Congressional Record, Volume 156 Issue 88 (Monday, June 14, 2010)

[Congressional Record Volume 156, Number 88 (Monday, June 14, 2010)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4872-S4876]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

CAP-AND-TRADE

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, today I wish to speak on where I think
this climate change debate is headed after last Thursday's vote on the
Murkowski resolution. We got a very clear signal in today's Politico,
which reported that President Obama, in his Oval Office address
tomorrow night, will seek, as a part of the response to the BP
oilspill, to ``put a price on carbon.''
Let's keep in mind what ``a price on carbon'' is. That is a tax, a
carbon tax, or what we call cap and trade. Quite often people have
said: Well, if those individuals really want to charge for carbon, want
to stop this economy, why don't they just put a carbon tax on it? The
reason they do not is then people would know how much it is costing
them. As it is now, with cap and trade, they would not.
But again, he is going to have an Oval Office address. I think this
will be

[[Page S4873]]

the first talk he will give from the Oval Office since he has been
President. Of course, that is Washington-speak for cap and trade--a
price on carbon.
This is remarkable. Here we have the most significant environmental
disaster in our Nation's history, and the President decides now is the
time for cap and trade--a massive new energy tax paid for by consumers,
working families, farmers, and small businesses; a massive new energy
tax that will destroy millions of jobs, in good measure by sending many
of them to places such as China and India; a massive new energy tax
that will make a gallon of gas more expensive; and a massive new energy
tax that will not do anything to stop global warming but will increase
the size of government and give more money to politicians to spend.
Just how that will contain the oilspill, mitigate the environmental
damage, or help those immediately affected by it remains a mystery. Put
simply, it will not do any of those things, but it will damage the
economy and make it harder to deal with this crisis.
We have a serious incident on our hands. People died, people's
economic livelihoods are at stake, and the environment is being harmed.
But instead of Presidential leadership and clear direction, we are
getting pure partisan politics. One glaring example is President
Obama's moratorium on deepwater drilling--something environmental
groups have been seeking for many years. This is an exercise in
overreaching that will do far more harm than good. The Louisiana
Department of Economic Development estimates that the President's
moratorium would kill 3,000 to 6,000 jobs in the next few weeks and
over 10,000 Louisiana jobs in the next few months. More than 20,000
jobs are at risk in the next 12 months. That is one example of just
pure politics.
Today, in a letter to supporters--we just got this, Mr. President;
you may not be aware of this--this is a letter that went out today to
Obama supporters all across the Nation, and it says: We are going to
have a big meeting at the White House, and we are going to talk about
moving forward on legislation to promote a new economy powered by green
jobs, combating climate change, and ending our dependence on foreign
oil.
Down further in the letter, he says that the House of Representatives
has already passed comprehensive energy legislation. Let's remember
what that was. That was the Waxman-Markey bill. That was a cap-and-
trade bill--one that was very expensive. He says there is currently a
plan in the Senate to do the same thing. That is the Kerry-Lieberman
bill he is talking about and we are going to talk about.
So the whole idea of this meeting--and I understand the speech that
is going to take place tomorrow night is to try to promote an agenda, a
very liberal agenda, an agenda that has been rejected. Cap and trade
has been rejected by this legislative body since the Kyoto Treaty. That
was way back in the late 1990s. Then, of course, the 2003 and 2005
bills by McCain and Lieberman that have been cap-and-trade bills were
rejected and every one of them since then, including the Warner-
Lieberman bill and the other bills we have had. The interesting thing
is, every time a cap-and-trade bill comes up here, it is defeated by a
larger margin. That is why I have been saying cap and trade is
something that is dead in the Senate.
Instead of Presidential leadership, we are getting rhetoric of the
worst kind. A case in point came last week. We heard that the Murkowski
resolution is a ``big oil bailout'' that will allow oil companies such
as BP to pollute the air. That must be news to thousands of groups
across the country because they certainly were very much in support of
her resolution. I am talking about people such as the American
Association of Housing Services for the Aging, Family Dairies USA, the
Farm Bureau, the National Federation of Independent Business, the Brick
Industry Association, the National Association of Manufacturers, the
Associated Builders and Contractors--the list goes on and on of the
people who realize they do not want to have this massive government
takeover.
Let's keep in mind that when you talk about cap-and-trade legislation
and then you talk about what the EPA is talking about doing under the
Clean Air Act, it is essentially the same thing. It is just that since
they could not get it passed legislatively, they are going to try to do
it administratively. That is what the whole Murkowski resolution was
about. It was about stopping that from taking place. Incidentally, it
got 47 votes, and I am going to talk about those votes in a minute.
Well, do some Members really believe these groups have been duped,
that what they are really supporting is nothing more than a sop to BP
and big oil? This is simply insulting to the citizens across the
country who supported the Murkowski resolution for one simple reason:
It will stop the greatest bureaucratic intrusion into the lives of the
American people in history.
I am confident we will keep hearing this refrain as we get closer to
November. The story in today's Politico--and this is interesting; it
just came out today--talks about a survey by a guy named Joe Benenson.
He is President Obama's campaign pollster. He is an Obama guy. They are
doing it for a very liberal group. Among other things, Mr. Benenson
found that, based on his interpretation of the survey results, pushing
for cap and trade and tying opposition to it to big oil is a ``potent
political weapon'' for Democrats against Republicans this fall. Purely
political. No one can argue that.
Well, it is my view that we should be capping that well and not the
economy, but apparently the President sees it differently. I suppose
some of this was driven by last week's 47-to-53 vote on overturning the
EPA's endangerment finding. The motion to proceed to the Murkowski
resolution failed, but the President should not let those numbers
obscure the hard political reality: there is a bipartisan majority in
the Senate that supports either a delay of or an outright ban on the
Obama EPA's job-killing global warming agenda.

