May 15, 2019 - Issue: Vol. 165, No. 81 — Daily Edition116th Congress (2019 - 2020) - 1st Session
All in House sectionPrev54 of 102Next
MAKING THE MATH WORK; Congressional Record Vol. 165, No. 81
(House of Representatives - May 15, 2019)
Text available as:
Formatting necessary for an accurate reading of this text may be shown by tags (e.g., <DELETED> or <BOLD>) or may be missing from this TXT display. For complete and accurate display of this text, see the PDF.
[Pages H3836-H3839] From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov] MAKING THE MATH WORK The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 3, 2019, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Schweikert) for 30 minutes. Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, this is actually something we try to do about once a week, come in here and actually sort of talk about our unified theory in our office: What do we do to, basically, keep our promises? Here is a thought experiment. Social Security and Medicare are two of the greatest fragilities we have in our society because we are getting older very fast. Remember, we have talked about this over and over and over. In about 8\1/2\ years, 50 percent of the spending in this body, less interest, will be to those 65 and up. How do you make the math work? And in an intellectual, lazier time, you would get some that would say: Well, we could raise taxes here or we can do entitlement reform here. Well, it turns out that math really actually doesn't work anymore. Now, we actually have to do everything to make the math work. So we have been trying to actually sell this concept that it is economic growth, and within economic growth it is how we design our tax system, how we design trade, how we design our regulatory environment, how we actually do population [[Page H3837]] stability--and this one actually gets complicated. You saw the article in The Wall Street Journal today about what has happened to U.S. birth rates. How do you encourage family formation, but also how do you deal with the immigration system that maximizes a talent-based immigration system to maximize that economic velocity? Remember, this is about us having a vibrant enough economy so we can keep our promises, but within that, we also have some other issues. How do you do what we call labor force participation? Countries like Japan and some in Western Europe are dealing with how they get those who are older, and if they are healthy and want to, how they create incentives to actually say: Are you willing to stay in or come back into the labor force? We actually have this quirky math here in our country of millennial males. In December, we started to see this breakthrough of millennial females entering the workforce. We still actually have a whole bunch of millennial males who are missing in the workforce who should be there. How do we build a society that encourages participation in that labor force? It turns out, if you actually look at a lot of our economic data, from the Joint Economic Committee to the Joint Committee on Taxation, when they talk about what are the barriers for us to be able to keep growing and continue this actually incredibly robust cycle we are having right now, it is capital stock. Well, actually, the numbers since tax reform have been dramatically healthier than we modeled for, with folks having savings, and that savings actually becoming lendable capital. You actually can see that in just nationwide interest rates. The second fragility that was being written about was labor force participation, and we now live in a society where we have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of jobs and no workers. So who would have ever thought a couple years ago you would live in a society with more job openings than available workers? This is a wonderful problem, but it actually does genuinely become a barrier to economic growth, and it is something we have to find a way to deal with. Part of this is actually really optimistic, though, as we started to see in the data over the last several months the number of business organizations and others who are taking a chance on people, hiring right out of correctional facilities, making accommodations for our brothers and sisters who may have a personal impairment, a personal handicap; and we actually see that in some of the Social Security disability numbers of individuals actually moving into the labor force. So, look, this is just our unified theory. Today, we are actually going to start to talk about technology, which is one of our five pillars, and how aggressive I believe the adoption of technology has to be to keep the economic growth going. We have done lots of floor time over the last couple months on the healthcare technology, the revolution that I believe, our office believes, some of the people we work with believe, that is about to happen and the ability for you to take care of yourself, the wearables--the kazoo you blow into that instantly tells you if you have the flu, to the other side of the spectrum, the single shot cure for hemophilia--and how do we finance those types of disruptions. Wouldn't it be amazing if this body were no longer having the, actually, in some ways, insane debate we have had for decades about who gets subsidized, who gets to pay in healthcare, and started actually talking about what we pay and how we are going to cure our brothers and sisters who have chronic conditions? We all know, the 5 percent of Americans with those chronic conditions are well over half of our healthcare spending. So what happens when we actually bring cures to market? And then our obligation: How do we finance them so we roll them out as fast as possible? But today, we are