[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 47 (Monday, April 4, 2011)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2065-S2066]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                             CAP AND TRADE

  Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, the business at hand is the amendments to 
the small business act. The amendment that has been most talked about 
is the one I have authored, along with Senator McConnell. It is the 
same thing as the bill I introduced some time ago with Congressman Fred 
Upton of the House and myself in the Senate.
  To give a little background, let me say this has been about a 9-year 
battle for me. I have gone back, all the way back to Kyoto when we 
talked about the fact that we were going to have to do something to 
limit greenhouse gases at that time. This was a national treaty at that 
time during the Clinton-Gore administration. Everyone at that time 
stated and believed, and I agreed because no one said anything to the 
contrary, that anthropogenic gases, greenhouse gases, methane and so 
forth, CO2, caused catastrophic global warming. That started 
with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change. It 
met many years ago, back in the 1990s.
  Then there was a wakeup call and we thought, Why should we, the 
United States of America, sign on to a treaty when the rest of the 
world was not going to do it, when it was going to be difficult for us 
economically, and it would not affect the developing world? So we 
passed a resolution saying we were not going to do it.
  However, right after that, starting in 2003--2003, 2005, 2007, 2009, 
and as recently as last year--different Members have introduced 
legislation that would impose almost the same thing as the Kyoto treaty 
on us and that is cap and trade.
  At that time, Republicans were the majority. I was the chairman of 
the Environment and Public Works Committee. In that committee we 
thought we had better look at this to make sure the science is there. 
This is important, because we had found out that for us to pass a cap-
and-trade bill, the cost would be somewhere between $300 and $400 
billion a year. My feeling, as chairman of that committee, was let's 
find out if in fact the science is there.
  Scientists started coming to me--one after another and another when 
they knew I was going to at least question the legitimacy of the 
science--and said: The science is not there. We would like the 
opportunity to get our views in.
  That became a reality, so we defeated all the bills up to and 
including the Waxman-Markey bill that passed the House and came over to 
the Senate. Let me say we are talking about something that would cost 
the American people between $300 billion and $400 billion a year.
  Sometimes I am not quite as smart as some of the guys here, so when 
you talk about billions and trillions of dollars I like to look and see 
how does that affect my State of Oklahoma. I have the total number of 
tax returns filed by Oklahomans. I do the math. When you do the math 
with $300 to $400 billion a year that means it would cost my average 
taxpayer who files a tax return in Oklahoma a little over $3,100 a 
year.
  If that is going to stop the world from coming to the end, maybe it 
is worth that. But what do you get for that? I even asked Lisa Jackson, 
the Administrator of the EPA. She is one appointed by President Obama. 
I asked her in a public hearing if we were to pass any of these cap-
and-trade bills that would be so costly to Americans, what would it do 
in terms of greenhouse gases?
  Her response was it would do very little if anything because that 
would only affect the United States of America and that is not where 
the problem is. The problem is in China and India and Mexico, places 
where they do not have any restraints on emissions. So as we lost our 
jobs to other states, obviously it is going to end up not decreasing 
but increasing the emissions of CO2.
  That is where we were. We passed all these things. With the President 
absolutely committed to doing something about the emissions of 
CO2, he decided he would do through regulation what he could 
not do through legislation. We had legislation that could not pass and 
so obviously he went ahead and started saying we are going to let the 
EPA do the same thing as we would have done in with legislation. That, 
again, would cost the American people between $300 and $400 billion a 
year.
  This is kind of in the weeds, but to do that you have to have an 
endangerment finding and the endangerment finding has to be a 
proclamation by the administration. It has to be based on science.
  A year-and-a-half ago, right before the Copenhagen event, again, Lisa 
Jackson, the Administrator of the EPA, a very fine person who is 
courageous enough to tell the truth when asked a question, was in and I 
again asked in a public forum: Director Jackson, I am going to leave 
for Copenhagen. I am going to be a one-man truth squad to go over there 
and undo the damage that has been done by people who are going to go 
over there and try to make people think we are going to pass all kinds 
of legislation. If you are going to do this through the administration, 
that means you have to base it on some type of science. I asked the 
question: What science would you base this assumption on, the 
endangerment finding?
  The answer was the IPCC. That is the Intergovernmental Panel on 
Climate Change. It is the United Nations. For others who get offended 
by some of the things the United Nations does, it all started with the 
United Nations. We are going to be in a position to see where we would 
go from here.
  With that, coincidentally--and it was not by design--somebody 
uncovered a lot of e-mails and things over in Europe that totally 
debunked or discredited what they were trying to do over there with the 
science. In other words, the IPCC was cooking the science. I think we 
all know that.
  Now we have an effort to use an endangerment finding to try to do 
this by regulation. They are going full ahead as much as they can.
  I have to say, it is my feeling the Obama administration does not 
want to have fossil fuels. When I say that, I would back up some of 
those things by stating what the administration said. Alan Krueger, the 
Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy, said:

