[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 70 (Thursday, May 7, 2009)]
[House]
[Page H5377]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                             GLOBAL WARMING

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Shimkus) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. SHIMKUS. Mr. Speaker, it is great to have this opportunity to 
come down to the floor once again to get the floor and the country 
ready for the debate on global warming. And I just want to put a couple 
of things in perspective. What the whole global warming bill intends to 
do is to monetize, which means put a cost, for carbon emissions. Now 
everyone knows that when you add a cost, it will be passed on, so hence 
the debate that we have been dealing with in the committee over the 
last couple weeks about raising energy costs. And it has mostly been on 
the premise of monetizing carbon, either by putting on a carbon tax, or 
monetizing carbon through what is called a cap-and-trade regime where 
you have marketeers purchase carbon credits. That is only one aspect of 
the rise of energy costs, because we do know that the producers will 
pass that on to the end users. And who are the end users? That is us. 
That is individual consumers, that is manufacturing, that is the 
service sector and that is the government. It will be passed back on to 
us in higher costs for us.
  There are other additional costs involved in this whole program, in 
this whole plan. And the other aspect of costs is the energy it will 
take for utilities to capture carbon dioxide. At a power plant that is 
being built that I just visited, 40 percent of the electricity that it 
was going to sell on the open market would now go internally to try to 
capture the carbon. So if they were going to sell 1600 megawatts of 
power, now they are only going to be able to sell about 950 megawatts 
of power because they are going to have to internally use that.
  Now if they have done the investment, doing a cost-benefit analysis 
and return on that, not only will they have less power to sell on the 
market if the demand is the same, the supply is less and the cost will 
go up. But they will also have to have a second cost increase, which 
will be buying the carbon credits. Now those are two areas by which 
electricity costs will increase.
  Well there is another area where electricity costs will increase 
because we are going to push an efficiency standard on utilities, which 
is another aspect that they are going to have to make major capital 
investments. So we have three times a burden on utilities, which they 
will pass on to the consumer.

                              {time}  1645

  Now, the concern many of us have, if we want to maintain our jobs and 
we want to maintain our competitive force in the world economy, we have 
to have low-cost power. The other thing that is really hard to 
understand is why would we unilaterally raise the cost to produce goods 
and services when the major emitters of the world today will not be 
forced to comply.
  Here is a chart of the important transmissions and emitting 
countries. It would surprise a lot of people to notice here at the 
bottom is the United States. We have had very little growth in 
emissions. Where has all of the growth come: Africa, the Middle East, 
Latin America, Southeast Asia, India, China, Korea, Eastern Europe. 
This is the increase in the emissions.
  So as we come to this debate if we just want to be straightforward, 
we are going to say if we are going to enforce all this pain on the 
U.S. economy at a time when this economy really can't accept the pain 
because of the job losses, shouldn't we have some gain? The reality is 
we could stop our carbon emissions today and put it to zero. And what 
will happen to worldwide carbon emissions? They will go up. We could go 
to zero. They would go up. That is no way to address a problem.
  We have declining carbon emissions in our economy today, and the 
reason why we have it is because of the recession we are facing. So job 
loss, manufacturing loss creates lower emissions which is what my 
friends on the other side of the aisle would like to see. We are going 
to fight to defeat it.

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