State Representative Mark Strama (D-Austin) discussed the need for Texas to take the lead in alternative energy research and a wide range of other issues before the Texas Legislature during his appearance in the Texas Politics Speaker Series on February 26, 2009.

Dean Randy Diehl: Well I'm absolutely delighted to be here today to welcome State Representative Mark Strama to the Texas Politics Speaker Series. He has represented the fiftieth district in the Texas House since 2004, and just a few weeks ago was named chair of the House committee on technology, economic development, and work force. Representative Strama has been a great friend to students at the University of Texas and other young people, with his innovative campaign academies, and his hosting of UT interns in his office and campaigns. Representative Strama is widely seen as one of a new generation of political leaders in the state, though he has been involved in politics for the better part of twenty years. Before being elected to office, he worked for Ann Richards' successful 1990 gubernatorial campaign, he served as chief of staff for State Senator Rodney Ellis, and then worked for the very successful Rock the Vote campaign, which wound up registering five hundred thousand new voters while he was on the job. He was then one of the early pioneers in the effort to facilitate online voter registration. As a legislator, Representative Strama has been engaged with a wide variety of issues, but has become increasingly known for his interest in, and expertise in technology and energy. He's here to talk to us today about technology in Texas. Please join me in welcoming Representative Mark Strama.

(Applause.)

