Dear Members of Congress:

Business Roundtable strongly supports Congressional action on energy. We are pleased that both the Senate and House have made a serious commitment to enacting energy legislation this year but believe that substantial work will be required to complete the job successfully.

Supply constraints and geopolitical uncertainties coupled with surging global demand have created a challenging energy environment for U.S. consumers and businesses. Our CEOs have ranked energy costs as one of their highest concerns, second only to health care costs. With crude oil prices increasing to over $90 a barrel, these cost pressures are only becoming more intense.

The Roundtable recently released a comprehensive vision for America's energy future. It is entitled More Diverse, More Domestic, More Efficient to reflect our strong belief that the U.S. must pursue a broad array of strategies to increase energy supply while reducing demand. Our mix of energy sources must be both more diverse and more domestic to enhance our long-term energy security. Energy efficiency should be an overriding goal in all sectors of our economy.

We applaud many aspects of the energy bills passed by the two bodies but are concerned that they do not fully embody this comprehensive three-pronged approach:

• We support the emphasis in both bills on energy efficiency and would urge Congress to go further by adding strong energy efficiency goals and incentives for existing and new residential and commercial buildings.
• Strengthening CAFE standards can play an important role in improving vehicle fuel economy, but the CAFE increases in the Senate bill are unrealistic and will impose hardship on the domestic auto industry and American consumers. We support the provisions of the Hill/Terry CAFE bill introduced in the House.
• The two bills fail to increase domestic energy supplies. In the case of the House bill, domestic production will be discouraged due to increasing taxes on U.S. oil and gas producers and erecting new barriers to domestic energy production. These tax increases should be dropped from the final legislation.
• We support increasing energy diversity by encouraging greater use of renewable energy sources for transportation and electricity generation but are concerned that the mandates and timelines for increased renewable use in both bills are too inflexible and fail to recognize limitations in available technology.
• We support the Senate bill’s provisions to establish strategic energy partnerships with major consuming and producing nations and believe they should be carried forward into the final legislation.
• We likewise support the provisions of both bills which accelerate development of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology, which will enable increased use of coal-based energy resources in a carbon constrained world.

The background paper below further explains Business Roundtable’s position.

We look forward to working with Congress to develop legislation that will take important steps toward strengthening America’s energy future.

Sincerely,

Michael G. Morris
Chairman, President and CEO
American Electric Power Company, Inc.
Chairman, Energy Task Force
Business Roundtable