going to talk about another fixation of mine, and that is environment issues. I wish I had a more delicate way to talk about this. Often, the discussion around here is almost Malthusian, saying the pie is only so big. If you care about global warming, if you care about greenhouse gases, we must shrink the economy; we must get individuals to drive less; we must generate less power; we must do these types of things. And a decade or so ago, maybe that was a legitimate view, but they have missed an entire technology revolution that is going on around us, and there should be optimism in this body that, if you are someone who cares about greenhouse gases in our national and world environment, the revolution is here, and it is a technology one. {time} 1815 How does this body start to remove the barriers that have slowed down the adoption of this clean generation, these alternative generations that are in our marketplace? A simple thought: solar generation. I hope I get this story, which is coming out of New Mexico, correct. They wanted to run a power line to Arizona. They have been working on the power transmission lines for a dozen years. We have seen the discussion in the upper Midwest. I believe it is Iowa, with wind generation, finally figuring it out and saying maybe we can run the power lines in the railroad right-of-way because we want this power to make it to Illinois. That is where the demand is, and over here is where the clean generation is. These are things we often don't think about. It is not enough to have the technology. How do you get the power to where it needs to be consumed? We have never fixed the bureaucratic barriers to moving that power. It is like some of the discussions we have had in our office. A couple of years ago, we did a math experiment. A pipeline in west Texas, a pipeline loop that would capture methane so you didn't have to flare it off, had a really impressive calculation in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, but it requires permitting a pipeline. I need us to remove some of our ideological blinders and think of pro-growth, pro-environment, pro-effectiveness. We have to be willing to change the permitting system and so much of the litigation and bureaucracy that slows these things down. We are going to walk through a couple of these boards, just because I think there is incredible optimism out there. This one I am sort of thrilled with. This is a chart that talks about battery efficiency. For those of you that geek out on this stuff with me, you probably all saw the article--I think it was April 1--on some new solid-state battery technology. It looks like they finally have a major breakthrough on what we call power density. This chart here, do you see that coming down? That is the cost of battery storage. It is a remarkable reduction. In Arizona, we have our largest and best utility, Arizona Public Service. When you read some of the articles that are going on right now with them, the amount of solar that is now in their portfolio, they have baseline nuclear and now the holy grail. What happens when you live in the desert Southwest as I do? I am blessed to live in the Phoenix-Scottsdale area. We produce lots of solar. Into the peak of the afternoon, California now produces so much alternative solar generation that they can't use it all. On some days, they paid Arizona to buy it off them. What happens when a company like APS gets really creative and says: How do we have solar power at night when, if you live in the Phoenix area, you are still running your air-conditioner into the evening? It turns out the battery investment is about to bring solar generation into the hours it is dark because they will store it. If you design that type of battery storage that holds for about 4 hours, you get us through the peak. It is referred to as the duck curve. If you see the back of a duck, we have all this production, and then it collapses. Yet, we still have all this demand. How do you cover that gap? In the past, we used peaking power plants, fire them up to cover those few hours. Now, with what is happening with battery storage, it is here. Our privately owned utility in Arizona, APS, recently did an RFP or RFQ. The numbers that came back [[Page H3838]] were remarkably competitive. It is happening. When on this floor we discuss global warming, greenhouse gases, and what we are going to do in alternative generation, it is here. We just need to understand what is happening right around us. How do you keep curves like this line continuing? When we are reading that there is a breakthrough in battery technology, how do we remove barriers so that technology rolls out and becomes part of what we do here in the United States and around the world? Here is something else. I am blessed to be on the Ways and Means Committee. Last year, we updated a tax credit mechanism for carbon sequestration. It turns out that we have multiple facilities now that were an experiment, but they are growing. They are about to go to large-scale commercial where they capture all the carbon. This first one, I believe this is the NET Power facility outside Houston. It is a natural gas-fired facility, so they are using a hydrocarbon and they have no smokestack. They capture not only the manmade CO2 , but they even capture any other gas throw-off. The remarkable design is that they throw a little oxygen. They heat it up, and heat it really, really hot. They use that to spin the turbines. Then they cool it down and pull out the CO2 and then use that to sell for other purposes. They don't have a smokestack. This technology is up and running today. The proof of concept is done. Now we are heading toward, I believe, a fairly substantial expansion in