Representative Mark Strama: Thank you all for coming out. This is actually a really pretty cool crowd, I have to say. For those of you who are standing by the door, I actually like that effect. Because even if I stink, y'all can't get out inconspicuously. There's no hiding it, if you try to get up in the middle, they're like gonna make it hard for you to be inconspicuous leaving. But if you're ending up sitting on the floor anyway, you might as well come sit up in this space up here if you want to. I was kind of startled when I arrived and saw, I don't know, have you all seen this thing going around the campus? This is kind of a funny thing to just see your face on the, plastered on the billboards around campus when you come on campus. When I started working at Rock the Vote, I have to say my mom thought I was crazy. Why do you want to go work for MTV and the music industry, and all that Hollywood stuff? She just thought it wasn't a real job. She was totally dismayed that I had taken what turned out to be the most fun job I'm ever gonna have, it was really cool. And so I kept trying to tell her no really, Rock the Vote's a big deal, I mean it's a big thing. So one day I called her and I was like listen mom, turn on CNN. In half an hour I'm doing a show on CNN with like three members of Congress. And she was still totally unimpressed. She was like I don't get it, why do they want to talk to you? You work for this stupid organization. And so then a couple of weeks later I was invited to be the guest speaker at Harvard's Institute of Politics. They do this Pizza and Politics thing on Tuesday nights. And I got to Harvard, and my name was up on this poster all over campus, Rock the Vote's Mark Strama, with the Harvard insignia on it. So I stole one off the wall and I sent it to my mom, and she was finally sort of took my job seriously at that point. She was like well that's pretty cool. So I'm gonna send her this now. It is, how many of you all are actually interning at the capital, or have previously interned at the capital? So a lot of you all know what's going on over there? Thanks for coming out today. I'm gonna talk a little bit about the new committee that I chair. It's actually a new committee. There has always been an economic development committee, but now it's technology, economic development, and work force. It's the first time the state of Texas has had a committee with technology as a very specific charge. And it's a reflection of the evolution that's occurred in this state's economy over the past thirty years. And it's an honor to be chairing that first time committee, representing Austin, because Austin really has benefited so much from the emergence of high tech as such a vibrant part of our economy. And it is in my own background professionally. When I left Rock the Vote, I founded a company here in Austin. I actually co-founded a company called Charity Gift, which was like gift certificates for charity that you could buy online and give to people for their birthday, or any special occasion. And then I founded a company called NewVoter.com, which was the first company to let people fill out a voter registration form over the internet. And in the 2000 election cycle, seven hundred thousand Americans used our technology to register to vote. Which is to say that in my early thirties I had registered almost as many voters as Jessie Jackson, and I hadn't worked nearly as hard as he had to do it. I mean if you think about how hard it would have been to register seven hundred thousand people in one election cycle using the traditional means, going door to door, think how many shoes you would have worn out, marshaling volunteers and setting up tables on campuses. Think how many volunteers you would have had to coordinate. But with the power of the internet, we were able to program a little software, put it on a server, propagate it to a bunch of different websites, and it happened almost magically after that. Never broke a sweat. Pretty amazing power in technology. And I believe that there are a lot of areas of society where we still haven't unleashed the transformative power of technology, one of which, in my opinion, it's ironic to say this as three different cameras are aimed at me under these bright lights, is in education. As, when I walk into a public school classroom in Texas today, it looks a lot like the public school classroom I graduated from in Texas twenty one years ago. And the technology that has changed the business processes of everything else we do hasn't changed very much the way we educate children in Texas public schools. If you look at the ways technology has changed the other aspects of our life, the defining characteristics of that change are increased productivity, reduced costs, and empowerment of the end user. Right? Precisely the types of change we want to bring to K through twelve education, and struggle to. And imagine how transformative it could be in education if we could just give each kid access to the interactive and individualized instruction available over the internet, or just using a computer. I believe that is one of the things that we really need to address ourselves to, and we have a once in a lifetime opportunity to address it now. I, like many of you probably, read the news reports about the stimulus package, and wasn't sure what to make of it. Because there was a lot of coverage from people whom I respect, who said this is, this is just flowing money without strategy. This is money that is gonna hit the economy one time, but not leave any lasting legacy. That was the critique of the stimulus package. The more I see of it now in the legislature, the more I, and for those of you who are interning at the capital this session, really you are gonna see something this session you'll never see again. We are at an inflection point. We can make choices that can change the way we do things forever. We can make investments with this money, because ultimately the rap about that stimulus package was wrong. It gives a great deal of latitude to us at the states to use that money in ways that genuinely transform the way we do business. We can spend this money, and it can be a one time hit for the economy, and we can hope that it resuscitates economic growth, and grow the economy enough that we can afford to pay back the debt we're using to stimulate the economy. And that's a sort of a minimalistic approach to this. Or we can be so smart about the way we invest this money that we leave behind from this money a more educated and productive work force that has very little difficulty paying back the debt, that we leave behind an energy consumption infrastructure that consumes so much less fossil fuels that the savings on people's utility bills help them pay back the debt with which we're investing that money today. If we can invest in transportation systems that lubricate economic development in a way that grows our economy so that a trillion dollars of debt is a smaller percentage of GDP than it would be today with GDP declining, if we can turn things around, grow the economy, make it more efficient, make it more productive, make it smarter, then this debt is well worth it, especially in light of the direction the economy is going today. But we could as easily waste this money as use it wisely. It has become increasingly clear to me just in the last forty eight hours that we have very little time, because of the urgency of injecting the money into the economy, we have very little time to figure out how to use it wisely. That's the biggest challenge I think we face right now. And so those of you who have the privilege of being at the capital during this historic time, apply your intellect to that challenge. Because we don't have much time to figure it out. One of the areas where Texas has I think a unique exigency, and a unique need to figure it out is in the area of energy. And I want to talk about this specifically in light of the fact that we're at the University of Texas, a university that was built on, in large part, the revenue derived from oil and gas leases on state owned land. For decades we were able to maintain a world class institution here, with relatively low support from the state compared to what other states have to contribute to maintain a world class institution. And, and I know you students are gonna jump on me about this, but until recently, relatively low tuition, because of the wealth we have in Texas from oil and gas. That prosperity that we've enjoyed as a state from oil and gas ripples throughout our entire economy. In 2006 when we finally passed a school finance bill, after five failed special sessions, with a court order about to shut down the schools, a lot of the credit for solving that problem went to a new tax bill that was adopted. But the biggest reason we solved that problem in 2006 was because we went into that special session with an eight billion dollar surplus, four billion of which came from unanticipated revenues due to the rise in oil and gas prices. When oil and gas went up to, when oil went to a hundred and forty dollars a barrel, as painful as it was for all of us as drivers, for four dollar a gallon gasoline, it was incredible for the state of Texas. It generated extraordinary prosperity. The governor likes to say 70% of new jobs created in the last year were created in Texas. 