       The administration believes it is not longer sufficient to 
     address the nation's energy needs by finding more fossil 
     fuels.

  We are talking about oil, gas, coal, fossil fuels.
  Then there was a statement made:

       To the extent lower tax rate encourages overproduction of 
     oil and gas, it is detrimental to long-term energy security. 
     . . .

  By this, the Nation is saying we want green energy. That is fine. 
After I am dead and gone, I am sure the technology will be there and we 
will be able to run the country on green energy. In the meantime, you 
cannot do it without oil, gas, and coal. Right now we are depending on 
coal for 50 percent of all of our energy.
  I wish to say also, here is another statement out of the Obama 
administration. Steven Chu, Secretary of Energy, told the Wall Street 
Journal ``somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of 
gasoline to the levels in Europe.''
  In other words, unless we get the American people complaining about 
the high price of gas, we are not going to be doing anything. The 
bottom line is they are trying to boost the price of gas to do that.
  This is the surprise here. I could not have said this a year ago, but 
the CRS, Congressional Research Service, which pretty much is not 
challenged, came out with the fact that we in the United States have 
more recoverable reserves in oil, gas, and coal than any other country 
in the world. Here we are. The next is Russia. Next to that is Saudi 
Arabia. You can see that we have more than Saudi Arabia, China, and 
Iran all put together. That is us right there, the United States of 
America. We have those reserves.
  You will hear people say we do not because we only have 3 percent of 
the

[[Page S2066]]