the scale of the facility. This was research that has been going on for years. Those of us here in this body, a year ago, we updated the carbon sequestration tax credits. It is paying off. The next one is another facility that is also in Texas. This one was really an interesting experiment because, in many ways, it broke through a bit of folklore. It sits right next to an existing coal-fired generation facility. It is a coal-fired carbon capture plant. They are spinning the turbines, burning coal, and they capture the carbon. It was only 2 or 3 years ago when we had witnesses around here saying this sort of technology would not work. It is up and running today. There should be joy and optimism around this place because the ability to basically say, for the hydrocarbons we have, what happens if we can use them to help us through this transition of time and we are capturing the CO2 ? This is wonderful. Let's go even further. If we are going to continue the thought experiment, you have already seen the United States do some pretty remarkable reductions. Most of it has come from natural gas, but there have been some pretty remarkable reductions in our CO2 production. A lot of the rest of the world hasn't even come close. For the number of new coal-fired plants moving in Southeast Asia, part of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative, they are not going to have the types of capture technology we have here in the United States. We have to have a worldwide strategy. I am one of those who has been really excited because I have been following a facility that is going up in Canada. It looks like they have succeeded in the breakthrough of mining the air to pull CO2 out of it. Mathematically, we had lots of smart people saying this is absurd, that you are not going to be able to do it. We had a very smart professor in Arizona at Arizona State University who had been working on sort of a carbon capture artificial tree. This technology is rolling out. It is under production right now, and they are moving up to industrial scale. The amazing thing is, they think they can do it for about $100 a ton, which is remarkable if you have actually played the math game. This is for the new facility. What happens if they start to break that curve? If you understand that carbon that has been captured, to have the ability to refine it and do other things, even make another fuel source out of it? The other thing is, think about the article we hopefully all saw last week about what the Dutch are doing. The Dutch are basically about to take a depleted oil field and take carbon that they have captured and shove it back in the ground and sequester it. All of a sudden, it is a negative calculation. In this place, in a lot of the debate, for a lot of the witnesses we have had in previous years, the concept of mining and having negative emissions was considered absurd. It is here. The technology is here. This is a facility that has, apparently, really smart, really wealthy people investing in it because they are so excited about the technology. We need to understand that there is optimism out here. How do we get ourselves up to date on the cutting-edge technology? How do we move it forward and promote it? We also need to understand that the theater that we engage in here often is not good math. I wish I had a more recent date, but the latest we could find is 2015 on this. Do you see the yellow bar on the side? That is all the photovoltaic solar that rolled out in 2015. It was an impressive year. There were fairly aggressive subsidies, State, local, and Federal. Do you see the other bar chart next to it? That was all the nuclear that went offline that year. The reality of it is, in 2015, if you were thinking about power generation in the United States that did not produce CO2 and you were joyful that this much solar hit the grid, understand that almost the equal amount of nuclear came off the grid. We were peddling in place. We need to be honest about the math, and we need to be honest about that baseload nuclear being really, really important if you care about this issue. There are a couple of quirky things I wanted to throw out here. This one is just fun. It is sort of an odd thought experiment. In the desert Southwest and mountain Southwest, uranium mining has always been a dodgy issue. We need it. We know we need it. We need it for everything from our X-rays to refining and refining and refining for a nuclear power plant. In previous decades, we have been able to take very high grades and step it down, but that was some of the excess that was out there after the Cold War. That stock has been substantially used up. So what are we going to do? There is a technology breakthrough of mining seawater for uranium. We should be joyful and pushing these technologies. They solve some of the moving problem of wanting nuclear generation but where are we going to get the uranium? How are we going to step it up? It turns out, even on that, the technology has moved forward. Look at other little thought experiments. How many of us in high school with Popular Science magazine used to get excited about how you generate power from ocean waves? It turns out that a new design is rolling out. It is sort of a bobbing power generation. It exists now, and it works. It is much more robust than anything that has ever been designed. We should be joyful and trying to promote more of this type of technology, but we have to deal with how you bring the power in from the shore. All of a sudden, you have a whole other layer of regs, rules, and permitting. You want clean power. We all want it, but we have to deal with the bureaucratic malaise, mess, and blocks that stop us from being able to pull