70% of new jobs in the whole country were created in Texas. It is an incredible statistic. It is a jaw dropping statistic. We need to understand why. And I'm not sure anybody knows exactly why. Some will argue it's because we have a relatively low tax burden in Texas, that undoubtedly has something to do with it. Some will say it is because, and by the way there's a consequence for that low tax burden, we have one of the highest rates of uninsured children, highest rates of children in poverty. One in eight children in Texas go to bed once a week hungry. And some will say it is because we haven't regulated the environment in a way that many states have that has driven out manufacturing and industry from the state. And there's some truth to that too probably, consequences there too. There's evidence that in the Houston ship channel there's much higher rates of childhood Leukemia because of the emissions from some of the manufacturing plants there. Maybe it is because of tort reform adopted in earlier, in the earlier part of this decade. Maybe it is because we have a porous border with Mexico, and we have low cost labor that comes into the state from Mexico, and we have a lot of consumption, churning money through the economy from the constant influx of immigrants from Mexico. There are a lot of different theories, and everybody's ideology tends to dictate what conclusion they reach about the explanation for our prosperity. But I would submit to you the most consistent correlate of prosperity in Texas is probably the price of oil. And we have to recognize that that is not going to drive our prosperity in the next hundred years as it did in the past hundred years. This campus has the best petroleum engineering department in the world. Bar none. Has the best geosciences department in the world. I think unquestioned. If you are growing up anywhere in the world and you know you want to study in those disciplines, and you want to have a career in oil and gas, you come to Texas. We attract the best students. It's created a virtuous circle, because those students going through that outstanding department go on to populate the executive offices of the oil and gas companies. And as proud UT alums, they then contribute large amounts back to those departments, making them even better, attracting even better students, producing even better graduates, populating the executive offices of those oil and gas companies again. A wonderful virtuous circle. But in the past three years, I can point to over eight hundred million dollars that Texas based companies have given to California and Colorado for R and D in renewable energy related disciplines. The same companies that are so generous with us in our petroleum engineering and geosciences departments are choosing to invest elsewhere in the area where the job growth and economic development opportunities of the future are sure to reside. That is a competition we cannot afford to lose. And I would submit to you if we were losing in football to California and Colorado, the way we've been losing some of the opportunities in renewable energy, there would be a clamor for change. And energy is as much in this state's DNA as football. Now I've been talking about this for a little, for a while, but the urgency of us doing something about it is immediate, because of the stimulus money. Barack, there is already tens of billions of dollars in the stimulus package for R and D and renewable related disciplines. And Obama pledged again in his speech to the country, and to the Congress the other night, his commitment to spend fifteen billion dollars a year for the next ten years on this type of R and D. Great. And I'm all for it. Here's the problem. Who's gonna decide where the money goes. It's gonna be awarded competitively. The person making the awards from the Department of Energy is Stephen Chu, the secretary of energy, a product of the faculty of Berkeley, in fact the guy who got BP to spend five hundred million dollars of money that they generated in Texas, and invest it in California. And when he's making his decision, he's looking around the country where he wants to invest, and he's saying well I actually know that the best faculty in this area are the people I hired when I was at Berkeley. Or he's looking at Stanford, that's received hundreds of millions of dollars from Exxon Mobile, or Colorado, that's received millions from Conoco Philips. And he wants to leverage the investments that have already been made, and he wants to send the money where the world renowned faculty already are. And so we're at a competitive disadvantage in competing for those federal grants right now. That is unacceptable to me, and I think to everybody I talk to. So what can we do about it. The good news is there's a lot we can do about it. There's a lot we can do about it. But it has to happen fast. The first thing is we do have a lot on our side when it comes to renewable energy. Texas is already the leading producer of wind power in the country. If we were our own country, we'd be the fourth leading producer of wind power in the world. And we got that way by the way because of government policy. Cause in 1999 state government, with George W. Bush as governor, adopted a law requiring a certain percentage of retail electricity sold in the state of Texas to come from renewable energy. And it absolutely catapulted our leadership in that marketplace. We have vast solar power potential in Texas. You could power the whole state off of solar, off of, if you put solar panels over the square footage of one county in Texas. We have vast agricultural resources for bio fuels production. We are the home of NASA, where they know a lot about renewable energy. We have the gulf coast and the tides, we have geothermal potential. Bu the biggest competitive advantage we have is that we are the headquarters today of the energy industry as it's currently constituted. We are the home of the intellectual and financial capital required for us to be a leader in the next generation of energy technology. If we want to be. Fifteen billion dollars a year from the federal government is a lot of money, but it's been one quarterly earnings report for Exxon Mobile for the past couple of years, with high priced oil. If we really put some skin in the game as a state, we can catch up and leap ahead of our competitors who are trying to supplant us as leaders in the energy industry. We also, unlike a lot of the states we're competing with, are not in the same desperate fiscal situation that they're in. So one of the immediate things we can do is take some of the state's money that we have and other states don't, and start stealing some of their faculty, and bringing them here. It's how we do it, that's how you do it. That's the law of the jungle. We're ahead. We've got the resources and the means to do it, we need to go recruit the best people in the world in these disciplines, and bring them right here. And then they will be able to go to Stephen Chu at the Department of Energy and say well I was at Berkeley, thanks for hiring me there. But I got a better offer at Texas, that is the energy headquarters of the world, so I wanted to be there. I've got the access to all these other resources throughout the energy industry, they're putting their skin in the game, we're forming a consortium, you should send all your grant money here, and if you do by the way, the state of Texas will match it. So you'll get more leverage out of your investment. We can catch up, but we got to be smart, we got to be aggressive, we got to do it now. Bottom line on this is the energy industry is gonna evolve. It can evolve one of two ways. It can evolve the way the media industry evolved, from broadcast radio to broadcast television, where ABC, CBS, and NBC saw change coming, invested, used their competitive financial advantages, and intellectual competitive advantages, and turned the corner, and led the media industry for the next fifty years, because they invested in the transition from broadcast radio to broadcast television. Or it could be a transition like that from television to the internet, where a couple of kids in a garage quickly built companies bigger than all the broadcasters combined, and the broadcasters will never recover from it. It can go either way. Obviously it's better for us if it goes the former way. If it goes the latter way, that is 15% of this state's GDP that could disappear. And we can't afford for that to happen in Texas. So it is I think one of the most urgent challenges we face. It is something I think we have to address in this session of the legislature, that cannot wait, because with the amount of federal money going into this area, the next time we are in session, I believe the game will be over. The winners and losers will have been sorted out. We'll still be a, even if we lose that competition, we'll still be a leader for the next twenty or thirty years in energy, because it's gonna take that long for the transition to occur, maybe longer. But we'll still have to answer to our children for what happened to our leadership in the energy economy forty, fifty, and sixty years from now, if we don't seize this opportunity. So those are the types of things that I think my committee can address, that I want us to address in this session of the legislature. I know you guys have interests in some of the other issues before the legislature this session that affect higher education, that affect you all as students. So I'll close with one quick story, and then take questions. On all things political I like to remind people of an experience I had with Ann Richards. I worked for Ann Richards, as you mentioned, in 1990 when I was just out of college, when I was pretty much y'all's age. I was twenty two, it was my first job out of college, she was running for governor against a guy named Clayton Williams. And while I adored Ann Richards, I was terrified of her. I didn't know what I was doing, I was in a job a little bit beyond my competency at the time, and I you know, I just basically tried to stay out of her way and avoid her line of sight. And fifteen years later I decided to run for state representative. And everybody told me you know, the first person you got to call is Ann Richards, she's still the most important democrat in the state, her endorsement would give you a lot of credibility. You know, you've got to get Ann Richards on your side. And I found that at the age of thirty seven I was as terrified of Ann Richards as I had been when I was twenty two. So I was reluctant about it, but I called her, and I told her I was running, and I asked her if she would support me. And she was very stern on the phone. She said Mark, why are you doing this? And I was nervous, so I launched into my entire stump speech. I mean I started telling her everything that I care about, all of the issues that I wanted to work on, all of the ways that I was sure I could make a difference if I was elected. I poured all of my passion and idealism into this way too lengthy soliloquy. And when I ran out of breath, there was five seconds of silence on the other end of the phone, and then for the first time in all the time that I'd known her, she softened up toward me, and she said, "Aww sweetie, that may be the dumbest thing I've ever heard in my entire life." She said the only smart reason to run for office is because you can win. So why don't you tell me how you're gonna win. Which is a great thing for me to leave you with, because we all get into politics with a vision and a passion, and that is the only good reason to get into politics. But those who get things done are those who can balance that vision and that passion with a practical understanding of how the political system works, and how to get things done within it, not just in running for office, but in practicing politics at the legislature or at any other level, it is the art of the possible. And it's one I enjoy practicing. So thank you guys for coming out and having me, and I'm happy to answer any questions.

