Lugar Calls for Trans-Atlantic Energy Security Strategy
Senator Lugar's speech to the Garden Club of America, February 27, 2008

It is a pleasure to be with you today to discuss topics of mutual concern. I appreciate very much the work of the Garden Club on numerous issues that are important to our nation and to the health of the global environment.

In particular, I would like to take a few minutes to thank you for your advocacy on behalf of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. Ratification of this treaty is vital to U.S. leadership in ocean policy. It has the support of the President, his Cabinet, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Navy, the Coast Guard, the U.S. Commission on Oceans Policy, every major ocean industry, and a broad coalition of environmental groups.

Virtually the entire world has ratified the Law of the Sea Convention, which now serves as the accepted international basis for ocean laws and practices. The United States faces intensifying environmental, national security and economic costs if we continue to absent ourselves from the Law of the Sea. If we fail to ratify this treaty, we are allowing decisions that will affect our Navy, our ship operators, our off-shore industries, and other maritime interests to be made without U.S. representation. Our ability to claim exclusive right to our vast extended continental shelf will be seriously impeded, as will our ability to cooperate with other nations on ocean conservation issues. We will also be forced to rely on other nations to oppose excessive claims to Arctic territory by Russia and perhaps others. We will be dismissing more than a decade of impassioned advocacy from fleet commanders who have told us that U.S. participation in the Treaty will help them operate on the oceans more effectively and with less risk to the men and women they command. And we will not even be able to participate in the amendment process to this treaty, which is far more likely to impose new requirements on our Navy and ocean interests if the U.S. is absent from negotiations.

Late last year, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved the Law of the Sea Treaty by a bipartisan 17-4 vote. The treaty was also passed by the Committee in 2003. A Senate Floor vote on the Convention, thus far, has been blocked. Nevertheless, the issue awaits action by the full Senate, and I am hopeful that we will soon have the chance to vote on it.

Although making environmental progress through public policy is often a frustrating enterprise, I believe the overall sweep of environmental history is not destined to move in negative directions. Environmental setbacks can and do happen, but they are not inevitable. The human spirit possesses remarkable abilities and energies that can be brought to bear on our conditions. Sometimes we achieve technological breakthroughs only to be frustrated for years by political or social arguments over their application. But rarely are environmental solutions and advancements out of reach if visionary people commit themselves to a determined effort to succeed.

With this sense of optimism, I report to you today that we have opportunities to build bipartisan coalitions behind more robust environmental stewardship and innovation. This is particularly true in debate on climate change, where individuals and groups representing increasingly divergent outlooks are becoming engaged in the campaign for an effective response. Our scientific understanding of climate change has advanced significantly. We have better computer models, more measurements and more evidence -- from the shrinking polar caps to expanding tropical disease zones for plants and humans -- that the problem is real and is exacerbated by man-made emissions of greenhouse gases. An increasing number of major corporations are joining climate change coalitions out of concern for long-term economic stability, and a growing number of religious organizations are embracing anti-climate change activities as an element of moral stewardship of the earth for future generations.

We are witnessing individual citizens, entrepreneurs, and policy makers coming forward with unique ideas. One such idea in which I have been proud to participate is the Chicago Climate Exchange. This is the world’s first legally binding greenhouse gas emission registry, reduction, and trading system. The Chicago Climate Exchange operates as a market discovery mechanism where willing buyers and sellers trade carbon credits that businesses, universities, cities, or other entities may want to use to offset the greenhouse gasses they are producing.

During the last 20 years, on my 604 acre farm in Marion County, Indiana, I have overseen the planting of thousands of Black Walnut trees. This is a crop that requires a good bit of patience. Unlike the corn and soybeans on our farm, the returns from the Walnut trees require decades of careful forestry stewardship. But with patience, I know that these trees will be producing income for my grandchildren many years into the future. In the meantime, this beautiful treasure is capturing carbon that otherwise would be in the atmosphere around Indianapolis. On this basis, in 2006 I enrolled the Lugar Stock Farm as an offset provider in the Chicago Climate Exchange. After studying our tree farm, the Exchange estimates that it will capture about 3,400 metric tons of carbon. My hope is this example will help inform farmers how they can play a role in market based solutions to climate change through carbon storing environmental practices. We need strong incentives for farmers and others to remove carbon from the atmosphere through methods such as tree farming and no-till planting.

But this is just one approach among many that are needed if we are to successfully address climate change. I have urged the Bush Administration and my colleagues in Congress to return to an international leadership role on climate change. Exercising this leadership will be one of the great challenges of the next presidency, because solutions to climate change are not simple to implement.

Last month, I took an extended trip to Central Asia and the Caucasus in which I visited Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Ukraine. This region is emblematic of the challenges that we face as we discuss climate change and the so-called post-Bali roadmap for international negotiations. More than fifteen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, all five of these countries continue to struggle to develop their economies, rebuild their infrastructures, and address widespread pollution and toxic waste problems.