this type of new power generation into our communities and our country. What is exciting about that is that is a type of power generation that, if we make it work, it can be all over the world. Being someone who, as a younger man, trekked Indonesia, Vietnam, lots of India, and Sri Lanka, think about most of the world's population living near coastal communities. Wouldn't that be exciting? Why aren't we promoting these types of technologies? We need to get rid of this Malthusian mindset that the pie is only so big, that we can cut it only so many ways, that once you cut it those ways, there is never an opportunity for it to grow. There are still people who believe that the 1968 book ``The Population Bomb'' was real. The only thing they got accurate was the author's name. {time} 1830 We need to understand there is a technology breakthrough happening around us, in particularly power generation. But if you want to have a revolution--and I am sort of banking on being one of the first people to talk [[Page H3839]] about this because this one is really disruptive, but it is worth the thought experiment. For anyone who might be watching or having an interest in this Google, ``photosynthesis 40 percent''. Read the complete articles that have been written. Madam Speaker, you remember your high school biology class talking about plants and plant cells having a certain inherent inefficiency, where there is a flaw that has been there for millions and millions of years where it reaches out and grabs the oxygen molecule when it should have grabbed the carbon molecule. Through some synthetic biology they fixed the inefficiency. It now will reach over and grab the carbon molecule every time. All of a sudden it means a 40 percent efficiency in growth. So, what happens tomorrow when crops require 40 percent less water, 40 percent less land, and 40 percent less fuel? What does it mean to the world? Thought experiment: I need you to take it a step further. World agriculture represents 2.2 times the total greenhouse gases of every automobile on Earth. Just adopting this plant technology in our agriculture equals removing every car off the face of the Earth. As this rolls out, how fast would it take to change the seed stock around the world? There are solutions, and they are not always a linear thought. They sometimes require some creativity. Let's face it. We work in a math- free zone that also lacks creativity. This exists. This is rolling out. It is a revolution. Yes, it is going to be incredibly disruptive to agriculture around the world. It is going to be incredibly disruptive. At the same time, what happens when you want to plant trees and you can grow them 40 percent more efficiently, and they are just little carbon capture machines? This is here. We should be excited about it. The last one is just more of the thought experiment of trying to say, if we really care, we need to stop the theater that seems to be what happens behind these microphones and actually understand the problem, understand the math, and then focus on that solution. Because often around here I believe a solution is a problem for us because the very thing that we got elected on, that we love coming and complaining about, oh, dear heaven, what happens if we solve it? So let's actually talk about something that is part of our pop culture right now, but it is a real issue. For someone like myself, I grew up scuba diving. I love scuba diving, and I have been blessed to do it in a lot of really neat places. Ninety percent of the plastic in the world's oceans come from 10 rivers. Eight of these rivers are in Asia, and two of those rivers are in Africa. Ninety percent of the plastic in the ocean comes from 10 rivers. If you give a darn about plastic in the ocean, banning straws in your community is theater. It is absurd math. It may make you feel better and get you in the local newspaper, but you didn't do anything. This body here immediately should figure out what aid programs we have, what research, what we can do to go to those 10 rivers that are 90 percent of the plastic in the ocean and help, instead of complaining about it and instead of doing a nice video of going out and saying, I am going to pick up plastic off a beach. No. If you care, it is 10 rivers, we know where the problem is. If you really want to have an impact, go where it is coming from. This is a simple example of we talk, talk, talk, talk, and talk around this place, but if we solve it, then we don't get to actually talk about it. But solving is the most ethical thing we can do as a body. Policy that is made with math and policy that is made with facts can do amazing things for our country, my 3-year-old little girl, and for this world. Policy around here that is done by folklore, by an anecdote, and by feelings, time and time again, when we look back, it may have been well-intended, but ultimately it hurts people. If we get our math right, if we actually understand the underlying basis of a problem, figure out an honest solution that continues to grow our economy and continues to provide opportunities instead of this sort of constant Malthusian echo around here that says that we can't grow anymore, we can't do this--they are wrong, and the folks who embrace that philosophy have been wrong for centuries now. There are technology breakthroughs happening all around us. You actually saw the latest one on this. Finally, we have broken the code on a plastic that truly breaks down. Let's incentivize that. There are solutions. This body is an honorable body, but it needs to become one about solutions instead of theatrics. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time. ____________________
All in House sectionPrev54 of 102Next