Male Voice: What kind of investment do you suggest to research and develop for alternative energy?

Representative Mark Strama: In terms of what areas should we invest in?

Male Voice: Yes.

Representative Mark Strama: Okay. Well that first of all, that's a good question, asked of the wrong person. Because, because that's a science question. I'll tell you what I think, what I get, I like, I'm kind of geeky about this stuff, so I like reading about it, and I like talking to the people on the faculty here. And I'll tell you what I think from talking to them, but I really, who am I, what do I know. We're doing really cool work here already on battery storage, up at the pickle. I think they are well positioned to be a leader in figuring out how to store electricity in a battery. And that is probably the most urgent challenge we have in the energy industry, because we know how to produce electricity from wind. Our problem in Texas is the wind blows at night, and we consume the electricity in the daytime, and the wind is intermittent, and you can't have intermittent power sources, because the lights would be blinking all the time. And so we have to figure out a way to harness the power of the wind and store it, and deploy it when we need it. And so I would say, and by the way, that's also one of the areas where I think we're gonna get there soon, right? I just don't think there are any limiting factors that are intrinsic that will prevent us from getting there. It's a matter of saying we're gonna do it, the way John Kennedy said we're gonna go to the moon, we just got to commit to doing it. So I'd say that's number one. We're also doing really cool research at UT in the area of bioalgae, and being able to take carbon emissions from industrial sources, run them through brackish water, which we have an abundance of in Texas, suck the carbon out, turn it into, turn it into algae that can be converted into basically biofuel. That I'm not, I'm not convinced, and again my opinion is irrelevant because I'm not a scientist, but I'm not yet convinced that that's gonna work, but we absolutely ought to figure it out, we ought to see if it'll work. And by work, it has to work at a scalable, commercializable, affordable level, right? And I think that, okay so that's two sort of out there areas. And then there is solar power. I mean solar power makes sense today, if you can, I think the economics are there for solar to compete today. But I also think it is much like the semiconductor chip industry, where every couple of years you get a pretty significant increase in the productive or efficiency of the solar panel, and a corresponding reduction in the cost. And if we can experience the kind of improvements in solar technology over the next twenty years that we've seen in semiconductor chips over the past twenty years, then the future looks pretty good for renewable energy. I mean very good. And not just for renewable energy for environmental purposes or for energy independence purposes, but for your price you pay for power as a consumer. So that probably leaves out a lot. Look, I think we also, and this is another area where Texas is a leader, we need to figure out what to do with carbon emissions, from industrial facilities, from all types of sources. But you know, we can, we can recycle carbon emissions, and turn it to productive use, rather than emitting it into the atmosphere at the risk of you know, overheating the planet. We can actually make money off carbon emissions if we're smart about it. And I think if Texas just chose to be a leader in those areas, and let everybody else, there are a lot more areas to invest, but you know, if we just carved out those niches as our area of leadership, we'd be securing a pretty good future. Yes ma'am.

Female Voice: I'm not familiar with your committee, but I am familiar with a lot of the energy issues in Texas. What, or have you looked at the reclamation? Because with energy you're using up resources. And Texas has been in the past number one in the world on reclamation efforts, especially here through the central part of our state with the mining of lignite, and it's as close as twelve miles to the east of us. And the reclamation projects have been extremely successful in not only recapturing the lignite, but then making the land more productive than it's ever been in how it's being used for agricultural needs. I have other questions later, but I'll let other people ask, but let's start there.

Representative Mark Strama: Okay, well I, the answer is no I haven't looked a lot at that. I have looked at some of the work coming out of the Bureau of Economic Geology here, in the area of carbon sequestration, and using underground oil wells as storage facilities for captured carbon dioxide, and actually using the captured carbon dioxide for tertiary oil recovery to pressurize the well and get more oil out, while permanently sequestering the carbon dioxide. It seems to be the same sort of spirit of let's maximize the usage of the land, and take what looks like a project that is sort of spent and done with, and that many would leave behind, and instead convert it to productive purpose after its first useful life was exhausted. But I don't know as much about reclamation.

Male Voice: Earlier in your speech you were talking about you know, wanting to improve the quality of public education in Texas. And I was just wondering what were you know, elaborate on some steps that you plan to take to really initiate a change.

