Natural Resources committee  Yes. The one point I would make is that the Environmental Protection Agency announced yesterday, in response to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling of some years ago, that they were fully prepared to regulate greenhouse gases, including tailpipe emissions as one of those.

Natural Resources committee  For the CBED program that I mentioned in Minnesota, I couldn't give you the exact rate on that, but I believe it's the sale price that the utility provides plus some incentive payment. We can get you that information. I think that's something that I can find readily available and send to your committee staff.

Natural Resources committee  I'm simply not in a position to be able to answer that. I don't know.

Natural Resources committee  I think the world needs to know about whether or not carbon capture sequestration works or doesn't work. For the global economy that question is especially important, given that China, for the last number of years, has been building and commissioning a coal-fired power plant every single week of every year.

Natural Resources committee  Yes, it did, and it was largely driven by the fact that over the last half dozen years or so, 28 individual states in the U.S. passed their own renewable electricity standards. That's roughly the equivalent of passing a federal 12% standard, I think it is. As a result of that, a growing set of markets was created at the state level that brought in a lot of investment in wind-generated electricity, and that was reflected in a big rise in employment in the industry, the opening up of at least a dozen new factories last year producing parts or assemblage of wind turbines here in the U.S.

Natural Resources committee  Likewise; I am uncertain about the extent of methane capture. I certainly have heard the District Energy St. Paul experts talk about methane as something that Europeans are much more interested in than I've heard developed here in the United States. But again, I have no specific knowledge about that.

Natural Resources committee  That system is exactly what was set up in my state of Minnesota through the state-mandated community-based economic development program. This program required utilities in rural parts of the state to buy back the excess generation from individual wind turbines that were installed by small farmers.

Natural Resources committee  Yes, on your last point, there certainly do continue to be siting issues for various reasons. Either local residents or conservation advocates have found reasons that particular wind turbine farm sites have been unattractive to them. I would certainly say that by and large the siting for wind farms in the U.S. has been far, far less contentious than the siting for traditional fossil fuel or nuclear power plants has been.

Natural Resources committee  Sure, I can speak briefly to that. Primarily, on the state level there are currently solar programs that provide financing mechanisms and rebates for individual homeowners who install photovoltaic systems on their homes. And in talking to people in the solar industry itself, they really have lived and died on the extension of these state-based solar tax credits for the last number of years.

Natural Resources committee  I agree that providing some level of market certainty is the critical issue that the economy needs to see. It also is true that putting a price on carbon will create at least an initial round of investment revenues that we can use, if we choose them wisely, to jump-start the bringing of certain renewable technologies and efficiency technologies up to the scale that makes them truly viable in a market economy.

Natural Resources committee  Well, again, a great question. I think it's essential that we link those two. We're at a moment in which the model of the global economy that we were running showed that it was literally and absolutely unsustainable. In 2008 we saw a run-up on natural resource prices in everything from oil to bauxite to alumina to copper to cement.

Natural Resources committee  That's a great question, Mr. Hyer, and the one that in many ways I think is the most important question all of us in the industrialized world should attempt to answer this year in the lead-up to the Copenhagen negotiations. As you know, I have spent most of my adult life in factory towns and among factory workers, listening to their concerns during a period of prolonged instability.

Natural Resources committee  Thank you very much for that question. First of all, yes, there certainly is recognition of the importance of worker training and retraining, both as part of the strategy of implementation of the transformation to the clean energy economy and as a response to changes in the economy overall, making some skills in some parts of the country redundant and requiring other skills in other parts of the country for economic expansion.

Natural Resources committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee. My name is David Foster. Currently I serve as executive director of the Blue Green Alliance, a partnership of four unions and two national environmental organizations with over six million members, touching virtually every community in the United States.