Report from Santa Fe; Tom Udall

Report from Santa Fe is made possible in part by a grant from New Mexico Tech on the Frontier of Science and Engineering Education. For bachelors, masters, and PhD degrees, New Mexico Tech is the college you've been looking for, 1-800-428-T-E-C-H. And by a grant from the Healy Foundation, Taos, New Mexico. I'm Lorraine Mills and welcome to report from Santa Fe. Our guest today is Santa their Tom Udall, Democrat representing the entire state of New Mexico. Welcome. Thank you, Lorraine. It's great to be with you. And you do such a good job, I think, informing citizens, New Mexicans of the crucial issues that are facing our state. And I thank you for doing that. Well, we have so many crucial issues, but I want to get to your experience if I can. What's the difference now between you? Well, let's talk a little bit your 17th

New Mexico Saniter. You served for 20 years as our own attorney general here in New Mexico and then as our U.S. Representative. And now you are a Senator. What's the difference between being in the House and then the Senate? Well, there are a couple of obvious differences. First of all, you have 435 House members. You don't have designated seats or anything. And in the Senate, it's much smaller. It's more intimate. And there are actual desks that have your name on them. And then one of the interesting things about it is that your desk has a little document telling every Senator all the way back to the beginning of the country who has held the desk that you have. And then at some point, you take your pen and you put your signature in the desk and it's supposed to be there for all time. So it's a great place to be. The reason I really love being there is I think I'm better able to help New Mexico with a lot of the challenges that we face. Well, indeed, indeed you are, but

it must be you must feel the mantle of history on you even more now that you're in the Senate. Well, I do feel the mantle of history. And one of the things we have happened at the Senate Caucus is when we meet on a weekly basis, we have the Senate historian come in and pick a moment. Usually it's the day that we're on of some great thing that happened on that day in Senate history. And so you learn a lot about the previous senators. You know, one of the other differences too is you don't need to fight for time very much on the Senate floor. In the House, the thing that used to happen is they tell you you had three minutes and when you got to the floor, it had been half to a minute and a half and by the time you stood up, been divided again and you got 45 seconds in the Senate, you're able to go down to the floor and get time and it can get competitive when there are hot issues there. But it's known as the great deliberative body and I look forward to engaging in some of those debates. I think we need to have more deliberative debates about the big issues

facing the country. Now, we'll get to those of the issues, but just the difference between the old administration, the previous administration and the new administration. Is it a sea change like they tell us? We're here in New Mexico. Give us the report from Washington. Lorraine, it is absolutely a sea change. I mean, this new president, Barack Obama, is so engaged, he has put together just in the first couple of months a legislative agenda that's transformative. It's going to take us in a whole new direction. He wants to invest in clean energy. He wants to do remarkable things in terms of health care and education. And it's like the dams have been opened up and there's just this huge surge of activity going on. You know, President Bush held us up on quite a few things. For example, the Lilly Ledbetter Act, which provides for equal pay for women, was held up. And we were able to then get it up. And it's one of the first bills signed by the president. We've signed

children's health insurance. The president signed that. We passed it. So we've had some good constructive things happen that were blocked by the last administration. Now we now will get to some of these major issues. Let's talk about the Icon Economic Recovery Act. You had an amendment that was put on onto the big bill to help returning veterans find work. So that's really a landmark achievement. Well, it was a wonderful thing to be able to work with Max Baucus, who is the chairman of that committee. And Max had put in some veterans. And when you looked at the numbers, it seemed like all the 9-11 veterans had the biggest problem with unemployment, returning and finding employment. And so we created an amendment that took care of all of those veterans. And it's going to be gratifying to me when I start running into people on the street that end up telling me that what's happened is that, and I expect a veteran

will tell me this in the next couple of months. I've been hired as a result of a law passed by Congress that would allow businesses to get a tax credit for hiring unemployed veterans. And I expect to run into that situation in New Mexico. I really do. Well, I want to look at history a little bit, because you were one of the original people who voted against the Iraq War from the beginning. That's right. That's right. And so how does this plan for responsible deployment, how is that taking the troops home? How do you feel about this finally coming about? Well, it's been so long since we went into Iraq. And we saw the difficulties that our troops had. And the first thing I want to say is, I went to Iraq with Senator McCain, and we visited with troops. And I visited with troops outside of Iraq that have been to Iraq both here in New Mexico and around the world. And they are fighting in very, very