Representative Mark Strama: Good question. I don't always know the answer to that question, that's always, it's always easy to give the, I was talking about this with somebody today, about for example the controversy over accountability in education. Well everybody knows we need to do something that you know, stops the practice of teaching to the test in the public schools, and that measures progress, not a point in time in education, all of that stuff. But nobody really knows how to write a bill that fixes it, right? In the area of technology, I've struggled to figure out how to go from this perspective I have as a technology entrepreneur that we're not deploying technology effectively in education, to saying sort of what can I do about it from the state capital. Because technology adoption isn't something you can force on people. We have this huge system, you know, four million students, hundreds of thousands of classrooms around the state, and teachers who have been doing it one way for a long time. And anybody who's sort of lived through the business cycles of the nineties, and first part of this decade remembers that you know, there are as many ways to spend money badly in technology as to spend it well. So if you force it on people, you run the risk of really wasting the money. And there are sort of some case studies of that, some examples of that in our own history. So what I've thought a lot about is what's the thin edge of the wedge that I have access to from the state capital, that can sort of motivate the education community to embrace technology on its own initiative. For a while I thought, and I think the people in Congress who wrote the stimulus bill think that it is broadband. You know, if we just equip every campus with broadband, then that'll be compelling enough to get them to make the other investments they need to make to access that broadband, and to do something with it, to put it to productive use. I don't think so any more. I think broadband's necessary, but not sufficient to make that happen. The thing that I think is critical to widespread adoption of technology in education is killer software. In the late nineties, everybody was, you know, the use of personal computers in people's homes just proliferated like mad. And it was because we had finally found the killer app, the thing that caused people to say I need a computer at home. I use it at work, it's no fun, but now it's fun, I want to have one at home. And it was the internet and email, right? And it was mostly email. Because the internet wasn't that interesting a place for quite a while. I mean it really took a long time for it to get interesting. And email was such a compelling thing to do that everybody wanted to have a computer at home, and used it all the time. And that, that high rate of usage then sort of snowballed into a lot of people creating a lot of really cool things that you could do on your personal computer at home since you had one anyway. It created a market, it created demand for all the cool stuff that you have now that you can do on your PC. My view is that we need to find the killer app that people in schools cannot live without, the equivalent of email technology for the home computer user. And don't think of email when you think about it, think about what is something that teachers would find so compelling, they just have to have it. I think it is, I think there are a couple of possibilities there. One is I think the state ought to create a fantastic portal for teachers, where they can find the best materials, and the best pedagogical advice, the best instructional curriculum, and the best strategies for how to teach it, for whatever they have to do tomorrow. Because their job is really hard, and we're not doing a lot to make it easier for them with enabling tools we could provide them over the internet. That would to me be step one. Next, and it ought to have a whole lot of web 2.0 qualities to it, right? It ought to enable the people using the technology to, using the curriculum, and using the pedagogical strategies on it to rate it, and let the user community sort of cause the best stuff on there, and to put their own stuff on there, and let the users determine what's good about it, and make that kind of rise to the top so that it comes up first for the next teacher looking for something useful in that area. I think if we just put the you know, if we created that sort of collaborative tool for teachers online, I think that would be really powerful. The next step of that is, to the extent that those instructional materials at that teacher portal are things they can use in the classroom, things they can hand out to kids, at some point those instructional materials ought to be soft, interactive software programs that kids can interface with to learn. And the ultimate end game is when teachers who are put in front of a room full of thirty kids every day, six times a day, different kids, each of whom comes to the classroom with different levels of preparedness, some of whom had breakfast that morning, some of whom didn't, some of whom had help with their homework the night before, many of whom didn't, some of whom got what you taught them yesterday, some of whom didn't. If you instead of force the teacher to the front of the room to teach to all those kids at the same time, which is to say to teach to none of them, but to just teach the subject, right, and hope the kids are learning it, if you instead move that teacher to the middle of the classroom, and let each of those kids pursue the instruction, individualized instruction, interactive instruction, interfacing with a computer, with the teacher as a coach looking over their shoulder, intervening where necessary, that to me is a transformational way of delivering educational services that would really change things. That's a you know, how you get there from here. You know, there's a few steps between, there's a lot of steps between here and there, but those are my initial ideas about it. Other questions. Yes sir.

Male Voice: I was wondering can you name any specific bills that are going to pass through your committee that you are planning on, or looking forward to amending or working on, and out of those if you have an idea of how many of those are actually gonna make it to the floor?