By preventing a debate on the Murkowski resolution, the
Democrat-led Senate voted last week to expand the reach of
government into our daily lives. But the reason this
bureaucratic intrusion will continue is that a deal was cut
just prior to the vote.

Now, listen to this. It was exposed in a front-page story in the Hill
the day of the vote. I am going to read from that story, the Hill
story:

Democratic leaders are scrambling to prevent the Senate
from delivering a stinging slap to President Barack Obama on
climate change. They have offered a vote on a bill they
dislike in the hopes of avoiding a loss on legislation Obama
hates. The president is threatening to veto a resolution from
Sen. Lisa Murkowski that would ban the Environmental
Protection Agency from regulating carbon emissions. But if
the president were forced to use his veto to prevent
legislation emerging from a Congress in which his own party
enjoys substantial majorities, it would be a humiliation for
him and for Democrats on Capitol Hill. So Senate Majority
Leader Harry Reid and other Democratic leaders are doing what
they can to stop it. They are floating the possibility of
voting on an alternative measure from Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a
Democrat from the coal state of West Virginia, which they
previously refused to grant floor time. . . .

This is all quoted from the article.
It appears at least seven Democrats took the deal offered to them.
What is the deal? The deal is: I know you guys want to vote for the
Murkowski resolution. All your people back home want you to vote for
it. It is a very popular resolution to stop this overwhelming takeover.
Yet, in order to keep them from getting to 51 votes, you are going to
have to vote against it.
These are seven Democrats. At the same time, those same seven
Democrats could use the Rockefeller amendment for cover. The
Rockefeller amendment is the same as the Murkowski resolution, except
it just delays it 2 years. Frankly, it accomplishes the same thing. I
am for either one of them. Either one would be good. The problem with
that is the Rockefeller bill would take 60 votes. So it is saying we
know they can get the 51 votes, but if you seven won't vote for
Murkowski, we will let you go ahead and vote for the Rockefeller thing
and they won't get it anyway because it would take 60 votes.

I know it is heavy lifting. It is complicated, but that is what is
going on around here. In other words, for the Democrats to ensure that
the EPA can micromanage farms and other institutions in America, they
have to develop a scheme to give cover to Democratic Members who should
oppose the EPA takeover. I wish to emphasize that I

[[Page S4874]]

