'China Is Dramatically Ahead Of Us': Cliff Bentz Warns China Is Beating The U.S. In The AI Race

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During a House Natural Resources Committee hearing on Tuesday, Rep. Cliff Bentz (R-OR) spoke about the competition between the U.S. and China in the artificial intelligence space.

Transcript

00:00The chair recognizes a gentleman from Oregon, Mr. Benz, for five minutes.

00:04Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you witnesses for being here today.

00:09Mr. Campbell, I had the good fortune to represent, as an attorney for a period of time,

00:17Idaho Power Company. It was engaged in trying to relicense its privately held dams on the Snake River.

00:24Not the four of you generally hear about environmentalists trying to remove on the lower reaches of that river.

00:30And that process has taken something like 20 years.

00:34If everyone saw the intersection of policy arguments with trying to get something done in that space, that's it.

00:43Although I think that's kind of what you guys are all hinting at here,

00:47that we have the fight that goes on in court and the fight that goes on in the hearings.

00:53And all of this seems to be a mixture of policymaking combined with trying to actually build something.

01:02I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out exactly where best to attack this problem.

01:06But my question to you is this.

01:08You say in your testimony that we are facing a crisis of shortage of electricity.

01:14I've heard it over and over and over and over again, driven in significant part by artificial intelligence.

01:20We see that China is dramatically ahead of us when it comes to electrical generation.

01:27Something like 86 gigawatts of coal created this year or within the last year in China.

01:36Where are we now?

01:39Well, we're still fighting through these kinds of mixtures of policy debate versus building something.

01:45My question to you is what would you suggest that we do first in this space?

01:52I don't expect a magic bullet.

01:55But I want to know what is it that we should focus on, in your opinion, to try to get out of the quagmire that we have created.

02:03And as an attorney, I understand it better than most.

02:05But give us your best shot at what we should do.

02:10So you're absolutely correct.

02:11And we need power in this country.

02:15And I've never seen load growth like we're seeing right now.

02:18And data centers are a big driver.

02:20They're the hyperscalers.

02:21We have one in our territory that's load that I've never even dreamed of that we would have.

02:27I think we have to serve that load.

02:30And I think data centers and AI, we have to win this battle.

02:35We can't lose this to China.

02:37And that is we need to build generation.

02:40And in my opinion, with the NEPA process, we're not suggesting do away with it.

02:44We all want to be good stewards of the environment.

02:48However, we think there needs to be time limits.

02:50Let's have time limits on the litigation.

02:53Let's have time limits on all the agencies getting information done.

02:57Because we need projects.

02:59And we need them yesterday.

03:00We're already behind in this country.

03:03And without the ability to move quickly, we're going to be in trouble in this country.

03:09I see a catastrophic event happening in the future.

03:11No, we had a situation in Oregon where land use planning had stalled out the construction of prisons.

03:17And suddenly we were overwhelmed by the challenge of finding a place to put people who had committed crimes.

03:22No place to house them.

03:24So the permitting process was set aside and the prisons were built.

03:29Is that what you're suggesting should happen here?

03:31Could you repeat that question?

03:33So what happened, we set aside the process in Oregon because there was no way we were going to get a prison built in the next 10 to 15 years.

03:42So the process went to the side, the prison got built.

03:45Is that what you're suggesting we should do in this electrical space, this generation space?

03:50I'm sorry.

03:50I'm not suggesting do away with the process.

03:53I'm saying modify the process so you have an end date, right?

03:56I mean, what you don't want to do, in my personal opinion, is find certain things that you're going to circumvent doing everything.

04:05Because we all want to protect the environment.

04:07But they need a limit, right?

04:09So you can build that prison when you need that prison.

04:11Not let people pervert the process.

04:14I appreciate that and your thoughts.

04:16I want to go to Mr. Harrogate for just a moment.

04:18Section 7 of the ESA is being perverted and used as an extortionary device to force people who are trying to get permits

04:26or get through these processes to pay exorbitant sums of money to state agencies,

04:31which they can then use in any way they like.

04:34And they just basically have to buy their way around the process in that fashion, right?

04:39Because they're setting the process aside and just saying, give us a bunch of money.

04:42We'll use it to offset whatever damage you're doing.

04:44Is that the solution?

04:47Mitigation can work in many situations.

04:48But the reality is that a project developer in that situation, a habitat, has to get everything right

04:53and has to take care of all scenarios.

04:54And to take a project down, you only need to prevail on one theory and one thing in it all.

04:58And because this is a risk-based standard.

05:01And so there are discretionary decisions being made about objective laws.

05:05And when you have a situation like that, that is based on real people making subjective decisions

05:09based on what they think and what they feel, afraid of what they're going to be sued on,

05:13then you do not get an informed permitting process.

05:16You get overbilled and you get fear-based decision-making.

05:20We yield back.

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