Representative Mark Strama: Well, I could do that, but I might make a lot of enemies in the process. I have a green jobs bill that I'm carrying with Senator Ellis, my former boss and mentor, that I think has, was a good bill when we filed it, it's a great bill now that there's a stimulus bill to actually fund it. And it is a bill that will provide funds for the delivery of job skills development for people who want to learn how to weatherize homes or install solar panels, or be in the manufacturing side of renewable energy. That's one that I'm very excited about. And I would think it has a pretty good prospect for passage. Bills are still being referred, we don't know exactly what bills are gonna come to my committee. But I will share with you one of the other biggest issues this session that I expect will be treated in my committee, is the issue, and you've been reading about it and hearing about it in the news a lot lately, the issue of unemployment insurance. One of the things in the stimulus package is a significant amount of money for states' unemployment insurance trust funds. But there are strings attached to that money. Unlike a lot of the other money, there's not a lot of strings attached to most of the stimulus money. This one, you only get the money if you adopt certain adjustments to the eligibility criteria that have the effect of expanding the number of people who qualify for uninsurance benefits. The amount of money Texas can get by doing this is five hundred and fifty million dollars right now. The cost of doing it, of expanding uninsurance eligibility benefits is estimated between forty and seventy million dollars a year. So clearly the five hundred and fifty million dollars covers the cost for some significant number of years into the future, but after that, you've then essentially raised taxes on businesses to pay for the ongoing cost of those adjustments you've made in uninsurance eligibility. The additional dimension to this is that our unemployment insurance trust fund is on its way to being broke. We've had such a dramatic increase in unemployment claims in the past several months that by October we'll be down to a hundred and ten million dollars in that fund, and right now we're spending over fifty million dollars a week on unemployment claims. So the, my view of it is, at least based on the data we have so far, and we don't have all the data we need, that we are faced with having to enact a pretty severe tax increase on businesses who are the only tax payers who fund the unemployment insurance trust, to make up for, because we're gonna have to issue debt, and we're gonna have to finance that debt, and pay for it with business taxes, because of the shortfall in the unemployment insurance trust. In light of that, and in the context of a recession, I don't see how we can pass on five hundred and fifty million dollars right now. Because yes, it creates a long-term tax liability in the future, but we're in a recession now. And taking the five hundred and fifty million dollars has the effect of reducing business taxes during this recession. That is gonna be a huge controversy. You've already seen that the governor of Louisiana has signaled his intention to reject unemployment insurance funding from the federal government, because he doesn't want to make those adjustments to the eligibility requirements. You know, if their trust looks anything like ours, and I don't see how it couldn't, that means he's raising taxes on businesses during a recession. I'm surprised by that. But it's gonna be a big controversy here.

Female Voice: You spoke, sorry, you spoke earlier about how we need to kind of steal the professors from California, which I don't know how we do that ethically, but -

Representative Mark Strama: Oh it's totally ethical.

Female Voice: Yeah.

Representative Mark Strama: It's a market. They get to go, I mean you know, we stole Mack Brown from North Carolina.

Female Voice: I guess this is true.

Representative Mark Strama: We stole Rick Barnes from Clemson, right?

Female Voice: I don't know, I'm not the sports expert.

Representative Mark Strama: Yeah, no, it's fair. We can, they're fair game.

Female Voice: Well I guess my question then is, obviously in the Texas legislature right now there's a lot of dialog about money in the university and professors and such, considering you know, deregulation, regulation of tuition, and then [inaudible] initiative with domestic partner benefits and stuff like that. So first of all, maybe your feelings on some of those things that are in the legislature right now, and then how you think we should go about recruiting these professors to our university.

Representative Mark Strama: Okay. Well let me do it backwards, cause the second question's easier. We should recruit them by well, the obvious thing they're most susceptible to is money, right? That's, I mean they're like everybody else. That's how the job market works, they go where they can make the most money. But they also are looking for a long-term commitment, not only to a salary that they expect, but to research freedom, to having the facilities, you know, we got Mack Brown not just cause we paid him a ton of money, but because we said we're gonna make sure that our athletic facilities are state of the art, right? That's equally important to somebody in chemistry and physics, and geology. So those are the types of tools you, those are the types of recruiting tools you have. Then the question is how do you pay for those things, right? And that's something I'm learning about right now. We do have funding sources for that. We have the emerging technology fund, 33% of which is allocated to what's called research superiority grants, which we specifically use to go out and attract the best people in the world in certain disciplines. Amazingly though, most of that type of money has gone outside of the energy sphere. And I love that we're you know, aggressively pursuing leadership in biotech and medical sciences, but you know, our economy was built on energy. And I think it should take priority, that's a feeling I have pretty strongly. And I think that that's a view that is gaining traction in the legislature. So we have the emerging tech fund as one tool, there is a program called Stars that's money that comes out of the available university fund for recruiting top tier faculty. And there are some other sort of, I mean gosh, the appropriations bill is this incredibly labrynthing, long document that is just full of you know, hidden ways to make things happen, and I'm gonna try to find every one I can to kind of make this happen. Your first question was mainly tuition, right? You want to know what I think about tuition?

Female Voice: Well, I mean, yeah. The dialogue has been that if we start to deregulate tuition then we're not gonna have enough money to get these professors. So I'm just wondering, I'm not necessarily asking for your opinion on the bill, but just like how you see the relationship there too.