Central Asian hydrocarbon reserves are the subject of intense global diplomatic and economic competition. The race for control of the natural gas and oil in this region will impact energy equations throughout Europe and Asia. Russia is vying to monopolize energy flows from Central Asia, while other nations are hoping to secure access to these supplies as an alternative to current sources of energy. Meanwhile, energy rich states like Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Azerbaijan are considering how to maximize the economic benefits that will be derived from their oil and natural gas reserves.

Given these stakes, climate change and the post-Bali road map are distant and purely hypothetical topics in Central Asian capitals. One can engage officials in Baku, Astana, and Ashgabat about melting ice caps, flooding coast lines and even the fate of the polar bears. They will say that concern for the global environment is all well and good, but they have to develop and use their fossil fuel resources to raise standards of living. They will say that they live in a tough neighborhood and have few economic options. They will say they have to sell the energy sources that will put even more carbon in the atmosphere. Clearly, they do not lack customers.

The picture is even more sobering when we consider China. That country’s rapid economic growth and industrialization are obliterating old ways of thinking about the global economy. In 2007, demand for power generation in China expanded by a phenomenal 16 percent. This figure followed a 14 percent increase in demand for power in 2006. The Chinese coal plants that came on line in 2006 alone added a net 80 gigawatts of electricity generation to the Chinese system – an amount roughly equal to the entire electricity capacity of Great Britain.

Vehicle sales in China increased by more than 25 percent in 2006, as China passed Japan to become the second largest vehicle market in the world behind the United States. The 7.2 million vehicles sold in China in 2006 were four and a half times as many as were sold in China just 9 years earlier. The resulting demand for transportation fuels has focused the Chinese government on a global search for reliable oil supplies that pays little attention to the external behavior or internal human rights record of potential suppliers.

Rapid industrialization in China, India, and other nations is rendering obsolete many well-intentioned approaches to energy security, climate change, and global economic policy. I say all of this not to diminish the problem of climate change or to dismiss the grave security and economic threats that could come from ignoring it. My concern is that the debate over climate change must not become divorced from what is happening in China and India, and regions such as Central Asia. The global surge in energy demand cannot be restrained purely through negotiation. Nor will arbitrary and unfocused goal setting related to carbon emissions have much impact.

We need to sharpen the focus of our debate over climate change and the economic and energy factors connected to it. We have to recognize that energy supply and demand issues are at the core of most major foreign policy, economic, and environmental issues today. Technological breakthroughs that expand clean energy supplies for billions of people worldwide will be necessary for sustained economic growth. In the absence of revolutionary changes in energy policy that are focused on these technological breakthroughs, we will be risking multiple hazards for our country that could constrain living standards, undermine our foreign policy goals, and leave us highly vulnerable to economic, political, and environmental disasters with an almost existential impact.

The United States should recognize that steps to address climate change involve economic opportunities, not just constraints. Thanks to new technology, we can control many greenhouse gases with proactive, pro-growth solutions. Such technology represents an enormous opportunity for U.S. exports.

But we have to have the will to develop, test, and implement these technologies on a truly urgent basis. The next President must demand that research projects related to battery technology, cellulosic ethanol, carbon capture and storage, solar and wind power, and dozens of other technologies receive the highest priority within the Administration.

Whoever is sworn in as President in 2009 must elevate energy security to the status of a core national goal and must directly engage the American people in the solution. If the next President addresses energy through the same old ideological prism, the chance to strengthen U.S. national security and economic prosperity will be lost.

To succeed, the President must be constantly attentive to energy concerns. He or she must be relentless, willing to stake the reputation of the Administration on politically difficult breakthroughs that contribute to U.S. energy security. The President must be willing to be judged according to success or failure on this issue.

This will involve considerable political risk. The safer course is for leaders to appear to be forward-looking on energy by proposing a few carefully chosen initiatives and occasionally voicing optimistic rhetoric about alternative sources. Washington believes that the public’s overwhelming energy concern is high gas prices, and that politicians can cover their political bases by being attentive to that issue.

The next President and the Congress must reject such a defensive posture. The President must operate outside the energy orthodoxy of his or her party, and avoid the temptation to go for popular, quick-fix nostrums such as cutting gasoline taxes or tapping the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to reduce gas prices, in place of a true energy security program.

It is not enough to ask presidential candidates which energy solutions they prefer or what legislation they will endorse. The real question is: ‘How deep is your commitment to changing the fundamental energy equation of the United States?’

I remain hopeful that the United States will exercise global leadership in developing and deploying cleaner energy technologies that could transform the world economy and provide our best opportunity to mitigate the risks of climate change. Safeguarding the environment should not be viewed as a zero-sum decision, in which limited resources must be diverted away from programs that more directly impact our immediate well-being. To the contrary, the environment is interlinked with our national security, our economy, our energy supplies, our diplomacy, and other elements of national welfare. It is up to us to thread all of these elements together and make potent arguments for a cohesive and creative environmental policy. I am optimistic that together we can do so.

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