believe these Members are conflicted about what to do. I think they
understand the economic harm and what an unfettered EPA bureaucracy
could mean for their constituents--fewer jobs, more regulations, higher
taxes, and a slower economy--but they were pressured by the President
and the base of the Democratic Party. They were warned against defying
the President on one of his top initiatives, so they turned to the
Rockefeller bill as an alternative, which is a 2-year delay for
implementation of this bill; in other words, not allowing the EPA to
micromanage our lives at least for 2 more years, giving us a little
breathing time. But it is not the end of the road.
As I see it, the Rockefeller bill should not be used as political
cover. It is merely an alternative means of achieving a similar goal
sought by Senator Murkowski to stop the EPA from deciding our Nation's
energy policy. We ought to get a vote on Rockefeller one way or
another, and if it happens, I trust these seven Members--and possibly
others who voted no on Murkowski--will vote with their constituents for
the Rockefeller bill and against EPA taking jobs, businesses, and
energy out of our struggling economy.
Let me be blunt. EPA's growing regulatory regime will lead to one of
the greatest bureaucratic intrusions into the lives of the American
people. Peter Glaser, an attorney with Troutman Sanders and one of the
foremost Clean Air Act attorneys--the Clean Air Act passed many decades
ago--said that the EPA's endangerment finding will lead to Federal
regulation of schools, hospitals, nursing homes, commercial buildings,
churches, restaurants, homes, hotels, malls, colleges and universities,
food processing facilities, farms, sports arenas--all of these things.
That is virtually everybody--and it would be a very expensive
proposition.
If you look at what happened throughout the history of this
endangerment finding, the debate over the Murkowski resolution began
even before the resolution was introduced in January. It began with the
creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC.
That was at the United Nations back in 1989. That led to the Kyoto
Protocol, and we voted on the intent of the Kyoto Protocol right in
this Chamber 95 to nothing. The question was this: We will reject any
treaty that comes from the Clinton-Gore White House to us if it either
hurts our economy or doesn't treat the developing nations the same as
the developed nations. Of course, that is exactly what we did. That was
95 to 0.
Then, later on, as I mentioned, we had all of these different bills,
including the Lieberman-Warner bill, the McCain-Warner bill, and all of
these were cap-and-trade bills and they all died. All of this led to
the EPA's endangerment finding. What that said was--and this is the
President: In the event that the House and the Senate refuse to vote in
favor of some kind of a cap-and-trade bill, as has been mentioned, then
we will go ahead and do it under the Clean Air Act. The Clean Air Act
was set up to attack real pollutants such as SOX,
NOX, and mercury. So they were saying we will go ahead and
do it with this regulation.
Make no mistake. Despite testimony to the contrary by senior
officials, the Obama administration was not forced by the Supreme Court
to choose endangerment. As I noted, they had a choice. They made the
wrong choice. They could have either voted not to consider
CO2 as endangering to health or they could do it or ignore
it altogether. They decided to do it, and it didn't surprise me a bit.
So the IPCC put together this thing and we now--I can remember so
well when we had Lisa Jackson, who is the Administrator of the
Environmental Protection Agency, before our committee. We talked about
the fact that I thought--this is before the endangerment finding. I
said: Administrator Jackson, I think you are going to have an
endangerment finding, and when you do, you have to base that on
science. What science are you going to base it on? The answer was: The
IPCC or the United Nations.
We know what has happened to the credibility of that science since
that time. It has been totally debunked.
The other defense people use in trying to justify voting against the
resolution as expressed by a few Democrats was that overturning
endangerment would mean removing the authority from the National
Highway Traffic Safety Administration--that is the NHTSA--to set
Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards, CAFE standards. More
specifically, some argue it would undo the historic auto deal reached
last May by the two auto companies, the White House, and the EPA, DOT,
and California. The only problem with this argument is that it is
wrong. Ask the Obama administration. According to a February 19 letter
by Kevin Vincent--that is the NHTSA's general counsel:

As a strictly legal matter, the Murkowski resolution does
not directly impact NHTSA's statutory authority to set fuel
economy standards under the Energy Policy and Conservation
Act, as amended by the Energy Independence and Security Act
of 2007.

So we are hearing that this resolution will revoke the new CAFE
standards and increase the amount of oil we consume. It is patently
false to assert that NHTSA said they can't continue to work on, and
then implement, as they are doing today, the CAFE standards. So that
argument is a phony argument.
Cap and trade. During the debate last week, I spoke briefly about the
collapse of the science behind manmade global warming. I said the vote
last week was not based on the science but, rather, on stopping a
liberal job-killing agenda. It is interesting because there are several
people--all of the Republicans supported the Murkowski resolution. Yet
there are some Republicans who actually believe that anthropogenic gas
is a major cause of global warming. I am not one of those. I am at the
other extreme. But there are some here who don't agree. So that wasn't
what the vote was about. It was about whether they should take over
control of our lives as they are talking about doing. There is no doubt
that there is a wide spectrum of beliefs about the science in the
Republican Party, but I am pleased that last week we stood united for
protecting American jobs. That is all 41 Republicans. That is very
rare. They always say Democrats are much more disciplined than
Republicans are. That is where the phrase ``herding cats'' came from.
That is why you try to get Republicans all together. It is a very
unusual thing, but we were. We were all together last week.
The Clean Air Act is a monumental mistake that will shackle the
American economy with job-killing regulations and higher energy taxes.
Let me now take a little time to discuss both the current state of
cap and trade in the Senate and the latest science behind global
warming. First, let me state the obvious. Despite the best efforts by
many in the more extreme liberal wing of the Democratic Party, global
warming cap-and-trade legislation is dead. It is dead. I stated that 2
months ago, and there is no way they are going to be able to bring it
back. We will have to wait and see. In fact, just the term ``cap and
trade'' is so toxic these days in the Senate, my Democratic colleagues
refuse to even use the term anymore. They don't use ``cap and trade.''
Last week Majority Leader Harry Reid said:

We don't use the words ``cap and trade'' . . . That's
something that's been deleted from my dictionary.