Representative Mark Strama: Right, right, right. It's fair. Yeah, no, no it's true. I mean I expect that every time I go to the regions and the administration at UT and tell them how much I want them to invest in this, they're gonna come back to me with well then you can't plan on capping tuition, cause you all don't give us the money to do it. My intention is to give them the money to do it. I think that between what we have coming to the state in stimulus money, and the expenses that it offsets that free up general revenue for us to invest in the recruiting of faculty, and going after leadership in this, that I'm not gonna ask UT to foot the bill for out of its own [inaudible] for the things that need to happen for us to become a leader. Now I do in exchange, if we're gonna put the money in, I do want to see them taking initiative, and not just UT, all of the Texas universities, because I can't be the one, and the legislature isn't the one that can go to Exxon, BP, Conoco, Philips, or any of the other huge donors to this university in the other disciplines we talked about, and say you need to help us become leaders in this. What I am in a position to do, along with the other members of the legislature is sweeten the pot, give UT some money that it can go to those big philanthropic organizations, or businesses, and say if you invest in us instead of Berkeley, instead of Stanford, instead of Colorado, we've got the legislature's commitment to leverage your investment, to put some additional money behind it. So you get more traction for spending your money in Texas than you do other places, in states that are broke by the way. So that's, that's point number one on where tuition and my agenda on energy meet, on tuition generally. I think you know, the, my colleague Patrick Rose is on the higher education committee, and has been working on this a lot. And the way he talks about this I think makes sense, which is tuition dereg essentially put the onus on the regions, for doing what the legislature was unwilling to do, fund higher education. And so instead of the legislature generating the revenue necessary to meet the needs of the higher education institutions in the state, the legislature punted that responsibility to the regions. And what Patrick has talked about, I actually shouldn't break this story for Patrick, actually. Patrick's got some ideas that I will speak to generally, that would basically say if we don't give you enough money, you can go get it, but puts the onus back on us to provide adequate funding to the universities. And in return, puts restrictions on tuition, provided that we're meeting our obligations. I think that's a sensible approach. Other questions, yes.

Female Voice: How many jobs in central Texas have been lost by professionals in the area of Engineering and Computer Science? Is there anything that your committee, or the legislature's doing this session to stop the bleeding of those jobs? And these are people that already have professional credentials, and or help them move into the area of energy technology.

Representative Mark Strama: Right. Two things, right? One is how do we continue, how do we try to make the technology industry flourish as it, in its current and previous forms. And two, to the extent that that isn't possible, how do we help people transition into high tech energy related jobs. You know, I, I've been chair of this committee for a week and a half now, so I've told you everything I know about it. No, but so, so, so I haven't yet seen a silver bullet solution that enables this committee to jump start the technology jobs that are in attrition. In large part, you know, the decline in those types of jobs is a function of the global economy, and I don't think that our committee is in a position to change that dynamic. I don't get the sense that, well to the extent that we're losing jobs like that, it is to lower cost competitors overseas. And I don't think that we can, I don't think that we have an easy solution to that problem coming through our committee. What I think we have to do is figure out what jobs the competitors overseas haven't figured out how to do cheaper than we can, right? And so I do think it is largely about transitioning, finding how to leverage the skill sets we have in the jobs of the future. Van Jones, who is sort of a national thought leader on the green collar economy wrote a book called The Green Collar Economy, based in Oakland, came down to Texas last week to do a press conference with myself and senator Ellis on our green jobs bill, and said you know, I really shouldn't be here, cause we hope Texas continues to do what it's always done, so we can take all your money and all your jobs away in California. And it rings true to me that you know, they really hope we don't get ahead of this curve, cause they do recognize we have a lot of competitive advantages that they don't have. They are off to a running start, and we are off to a slower start, but we should win this race. The jobs he talks about most are the jobs that cannot be outsourced. Weatherization, you know, solar panel installation, those types of jobs will always be here because they're inherently local. The question is can we also bring to Texas the higher level manufacturing and R and D side of the renewable energy industry. That, my green collar jobs bill is to address the job opportunities at the middle and lower wage scale for people who can make a very good living in solar panel installation and weatherization, and those types of jobs. But my emphasis on R and D at the University of Texas is because that's where I really think we create the high wage jobs, at the University of Texas and all the Texas institutions. I think R and D is what spins out the really great companies, where there are really good opportunities for the graduates of these institutions. And so I don't think I can press a button and create the jobs, but I think that investment in higher ed and R and D creates the companies that create the jobs. Yes sir.

Dean Randy Diehl: This question was actually raised earlier, and let me preface it by saying that I really liked what I heard you say about supporting UT and other universities in the state of Texas in recruiting talent from other top schools. Currently we're recruiting successfully from Berkeley, UCLA, UCSD, Michigan, Harvard. In the last several weeks in the College of Liberal Arts we've either closed the deal or we're very close to doing it. And these are top people.

Representative Mark Strama: And is one of the explanations for any recent success our relative economic health?

Dean Randy Diehl: Absolutely

There are two things going on. One is there's a you know, the sense of a safe port in the storm, but the other is a lot of exciting things are going on here because we still have some resources, and we're building.

And they know that, word has gotten out. One thing though that remains a serious impediment is the lack of domestic partner benefits.

Representative Mark Strama: You did ask about that. I wasn't dodging, I just got sidetracked.

Dean Randy Diehl: And I can tell you just from direct experience in talking to potential recruits, it is a very big issue. It cuts across the spectrum, there are people who won't come here simply because they think that the lack of DPB signals something about the state or about the university that they really don't want to be associated with. So this is by way of asking your views about the prospects for change on this issue.

Representative Mark Strama: Well okay, let me give you my views on it. We should change it. And let me give you my view for the prospects.

Not very good. And I'm at a loss to explain that to you. I mean you know, it's great to hear the business case articulated. You know, I try to talk about the renewable energy issue, without getting into the article of faith that people have over global warming, right? I've stopped debating that. I don't even pretend, you know, it's not a debatable issue unless you're a PhD in one of the related disciplines that knows about global warming. Otherwise it's an article of faith where you've just chosen whom you're gonna believe, right? I have these ridiculous emails I get from you know, people I'm very close to, who just want to debate it with me as if either of us knows. I've invested my faith in a lot of scientists whose credibility I trust, they've invested theirs in scientists whose credibility I'm dubious of, but they trust.