world's supply of oil and gas. They are saying that because they are 
using the term ``proven reserves.'' In order to have proven reserves 
you have to drill to find out and prove the oil is there. Obviously, if 
we have a government, an administration that will not let us drill for 
oil and gas, then we cannot get about proving it, so we have to go by 
``recoverable.'' No one will argue with this--well, they might argue 
but they cannot do it with a straight face--that our recoverable 
reserves are very large. Here, in the case of oil, it is this amount 
right here--135 billion barrels of oil, 83 percent of the oil. By the 
way, 83 percent of the oil that would be on public lands that we will 
not allow ourselves--or the liberals in this body will not allow us, 
and the White House, to drill on because of not just a moratorium but 
they stopped us from doing it sometimes through not issuing permits.
  But we have enough oil out there to run this country for 50 years 
without relying upon anybody else, without relying upon, certainly, the 
Middle East or any of the rest of our hemisphere.
  If we were to go ahead with the friendlies in our hemisphere, Canada 
and Mexico, we could be independent of the Middle East in a very short 
period of time.
  The United States has 28 percent of all of the coal, and that is very 
significant. As far as natural gas is concerned, we have enough natural 
gas to actually run this country for 90 years at the rate we are using 
natural gas now, only on our own, if we would allow ourselves to go 
ahead and produce it.
  So that is where we are right now. Of course, I would be remiss if I 
did not say we have been wanting my amendment. It is amendment No. 183 
to the Small Business Act. We have been trying to bring it up for 3 
weeks now. Several times it has been postponed. I think it has been 
postponed for one of two reasons. Either they do not have the votes to 
stop it--and according to Senator Manchin, West Virginia, who stated 
just the other day there are 12 or 13 Democrats willing to vote for my 
amendment, and you get all the Republicans, that would be enough to 
reach 60 and pass my amendment.
  What does my amendment do? It takes away the jurisdiction from the 
Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gases. 
Simple as that. So maybe we have the votes, but the other reason is--
and I do not blame the leadership on the other side of the aisle--they 
do not want to subject their Senators to voting, to have to cast a vote 
that would allow the EPA to continue harassing and overregulating 
manufacturers and refineries and businesses and farmers and the rest of 
America.
  Well, there are two votes that are out there that they have offered 
as cover votes. One is the Baucus amendment; the other is the 
Rockefeller amendment. The Baucus amendment would exempt some of the 
smaller ones. Frankly, I think everyone knows that is something that 
would not work. In fact, somewhere I have the quote from the American 
Farm Bureau. Well, I do not have it right here, but, by and large, what 
they say is that they want to be sure everyone understands we cannot 
pass the Baucus amendment because that will just--we could exempt some 
farmers and some other smaller people, schools, maybe churches; but 
with the higher price of energy, it all trickles down to them. So that 
is why the American Farm Bureau, the Association of Manufacturers, and 
others are very much in favor of my amendment.
  The other one is the Rockefeller amendment that would merely delay it 
for 2 years. The reason I am opposed to this--and on the floor of the 
Senate, Senator Rockefeller made some statements the other day that 
were not very flattering. That is unlike him because that is normally 
not the way he would do it. Unfortunately, my effort was dubbed as 
``childlike,'' ``immature,'' and, yes, you guessed it, ``crazy'' too. 
But I will only say that over the years Senator Rockefeller has stated 
that the EPA--well, I will just read to you what he has stated: EPA has 
little or no authority to address economic needs. They say they do, but 
they don't. They have no ability to incentivize and deploy new 
technologies. They have no obligation to protect the hard-working 
people. And on and on.
  So I would agree with those statements of Senator Rockefeller. I 
would just say, if we are going to get rid of this, the overregulation, 
let's go ahead and do it. Let's not postpone it for 2 years. We have 
documentation from various companies, industries that say we are going 
to put something in place that is going to employ a large number of 
people, but we cannot do it so long as the uncertainty is out there.
  At Point Comfort in Texas, 1,182 jobs were lost. They wanted to--they 
were planning--Formosa Plastics--had been planning a $1 billion 
expansion. It would have employed 700 construction jobs, 357 service 
jobs, and 125 full-time operations and maintenance jobs. Yet they are 
not doing it because of the regulation that is taking place and the 
uncertainty of what the EPA is going to be doing to us.
  El Dorado, AR, similar situation. Arkansas-based Lion Oil was forced 
to delay several hundred million dollars in refinery expansion because 
of the uncertainty of the regulation by the Environmental Protection 
Agency. Louisiana, the same thing; 1,850 jobs were lost.
  I have had people ask me over the years: Inhofe, what if you are 
wrong? Well, this is what I would say and how I respond to that. When 
you stop and say I am wrong and actually that greenhouse gases do cause 
catastrophic global warming, if that is the case, then you are not 
going to resolve it by having the United States of America do something 
unilaterally.
  The Chinese are over there celebrating right now, hoping we will pass 
something to stop us from regulating or make us regulate greenhouse 
gases because those jobs we have--we have all of the figures. If anyone 
is interested, my Web site is Inhofe.Senate.gov. We can quantify the 
jobs lost and money involved.
  Stop and think about it. Anyone who has a comparable State to 
Oklahoma, do you want to increase your taxes by over $3,000 a year and 
get nothing for it?
  With that, I would make another appeal to the administration and to 
the Democrats in the Senate, to call a vote on my amendment No. 183. 
Just call it and let's get this behind us. Let's try to save energy for 
America.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Blumenthal.) The Senator from Arizona.
  Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I want to compliment my colleague from 
Oklahoma for the leadership he has exercised with respect to the rogue 
Environmental Protection Agency attempting to regulate, in effect, what 
we breathe and the job-killing program that would result from the 
regulations that would be prohibited from being adopted were the 
Inhofe-McConnell amendment to be adopted by this body. I share his 
desire that we be able to vote on that and stop these onerous 
regulations from being put into effect.
  I ask unanimous consent to speak not to exceed 15 minutes in morning 
business.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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