite 5 main areas where our policies to support technology development and use have fallen short.

1. Need to support our science and technology enterprise.

2. Need to set priorities for energy technology development and use.

3. Need to sustain support for those R&D priorities.

4. Need for a long term regulatory and tax framework to promote development of new technologies.

5. Need for a strategy for how to create the high wage jobs in the U.S. involved with manufacture of these clean energy technologies.

Our first key failing is in our support for the basic scientific and engineering enterprise in our nation.

          The best recent analysis of this problem was in a report issued by the National Academies, entitled Rising Above the Gathering Storm.  The report was a significant and well supported wake-up call for policymakers on the need for major sustained support of the basic sciences.  We in Washington are beginning to respond.  While we don't have major progress to report as yet, I believe we will make progress in the months and years to come.  One aspect of our anemic and unreliable support for the basic science and engineering enterprise in this country has been the anemic and unreliable support for energy related science and technology development.

That brings me to the second point on this chart.  We have failed to set priorities among the promising energy technologies that would lower our greenhouse gas emissions. 

You can find government reports on climate change technologies – the Department of Energy put one out in 2006 that it labeled as a Strategic Plan.  But these reports are basically only "shopping lists" of viable technologies -- with no concrete goals, no roadmaps for making progress, and no timelines for development.  Such reports are not entirely without value, but what we have nationally now is far from being a strategy.  And it is far from adequate to address the challenges before us.  What we need is to formulate a strategic research and development plan that maps out a prioritized set of technological goals, the steps needed to achieve those goals, and the time in which those goals should be met. I am not talking about a document that would limit scientific and technological exploration, but a roadmap with broad highways along which we could ensure that science and technology would be supported.  Any energy R&D roadmap we design will need plenty of on- and off-ramps to incorporate the new knowledge, understanding, and breakthroughs that will inevitably occur.

Japan has recently begun to move along the path of developing such a strategic plan with the release last month of its "Cool Earth – Innovative Energy Technology Program."
          This document identifies 21 areas of technology development which meet two criteria.  First, each is expected to deliver substantial reductions in carbon dioxide emissions in the world by 2050.  Second, each is a technology area in which Japan believes it can lead the world.  Technology roadmaps are being formulated for each of the 21 technologies, giving R&D direction and milestones on performance with timelines toward long-term goals.

          Perhaps the closest parallel we have to the Japanese priority setting effort is a project to identify the "Grand Challenges for Engineering in the 21st Century," which were described in a report the National Academy of Engineering earlier this year.  Among the "grand challenges" identified are two of the 21 technology areas covered in the Japanese innovative technology program:

-         making solar energy economical and

-         developing carbon sequestration methods.

While there is a significant effort underway at our National Academies to determine U.S. research and development needs in the energy area, it is clear that the systematic setting and maintenance of priorities for energy technology development is not something we have committed to at the highest levels of our government. 

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