Tuesday, June 21, 2005

U.S. Senator Johnny Isakson (R-GA)
Floor Statement on the Energy Policy Act of 2005
Remarks as Delivered on the Senate Floor

Mr. President, I rise for a moment to commend the Senator from Nebraska and the Senator from Arkansas for their leadership on this amendment and, in particular, for their approach. As a freshman Member of this body, I have looked forward with anticipation to the great debate on the Energy bill. I know that for basically a decade we have been without an energy policy and desperately in need of one.

As a member of the Environment and Public Works Committee, and because of earlier legislation this year, I am critically aware of the climate change concerns and the desires by some to establish absolute standards on carbon. Senator Hagel and Senator Pryor have done precisely the right thing--precisely the thing America has done over and over again to address problems and bring about positive solutions.

As Senator Pryor just outlined, there is no reason for the business and development community of America and the environmental community's interests to be mutually exclusive. In fact, they should be mutually inclusive. Legislation such as this, which promotes incentives to find solutions to greenhouse gases, carbon emissions, develop alternative energy sources and new mechanisms of taking old sources such as coal and making them clean technologies, is absolutely correct.

I rise for one purpose, and that is to talk about a prime example of what Senators Pryor and Hagel are proposing. A number of years ago, the Department of Energy put out competition to ask private sector electric generation companies to bid on doing a demonstration project to see if coal gasification was possible and through its generation electricity could be produced at an economically viable and competitive rate.

In my neighboring State of Alabama, next to my home of Georgia, in Wilsonville, AL, such a project took place in the Southern Company. The Department of Energy began a joint project and invested money and developed technology that today leads to the construction of a plant in Orlando, FL, in conjunction with the Orlando Utility Company, where, through the new technique of coal gasification, electricity will be generated and retailed in that part of middle Florida without the emission of greenhouse gases.

That is what America is all about--positive incentives to do the right thing and to find solutions. This amendment by the Senators from Nebraska and Arkansas will do just that. I rise happily to give it my endorsement and my support.

One final comment. As we talk about the need to protect our environment and ensure that greenhouse gases don't run away from us and that we preserve all that we have, we have to understand that we have to incentivize every part of the energy sector and the energy segment, and as we develop new technologies, we also ought to reuse and reintroduce those great technologies of nuclear and others that have produced clean, efficient, reliable energy without the production either of carbon or the greenhouse gases.

So I commend the Senator from Nebraska and the Senator from Arkansas on their leadership. I support the Hagel-Pryor amendment.

I yield the floor.