difficult circumstances. And so we need to make sure that we honor their service as the first thing. And when we say that mistakes were made and the policy wasn't right, and we rushed into this situation, that goes to the commander-in-chief, not to the troops. And so I am so glad that we had an election. We fought it out on Iraq. The President said we're going to the current President, Barack Obama said in the campaign, we're going to move in a new direction. We're going to disengage in Iraq. We're going to focus on Afghanistan. And focus on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, where Al-Qaeda is hiding and where they're planning attacks against us. And so this will allow the two fronts of that policy to occur, wind down in Iraq and focus in Afghanistan, where the threat was all along. You know, my belief is that President Bush should have stayed in Afghanistan, should

have got the job done, should have captured Osama bin Laden, and put that whole issue to rest, and wiped out Al-Qaeda. And unfortunately, we took that detour into Iraq. Now another thing that you're so well known, the whole issue of green jobs and green energy, your maiden speech on the Senate floor was about RES, renewable, electric, standards. Yeah, the renewable electricity. You've been doing that since 2002, you got it through the House, but so now tell us what that is and what's happening with green energy, nationally and in New Mexico. Well, one of the things that I'm the proudest of is that the bills that have made it through the House and the Senate have both been authored by two New Mexicans. Senator Jeff Bingham and three times has gotten a renewable electricity proposal out of the Senate. And I was able last year to get one out of the House. And what that means is we set up a market so that let's a county in Southern New Mexico that has great solar resources. They are going

to be able to sell nationwide. And we're going to have companies come here, manufacture solar, create utility scale, solar plants, hire people, manufacturing jobs. These are jobs that will not be outsourced. I mean, these are going to be the jobs of the future. And so I'm just very excited that New Mexico's front and center on wind and solar and biomass and geothermal, if we create this national market. And that's what the renewable electricity standard does is push us towards a national market so that New Mexico can sell the great and abundant resources of renewable energy that we have. You have mentioned Luna County, particularly as a focus for that. And tell our- Well, I picked Luna as an example because they're down right near the border. They have incredible solar resources. But much of New Mexico has great solar resources. We're seeing

solar development around, Albuquerque. We're seeing geothermal projects that have been started and there's a lot going on in New Mexico on the renewable energy front. Now, you- your father is Stuart Udall, the former cabinet secretary for the interior under both Kennedy and Johnson. And he had done so much with- with these green environmental ideas so long ago. You and he did an interview with me together talking about the peak oil crisis. And we're going to want some of that in a minute. But I'd like you to just explain to you- you wrote an article in- in 2004 or 2006 what every American should know about peak oil. Just tell us a short version of peak oil. And then we'll look a little about a conversation with you and your dad about peak oil. You bet. Well, the- the- the real issue here is how much oil do we have and how much have we've used. And if we've about approached using one half of the oil in the world. Now we're talking in the world. We know in the United States of America we reached peak

back in 1970. We used half and we're on the downward side. And so now we are reaching that peak in the world. We don't know whether it's four years out, eight years out, how many years out. But- but we need to prepare for it. It may take decades to prepare because this price could skyrocket and it could have a severe impact on our economy. So peak oil is really talking about preparing for the new energy future. It's- it's not an argument over when do we exactly reach the point that we've reached half. You know many of the experts say we're already there. And if that's true then we're not doing the things we need to do to protect our clean energy future. Well, let's take a little look at you and your father Stuart Udall talking about energy issues and the peak oil crisis. Let's just take a minute and look. Great. The- what peak is all about is your maximum production. It's when you start down on the curve and you're never going to produce more than that again. And for example today

the world uses 84 million barrels a day of oil. At some point in time it may be 90 million, it may be 100 million, maybe 86 million. We reach peak and from then on the world will never produce more oil. We're on the downward slope. And- and if we're approaching peak which many experts believe now we need to plan for it. And the wonderful thing you mentioned to tie this in, you mentioned about dad. The forgotten founders growing up with a father who- snows history and studies history and was at the Department of Interior which had a big influence over oil. He ran the oil program for the country, the oil import program. I learned a lot about what had happened with oil. And so I went into Congress with that background and when Roscoe said- it told me about what peak oil was about. I thought, well you know let's start a caucus, a bipartisan caucus, Republican and Democrat. And try

to educate people that were facing this- this possible- there will be a peak, an imminent peak of oil in my predictions the next four to eight years. And when that happens we better be prepared for it. But we've had this call to action before. Haven't we steward? We had, you know, you were talking about your meetings with the oil people back in the Eisenhower time. And then there was the 70s oil energy crisis. And why do people choose to slumber? Well, we've had a history of following myths about oil. And I was involved in the 60s. But when the OPEC nations, the oil-producing nations put an embargo on in 1973, President Nixon said, oh this is bad. We can't be that vulnerable. We're going to have a policy of energy independence. He said, by 1980, President Ford later raised it to 1985 and that

