On the recordJuly 9, 2014
Reclaiming my time, Mr. Chairman, I also oppose the amendment. While I opposed increasing EERE funding in previous amendments, I am also opposed to eliminating EERE. When you look at the traditional energy sources that we use, the government has done research into the fossil fuels, into nuclear energy, into fracking, into other things, and hydrocarbons because they are important. It is not the companies that we try to pick winners and losers from, but it is the technology that we try to do the research into, to try to advance certain technologies and help technologies become more efficient for the consumers to use. We are trying to make automobiles more fuel efficient. We are trying to do work to make a SuperTruck that is much more fuel efficient. I guess it could be argued whether the government should do any research at all. Years and years ago, a lot of those things used to be done by private companies, when you had the Bell Labs and other types of things like that. Those aren't done anymore by companies because they are much, much too expensive for companies to do, but they are good for our economy. You could make the argument that we really shouldn't have put any money into space research and putting a man on the Moon--that should have been done by a private company--yet the American economy and the world has benefited greatly from the investment that American taxpayers made into NASA. The same is true with the fuels that we use.…
