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DC: Right.
MW: If they have a kind of conceptual concern it is that the task force itself is weighted with industry veterans. To what extent are the environmental concerns addressed and voiced inside of your regular meetings?
DC: Well, I think you've got a broad cross-section of opinion there, and certainly the debates we have over what we ought to do in various areas don't reflect unanimity of opinion. By the way, we have pretty good arguments in there over how we ought to proceed, what kind of recommendations we ought to make on various issues. And also spending time at the table is Christie Todd Whitman, the EPA administrator, who I think is pretty well known for her views and her institutional responsibility and statutory responsibilities to implement our environmental laws. Same for Gail Norton, the Secretary of the Interior. I mean we are a diverse group that the President has pulled together in his Administration. To say we're all industry veterans — I certainly wouldn't accept that characterization, but I also think it's important to have people at the table who do know something about the energy business. After all, that's what we're trying to address.
MW: Yesterday some of the task force reps met with the coal industry. Are there going to be meetings like that with other groups, including environmentalists?
DC: Well, we're still in the process of preparing the report, but as we get closer to the date when we think we've got a product to take to the President and he's ready to make decisions, then we clearly are going to want to have a fairly comprehensive rollout of the proposal. We'll want to talk to any group that wants to hear from us. And I can't believe there's anybody out there we won't talk to.
MW: Why was the coal industry chosen first to talk to?
DC: I don't know that they were chosen first. We met with the environmental groups. I know the staff did back in early April, three or four weeks ago.
MW: Yes, but not at this juncture...
DC: It's a continuous process. You know, there's a certain time urgency in terms of trying to get something done in reasonable order here. But I don't think anybody's discriminating for or against anybody in that process of talking with outside groups. We've talked with a lot of them.
AZ: Mr. Vice President, coal is certainly the most plentiful domestic resource that we have and by some accounting measures it's also one of the cheaper ones. How does coal fit into your plan, and is it wise, considering the environmental problems associated with coal and the years that it could take for clean coal technology to solve the problem, to have a big role for coal, if that's what it is?
DC: Well, coal is important. You start with a proposition that about 52% of all our electric generating capacity in the country today is coal-fired. So it's already a very, very important part of our energy situation. One of the things that it's important to keep in mind is that we estimate that some 1300 to 1900 new generating facilities will be required over the next 20 years. But say the conservative estimate of some 1300 power plants works out to about 65 power plants per year. Some of those are bound to be coal-fired. And coal's important because that technology is well developed. It's also affordable. It's one of the lowest cost forms of energy we've got out there. We've already invested a lot in terms of Clean Air Act and success implementing the Clean Air Act and reducing emissions from coal-fired plants. We need to do more. The President's recommended to the Congress that we spend some $2 billion next year on clean coal technology, finding ways to make coal an even cleaner fuel to burn in the future. So I expect it will be important going forward.
A lot of the emphasis is going to be on natural gas. And currently the expectation is, in terms of people planning future power plants, that as much as 90% of that future generating capacity will be gas-fired. And, what that does of course, is that then raises questions of where are we going to get the gas. There's a lot of it out there. But it needs to be developed. You have to go find it. You've got to produce it. You've got to process it. You've got to build pipelines to get it to the power plants. You've got to invest. For example, we estimate some 38,000 miles of new gas pipelines over the next 20 years if you're going to have that kind of reliance on natural gas. Gas is attractive, partly because it's a relatively clean-burning fuel. So there are environmental reasons for going with gas. But both gas and coal also do emit carbon dioxide when you burn them. That in turn gets us over to looking at this whole question of whether or not we ought to go back and reconsider nuclear plants and new nuclear technologies as a way of addressing some of our future demand for electric power while at the same time reducing the problem of greenhouse emissions and possibly global warming.