Mr. Speaker, I think it is very good that the President has focused a large number of resources on deciding what to do about this problem. He has put together a task force and the Vice President is taking the leadership role on that. I think this is a problem that we need to focus on. 

I am not as excited about the initial reports from the Vice President and the President about the direction they need to go in, but I feel, and so does the new Democratic coalition, which I rise tonight in part to represent, that it is a good first step and we can get there on the policy. 

But where should we go? The Vice President's approach and some of his initial remarks were, first of all, that we are going to need to build a power plant a week for the next 20 years, and that conservation, while a personal virtue, is not an energy policy. 

The vision that is laid out from those initial statements is that we are going to be building a lot of power plants and power plants that are focused on existing fuel sources, fossil fuel, oil, natural gas, coal, and we are simply going to try to burn and drill our way out of the problem. 

Is this a good solution to our energy crisis? I would argue, and my fellow new Democrats also argue, that this is not the best solution. There are a lot of damaging side effects to taking that approach, and what is more, there is a better option, a better approach. Building a power plant every week for the next 20 years is going to be an incredibly costly endeavor, costly in terms of money and costly in terms of the impact that it has on our environment. 

When you are drilling for oil all over the place, you have a tendency to damage the environment and have an impact. When you burn that oil, when you burn those fossil fuels, you have a very damaging impact on the quality of our air and on the overall quality of our environment. This is not the best direction to go in. 

One final reason why I do not think it is the best direction to go in, it has been a constant focus on our dependency on foreign sources for our energy. In fact, ironically, that is one of the arguments that the administration gives for drilling in the Alaskan National Wildlife Reserve and the Gulf of Mexico and a variety of different places for oil domestically: to reduce our dependency on foreign oil. 

Drilling for more oil is not going to reduce our dependency on foreign energy sources. As long as we have a fossil fuel base system, as long as we are dependent on oil, we are going to be dependent on foreign sources for that oil, because you could drill the entire country and you would not come up with as much oil as they have in the Middle East and Russia and in a variety of other places that we are dependent on. 

The only way to reduce our foreign dependency on energy is to come up with new sources of that energy, and that is what we and the new Democrats are talking about doing. 

Mr. Speaker, let me be clear; we need more generation. Some of that generation will have to be traditional natural gas, coal-burning, fossil fuel-generating plants. We understand that we cannot simply tomorrow shift to new sources of energy and get off of this, but we would like to be able to do so as soon as possible, for all of the reasons that I stated. 

What are the possibilities here? Is it simply a matter of generating a megawatt here, a megawatt there? It is much better than that. The possibilities of what we can accomplish in terms of shifting our focus and energy dependency away from fossil fuels towards greater conservation and new technologies is far greater than I feel most people realize. 

Even before we get into the new sources of energy discussion, even focusing on conservation, the thing the Vice President said was a personal virtue but not an energy policy, if we were to improve in homes and businesses the way we consume energy, electricity, natural gas, a variety of different things, improve conservation, we could save an unbelievable amount of energy. 

A recent survey on conservation just cited a couple of things that we could do: tuning up residential air-conditioning, tuning up commercial buildings, more efficient air-conditioning systems in those commercial buildings, and more efficient commercial lighting. All of those things combined could save sufficient megawatts to save us well over 100 of those new power plants that the Vice President has proposed that we needed. 

If we could then move on to new technologies, solar, wind, fuel cell technology, biomass, a variety of different programs that are out there, we could save even more. By a very conservative estimate, we could cut in half the number of new power plants that we need; maybe more if we went out and spent the money and experimented and found out what we could do. 

This is a much better, more balanced approach. It is better for the environment. It is better for domestic security, so that we are not dependent on those foreign sources of energy, and it will build us a long-term sustainable energy policy, instead of thinking that we could simply drill our way out of it by depending on fossil fuels. 

We need this balanced approach. What I sincerely hope that the President and the Vice President do is engage Congress to work on this, to balance out this approach and come up with a sustainable long-term policy. 

A lot of people will say on a number of these subjects that I talked about, whether it is wind, solar, fuel cell, increased conservation, it is just not cost effective. It does not work. In other words, it is too expensive right now to generate wind power, and you do not really get that much. 

Conservation will not really save you that much because you have to spend a lot of money to get there. We do not have the technology to accomplish this. 

I would like to draw an analogy to another topic that we have been debating here recently in Congress, and that is the national missile defense system. The President has also recently come out and said we need to build a national missile defense system, basically a system where we could protect at least some portion of the United States, actually, I think it is all of the United States, by being able to shoot down one or two rogue ICBMs if they are fired at the U.S. 

We will not find a scientist in this country right now who says that currently that can work at this moment. You will find some who say it will never work. You will find some others who think we can work our way out of it, but the bottom line is the President is saying that whatever you think about this policy, that it is so important to this country that we be able to protect ourselves from a rogue missile or ICBM coming from a rogue nation, that we should spend the money and find out. 

Figure it out. He is willing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to come up with this solution. Like I said, I am not speaking against that policy. He may well be right. That may be such an important policy to do that, but transfer that to energy. Why not spend at least a fraction of that developing some of these new technologies? 

If we can figure out in the President's estimation how to hit a bullet with a bullet, with the national missile defense system, by spending enough money, why can we not figure out how to conserve energy better and develop new sources of energy so that we are not relying on the fossil fuel system we have right now? 

The answer is that we can. We can develop those technologies, wean our dependence on fossil fuels and better use conservation so we have a cleaner future in addition to ones that generate the energy that we need. 

We need to take this balanced approach. It is not enough to simply say, coal, natural gas, oil, that is all we have, that is all that works, let us move on and not change, not look at conservation, not look at alternatives. We need to strike that balanced approach.