Sam Farr: “First of all, thank you for doing this Special Order. It's very important for the American public to know that their…”

“First of all, thank you for doing this Special Order. It's very important for the American public to know that their Capitol, this is a public building, the people of this country own it. But we, as caretakers of it, are changing it into a model place to work and to have as a seat of government. And just a few things that Mr. Blumenauer talked about, we're eliminating plastics and Styrofoam from the food service has totally been eliminated. As he showed, they're using compostable food service items. We're running a commercial composting operation, reducing waste by 50 percent. We've installed 30,000 compact fluorescent lights and use one-quarter of the energy that will last 10 times longer than the regular light bulbs. We've changed the settings on heating and ceiling fans to reduce the run-times by 14 percent. We've replaced 84 vending machines with energy efficient equivalents. People don't think about these vending machines. They're all plugged in and they have lights and everything on them. Analyzing the electrical energy usage throughout the 6 million square feet of the House buildings, the offices that we occupy, we're doing that audit now to find savings. We've activated economizers on building air conditioners, which cut the annual cooling cost by 20 percent. And we've initiated a study to relight the Capitol dome. Those lights are on all night, and I think we're all proud of it, but that study will reduce the energy requirements and do very efficient lighting.”