It's a, it is a lot like debating the existence of God, right? I mean we've all just decided who we trust, right? Cause most of us don't have any personal knowledge of it. And so I mean you have your personal faith, but it's faith. And so I compare global warming a lot to fate. Okay, how's that relevant to your question?

The, it is that therefore I talk about global warming as an economic issue for Texas. I mean I don't talk about global warming, I don't talk about global warming, I talk about renewable energy as an economic issue. I only mentioned global warming once in the whole time I talked until now, right? And I talked about it as a risk. Because the way to debate it is in terms of the business case, right? You made a great business case for why Texas should change it's policy on domestic partner benefits. Because we're not gonna change anybody's mind about the morality of homosexuality, right? But your argument is compelling, and I'm at a loss to explain to you why anybody wouldn't be convinced by it. But unlike global warming, and being able to divert the argument from global warming by talking about the economics, there is no way to divert the issue of faith from your argument, right? Because that one actually does speak to people's religious beliefs. Global warming is only analogous to people's religious beliefs. Yours is directly relevant to their religious beliefs. And so that's what you're up against in making the business case. I do think that, I mean since we're talking about it, am I out of time? Okay. Since we're talking about it, let me share my perspective on the politics of religion right now. One of the most overhyped things I've ever seen was the reaction to the 2004 election in which an exit poll said 22% of George Bush voters voted for George Bush because of moral values. And everybody said well this is evidence that the religious right controls American politics, because that was the number one out of all the different reasons people could choose, that one got the most responses. Well one of the reasons that one got the most responses was because there were three different answers you could give if what you were concerned about was national security, terrorism, or the war in Iraq. If you combined those three, they vastly exceeded moral values. But more importantly, moral values was actually in the minds of a lot of respondents, a proxy for John Kerry's a flip flopper, George Bush knows what he believes. They weren't necessarily saying I agree with his stance on every moral issue, they were saying he is who he is, and doesn't change it based on what he perceives the political will. And the Bush campaign's message about Kerry being a flip flopper had really saturated in the American consciousness, and that's what I think they were, that's what I think they were reflecting when they said moral values was the reason they voted for George Bush. They meant he's not a flip flopper, he doesn't have his finger to the wind. Which is an admiral quality in a politician. Some of them clearly also meant he shares my values on abortion and homosexuality and all these things, but I don't think it was that huge a number, and I don't think it was that decisive an issue in that election. Two years later, but by the way, the reaction to it, the reaction to that one little exit poll question was this whole scramble among all kinds of politicians to start you know, making sort of big extravagant displays of their piousness, you know? And so we pursued that for a couple of years, it was fun to watch. And then 2006 comes along and lo and behold, people actually care more about you know, having a government that works, and an economy that's robust. And you know, all of a sudden the religious right had no influence in politics any more, and 2008 even more. They were just totally irrelevant, right? Dragging the republican party off the cliff. Also an over reaction to the empirical evidence in my opinion. They're still a significant force to contend with. In Texas politics they're an even more significant force to contend with. And most importantly, in Texas republican primaries they are an extremely important force to contend with. And that's where the dysfunction of our political system becomes a factor. The dysfunction of our political system is that most politicians are elected in a primary election, not a general election. Now how many of you all have ever voted, and be honest, how many of you all have ever voted in a primary election? That's a pretty high percentage. But still, barely more than half of you. And you all are obviously weird because you're here on a pretty day, when you could be outside enjoying this weather. So you all are junkies, and almost half of you haven't voted in a primary. So my point is most people don't vote in primaries, but primaries decide the outcomes of most elections. Because the districts are so jerry mandered that the general election is not in contention. My district is one of the few genuinely competitive districts in the state, it could go either way in every election, and I have to be accountable to every voter in my district, not just democratic primary voters, I'm a democrat by the way. But most, but if you're in a 60% republican district, or a 60% democratic district, you're only concerned about the voters within your primary, cause you're not gonna lose to an opponent from the other party. So you have to be very concerned about that small percentage of the electorate that votes in your primary. And that is why there is so much power in a republican dominated state, where republican primary politics are very much dominated by the religious right. One interesting dynamic in the next few years that will end up being the answer to your question about the prospects for a change in policy is whether statewide offices become competitive or not. As long as they're not, and George, and Barack Obama only got 44% of the vote in Texas, right? High watermark year for democrats, and the best we could was 44%, so if you're Rick Perry or Kay Bailey Hutchison, thinking about how to get elected governor of Texas, you're thinking how do I win the republican primary? You're not thinking how do I win the general, because you're assuming you can win the general, right? You're not being very calculated about how not to get pulled too far to the right, and jeopardize your chances of winning the centrous voters in the general election, that's not a concern for you yet. If democrats start being much more competitive in statewide races, and I think they might in 2010, then it will diminish the power of the religious right in republican primaries in statewide elections, because republican primaries will have to be sensitive to not nominating someone that can't win the moderate center that votes in the general election. That's how it works politically, and that's what will end up determining the answer to your question.

Dr. James Henson: Let's thank Representative Mark Strama one more time.

(End of presentation.)