sort of disappeared. But every president talks about energy independence, but we become more and more dependent. And 58% of the oil we use in this country is imported oil. The other thing we ought to be worried about is when we hit this so-called peak, are we prepared to be more thrifty? Are we prepared to live with energy being expensive? You know, the era that Dad's talking about is the era of cheap energy. And we've had a lot of that and we've grown used to it. And his generation had a thriftiness that we need to learn about again and become thrifty. Because we're approaching a point in our history where we need to make some serious changes. Well, we're really right, as Tom and Sandworth, we're right in and near this point. You

know, the oil, as it comes out, is a bell curve. It'll go up and it'll reach the peak and then it goes down. There's only so much oil. It's a finite resource. And that's looming in the last summer and fall with Katrina and all the rest of this. Oil price, what gasoline went up to $3, over $3. And what if it goes up to $5, $10? And that's what Matt Simmons, this Texas oil expert, who's a friend of mine, wrote an article with him a few months ago. And he says that Saudi Arabia doesn't have a big surplus and they're getting near peak, Tom. Well, that's a thing to do.

Lorin, to give you an example of the kinds of pressures that we could be under. One of the major networks just ran a scenario that said, let's say within a year, a year time frame, that you had a terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia and that disabled several million barrels a day out of their production of, I think, they're at about 10 million. So you knock out there, you have a hurricane like Katrina that hits Houston in the same year and knocks out oil and gas there. The refineries. The refineries and you knock out another couple of million barrels. So you're talking five, five, six million barrels somewhere in that range. And the network said, well, where do we find it? Where do we go to make that up? And their conclusion was, we don't have that excess in the system. We're right up to the edge right now. And they were talking about $8, a gallon gasoline. And the price of a barrel of oil of $100. And so you can see we're in a tight market now as we approach

peak, it's going to get tighter. And unless we change our habits and move in a new direction and be aggressive about this, we're the economy that's the most dependent on this. We're going to be shocked. We're the most vulnerable. This, our reliance on imported oil will become an Achilles heel to use that expression for this country because the shops are going to run through the whole system. But I read some of your essays about the peak oil caucus and you end up with this really inspiring and passionate comparison to the Kennedy call for the race to put a man on the moon. And I think you call for creative. And you wanted all Americans to put their, their muscle and their ingenuity into finding a way to have alternative energy sources to conserve and what else? Well, we, we need, and you, you've said a lot of it, they're luring. We need a president

that will galvanize us around this central issue that confronts us. And, and it needs to be done in a way where, where people realize that there's a national purpose to this. As far as research, there needs to be a massive effort to research the areas that, that have potential. Many, there are many areas that are out there that we think we could pursue, but we haven't, we haven't focused enough and we haven't had a national program that, that looks at that. So the science and math are very, very important. We don't have as many students, engineering. We need to get these people into the fields. It's only a president that can, I think, excite the country around this kind of mission. You've got to have a, a president who has a plan and has goals. President Ford, been very good, President Carter. He had the energy. He had a big program. It turned out to be not

very smart, but he had one, but, but we have to have goals that all the country realizes. And, let me, let me just give you one thing. It takes about 12 years, I've read, Tom, to replace our automobile fleet in this country. If we had started 12 years ago, though, the automobile companies now are moving in the direction of smaller cars, 30 miles a gallon. If, if we can double the amount, if we can double the amount of gasoline that's needed, the amount of gasoline that's needed. In efficiency, it would give us tremendous independence from being smacked by this hard, as hard as we're going to be, I'm afraid. And the key there, Lorraine, is the fact that, you know, if we know the things to do,

they still take a long time to achieve. And as we said with the automobile industry, we're talking 10, 12, 15 years to turn the fleet over. So even if today you say, we're going to have all cars that drive 50 miles per gallon and that's your goal, you can't do it for 15 years. If you say that power companies are going to operate completely differently with coal, it takes 25 to 30 years to amortize the cost of a power plant that you're putting in. So we're talking about having to look long term and do the planning. And the thing here is not to scare everybody. It's to turn people around and say, let's get focused and undertake this task and do it now. I really enjoy seeing that because you both have been so visionary for so long. And you had even once, I love the part about you're having a call, just like Kennedy said, we must have a man on the moon in 10 years. You gave a call even back then years ago that