Further, RollCall reported last week that Democrats in the House had
a similar response to cap and trade. RollCall reported:

Both Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Majority Leader Steny
Hoyer bristled at a question about Senate Minority Leader
Mitch McConnell's declaration that the House's cap-and-trade
energy proposal is dead. The House passed a bill that
includes the proposal last year, but the issue has stalled
in the Senate. ``That's not the bill they have in the
Senate,'' Pelosi told reporters. ``They don't have a cap-
and-trade bill. That's not the bill they have in the
Senate.''

That is the bill we have in the Senate. It is cap and trade. All of
those are cap and trade. The current bill, the Kerry-Lieberman bill, is
cap and trade. They may change the name of it, but it is still cap and
trade. They cap emissions and then they start trading around and the
government picks winners and losers and tries to convince everyone that
he will be the winner.
It wasn't long ago that the author of the cap-and-trade bill in the
Senate tried to suggest that his bill wasn't cap and trade either. He
said:

[[Page S4875]]

I don't know what ``cap and trade'' means. I don't think
the average American does. This is not a cap-and-trade bill,
it's a pollution reduction bill.

It is a cap-and-trade bill.
In fact, when Senators Kerry and Lieberman finally introduced their
bill, we soon learned that it was worse than cap and trade because it
was cap and trade, but it also included a gas tax increase.
No matter the word games employed or the extent to which the
Democrats wish to hide the truth from the American people, cap and
trade will mean more job losses, more pain at the pump, and higher food
and electricity prices for consumers. Despite the postmodern denial of
``the truth'' in which words can mean whatever one chooses, the next
version of ``putting a price on carbon'' will be cap and trade, pure
and simple. And if the House Waxman-Markey bill is any guide, it will
showcase massive expansion of government mandates, spending, taxes, and
energy rationing for America.
Now let me turn to cover the flaws of the science on which the EPA's
endangerment is based. Lisa Jackson is President Obama's EPA
Administrator. She admitted publicly that the EPA's finding of
endangerment is in good measure a conclusion of the UN's IPCC. She told
me in a public forum live on TV that EPA accepted those findings
without any serious independent analysis to see whether they were true.
After climategate and the admission of errors by IPCC, we now know
that the process was flawed all along. In a Senate report I released
earlier this year on climategate, the report found that some of the
world's leading climate scientists engaged in unethical behavior and
possibly violated Federal laws. Many of those scientists appeared to
have manipulated the data--this is what came out of the report--
manipulated the data to fit preconceived conclusions. In other words,
IPCC says, What do we have to show to come to the conclusion we have
already come to 7, 8 years ago that anthropogenic gases are causing
global warming. They obstructed Freedom of Information requests and
dissemination of climate data--and by the way, they did show that was
true in Great Britain, but the problem is the statute of limitations
had already run and the IPCC had colluded to pressure journal editors
against publishing scientific work contrary to their own.
The U.K. Government has already found that scientists from the
Climate Research Unit, or CRU, who are at the center of this scandal,
violated its Freedom of Information Act.
Importantly, the Senate report shows many of the scientists involved
in this scandal worked for the UN's IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change. They helped compile the IPCC's 2O07 Fourth
Assessment Report. That is important because that report is a primary
basis for the EPA's endangerment finding for greenhouse gases. The
media has uncovered several errors and mistakes in the report which
undermine the credibility of the IPCC's science.
The things I am going to list right here were found both in Al Gore's
movie as well as the IPCC report. They are all in this thing together.
They said it would melt the Himalayan glaciers by 2035. That is just
flat not true. They admit that is not true. They said it would destroy
40 percent of the Amazon's rain forest. That is not true. They said it
would melt the ice in the Andes, the Alps, and in Africa. That is not
true. They said it would drastically increase the cost of climate-
related natural disasters. That is not true. It would drive 20 to 30
percent of the species to extinction. That is not true. It would slash
crop production by 50 percent in Africa by 2020. All of these things
have been fabricated and since proven not to be true. Yet that is the
science on which the endangerment finding has been based. Oh, yes. The
IPCC said the Netherlands is 50 percent below sea level. That is not
true, either, as we well know. There is even more, but I think we have
made our point here.
The fact is that the EPA accepted the IPCC's erroneous claims
wholesale without doing its own independent review. So EPA's
endangerment finding rests on bad science. The EPA minority report
provides further proof that EPA needs to scrap the endangerment finding
and start all over again. By the way, anyone interested in this can
look at my Web site where we cover all the details and all the
documentation on everything I have been saying.
The Obama administration, however, is pressing ahead. We have been
told that the science still stands. We have been told that IPCC's
mistakes are trivial. We have been told that climategate was just
gossipy e-mails between scientists. Yet global warming alarmism has
been sold on the very notion that manmade greenhouse gases are causing
environmental catastrophes, such as the Himalayan glaciers melting and
all that stuff. So the science is certainly not so.
Further, the challenges to the integrity and credibility of the IPCC
merit closer examination by the Congress. The ramifications of the IPCC
spread far and wide, most notably to the endangerment finding.
The EPA's finding rests on the IPCC's conclusions, and the EPA has
accepted them wholesale, without independent assessment.
Remember how the Telegraph of London referred to all this? That is
one of their largest publications, the London Telegraph. They said
climategate and the IPCC's errors amount to ``the greatest scientific
scandal of our time.'' That is a publication that was very favorable to
the IPCC before climategate came along. Climategate--even though it
happened this last December, if anybody wants to document how far back
this was first discovered, I made a speech at this podium on the Senate
floor 4 or 5 years ago that documented all these scientists coming in
and saying how they were rejected from the process of the IPCC because
they would not verify their conclusions.
At this pivotal time, as the Obama EPA is preparing to enact policies
potentially costing trillions of dollars and thousands of jobs, IPCC's
errors make plain that we need openness, transparency, and
accountability in the scientific research financed by U.S. taxpayers.
Mr. President, let me conclude with this: As the most conservative
Member of the Senate, as ranked by the National Journal, I have spent
the past 2 years speaking out against the unprecedented liberal agenda
coming out of Washington. I have stood up and spoken out about massive
out-of-control spending in Washington, increased government
intervention into our daily lives, the gutting of our national defense,
and of the costly global warming agenda.
In the midst of these challenges, we also face an unprecedented
environmental catastrophe in the gulf. Today, as the American people
continue to face high unemployment and a struggling economy, we must
remain focused on finding every opportunity to stand on the side of the
American worker and create opportunities.
In the gulf, we all have to work together and stay focused on
mitigating and containing the environmental impacts and providing
assistance to the gulf's affected commercial and recreational
industries and investigating the causes so we can prevent a disaster of
this kind from happening again. Staying focused will help us make
prudent decisions.
The bottom line is, for the sake of our Nation, we must be willing to
put aside the costly liberal agenda of the left and not allow them to
use the gulf tragedy to advance their cap-and-trade energy tax, which
is completely unrelated to stopping the spill and helping the people in
the gulf. There is no relationship between cap and trade and the gulf
disaster. There is no relationship between what the EPA endangerment
finding would allow one bureaucrat to do and the gulf tragedy. By their
own admission--to say they can parlay this into their own agenda is
something we cannot let happen.
Twenty years ago, a very similar thing happened with the Exxon
Valdez. It was tragic, and I went up there. The environmental
extremists were up there celebrating and saying: We are going to parlay
this into retarding the exploration and production on the North Slope.
I made the statement there--it is all in writing--how can you figure
this out? How can you stop oil production domestically in Alaska by
using this issue?
Well, the issue was a transportation issue. It wasn't an oilspill or
a production accident. It was a transportation accident.

[[Page S4876]]

I said: If you stop our production, we are going to be more dependent
upon other countries for our ability to run this machine called
America. They are going to have more transportation and a greater
possibility of transportation accidents. That is what we are faced with
now.
Clearly, I appreciate the two statements that were made by President
Obama's old director of the EPA that the endangerment finding is based
on the science that we now know is false science. By the way, even
though it is not the end of the world that the Murkowski resolution
failed, four key lawsuits are filed challenging the law on which they
are basing this endangerment finding.
Even if we were to pass any of the cap-and-trade bills, it would not
reduce worldwide emissions any. It would only affect the United States.
I argue it would increase CO2 emissions because as we lose
jobs in the United States with cap and trade and force a lot of our
manufacturers to other countries--they would go to countries such as
China, India, and Mexico where they don't even have strong emissions
standards.
With that, let's not politicize this any more. If they want to bring
up cap and trade, let's do it, and we can defeat it like we have done
over the past 10 years.
I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The clerk will call the roll.
The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for
the quorum call be rescinded.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so
ordered.

____________________