we should put our energy into conservation. We should have a using Yankee ingenuity in the American genius to call upon creative ways to conserve more energy and to harness new sources of energy. So thank you for all that you've brought to us. But now it's really happening. You know, the thing that is so exciting is to see this economic and recovery package that's been passed $80 billion. So almost a tenth of that package is dedicated to various forms of moving us forward on renewable energy. And the president now wants to pass. He said a major part of his legislative agenda is to get a renewable electricity standard, which I will work for it closely with Senator Binghamon on. And we are going to embark in a new direction on energy that's going to protect this country. I mean, we are so dependent on foreign oil now. And every year, we get more dependent. And the thing that is going

to happen, if we continue down that path, is it hurts our economy, it hurts our national security, it hurts the environment. Well, we move in a new direction and it can be a completely different way of developing in its our jobs, our future. It bolsters our national security, bolsters our economy. And bolsters, they are our ability to really be a move us on a path of energy independence. And something that you've done over the years, also you've called for reworking the mission of our national labs. Here we've got genius scientists. We've got intellectual and financial resources. And you've called if we could modify their mission a little bit to to exploring new forms of energy, be it hydrogen fuel sales, be it who knows what lies ahead. Well, these national laboratories in New Mexico and the other ones outside of New Mexico are national treasures. And they they have wonderful scientists. They can tackle any of these

big problems that we've talked about. We just need to to give them the mission and say go out and do it. And that's what I've been working on for a while is to work with Cindy and National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory to turn those scientists loose on these big challenges and scientific problems that we face. Among your committee assignments, you're also on the Indian Affairs Committee, which is wonderful because 10% of our population is Native American. So you recently put in a bill that I was so moved by and upset by the youth suicide. Oh, yes. Oh, I'm so sorry, but tell our audience a little about that. Oh, sure. Well, one of the thing we had a hearing in Washington, it's a report every couple of years to try to find out where we are on youth suicide and where we need to go. And so we we had before us some family members who had lost daughters or sons and much of the discussion was talking about suicide.

In fact, Harry Reid, our leader in the Senate, his father committed suicide when he was young. And so he told a very moving story about it and said, this is something we need to talk about publicly. My cousin, Gordon Smith, who was the United States Senator, he lost his son. And as a result of that, a law was passed called the Garrett Lee Smith Suicide Prevention Act. And that act now provides money at the local level so that you can have suicide hotlines so that young people have someone to talk to and trying to get the institutions that are out there to put in place the protocols and things that need to be done to prevent this. And we heard some very, very sad stories in the committee and we hope that we're now taking the actions to make sure that we move down a path of prevention. Well, you're working on so many levels, you know, with the green energy and the economic

stimulus and the Indian affairs. And, you know, I always I think of you as being such a fighter for environmental issues. So I want to thank you. But tell our audience just briefly what we can do in this new age is things are changing. Should we conserve? Remember, you know, Mr. Rogers put on his little sweater, you know, what can the people in New Mexico do? Well, I think the best thing that people can do is to get involved and stay involved. I mean, one of the important things you do is reach out to New Mexicans and give them information and they can take that information and get involved at all levels of government. It is the big things that are going to happen to us aren't just going to be in Washington. They're going to be at the state level and the local level and the city level and citizens need to be involved at every one of those stages to make sure that their voice is heard and that they hold accountable the people they elect to office. I mean, that's the most important thing is you don't just have an election every four years or two years or six

years. What you do is you elect someone who you're going to then stay on top of and give advice to and say these things aren't working. We need to change direction and give real input. And that's a big part of what Barack Obama is talking about on this economic recovery package is saying the citizens need to hold us accountable. And we're going to give them the information. We're going to say this is the way the money is being spent. We want them to look at the local level and make sure it's being spent wisely. And so that's true citizen democracy. That's what we need to see. Well, as our new elected senator, we are so grateful. I know the demands on your time are great so that you were able to make a little time for our people in report from Santa Fe. I just hope that you'll come back the next time you're in town. Please let's do another show. I would love to. And as I said, this show I think helps citizens get involved in their democracy and make a difference. And so thank you, Lorraine, for that.

Our guest today is Senator Tom Udall, Democrat representing the state of New Mexico. Thank you for joining us. Thank you. Real pleasure. Real pleasure. And I'm Lorraine Mills. It's been a pleasure to have you our audience with us today on report from Santa Fe. We'll see you next week. Report from Santa Fe is made possible in part by a grant from New Mexico Tech on the frontier of science and engineering education for bachelor's, master's and PhD degrees. New Mexico Tech is the college you've been looking for 1-800-428-TECH. And by a grant from the Healy Foundation, Tau's New Mexico.