[Congressional Record Volume 158, Number 26 (Thursday, February 16, 2012)]
[Senate]
[Pages S856-S858]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

      By Mr. INHOFE:
  S.J. Res. 37. A joint resolution to disapprove a rule promulgated by 
the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency relating to 
emission standards for certain steam generating units; to the Committee 
on Environment and Public Works.
  Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I want to announce that I introduced a 
resolution of disapproval just a few minutes ago under the 
Congressional Review Act.
  A lot of people don't know what the Congressional Review Act is, but 
it is an act that will allow Congress to look at some of the 
regulations. If there is something they don't believe is in the best 
interest of the country, they are able to introduce something to 
rescind that. It would call for a vote, and the vote would be a 51-
vote. So it is one that has not been used very much, but it is a 
measure that would prevent, in this case the Obama EPA, from going 
through with its Utility MACT.
  MACT is the maximum achievable control technology. That is used quite 
often because there are sometimes requirements in these EPA rules that 
require different industries to do things where there is no technology 
available to allow them to get that done. So the Utility MACT is one of 
the most expensive environmental rules in American history, second only 
to President Obama's cap-and-trade rules, which he was unable to 
achieve legislatively. Left untouched, the Utility MACT would destroy 
over 1 million jobs and cost the American economy billions of dollars.
  My CRA, the Congressional Review Act, will be the moment of truth for 
a majority in this body who understand how harmful the Obama EPA 
regulatory agenda will be for their constituents. Remember, last year 
at this time 64 Senators voted in different ways to rein in the EPA's 
destructive greenhouse gas regulations. I had a bill to take away the 
jurisdiction from the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate 
greenhouse gases. It was called the Energy Tax Prevention Act. At the 
same time, there was another I call a cover vote. Sometimes when you 
want to tell people at home that you are against something, you can 
have a less maybe severe vote, and there happens to be a cover vote 
that takes place.
  The bottom line is 64 of the 100 Senators voted to do something about 
the overregulation that is coming out of the Environmental Protection 
Agency. That particular one was on the regulation that would be the 
most expensive of all.
  The Utility MACT I am offering the CRA on now is probably the second 
most expensive. But to refresh your memory, in order to have the EPA 
have jurisdiction of the greenhouse gases, they had to somehow come up 
with an endangerment finding. They did, and they based it on the IPCC 
science that gave rise to the concern that was exposed in climategate. 
I think everyone understands that was flawed science. But, nonetheless, 
that is what they used. That is why we were able to get two-thirds of 
this body to object to the EPA regulating greenhouse gases.
  I think the bottom line now is that there are more than a dozen 
Senate Democrats who have claimed they want to rein in the EPA because 
they know the devastating impact the Agency's regulatory train wreck 
will have at home. The Senators understand if their constituents lose 
their jobs as a result of these overregulations, they might lose their 
jobs.
  So today the Senate can look forward to having one more opportunity 
to stand up to President Obama's war on affordable energy. They can 
vote for this CRA which will put a halt to one of the Obama EPA's most 
expensive and economically destructive rules.
  Under the Utility MACT, it would cost American families--and nobody 
disagrees with this--the range is between $11 billion and $18 billion 
in electricity rate increases. That is over an 11-percent rate increase 
on average that it would cost if we were to pass this Utility MACT 
under the regulations of the utilities. This would send ripple effects 
throughout the economy, causing approximately 1.4 million net job 
losses by 2020. And it is not just jobs in the coal industry that would 
be affected.
  Dr. Bernard Weinstein of the Maguire Energy Institute at Southern 
Methodist University has estimated EPA's air rules could endanger 1 
million manufacturing jobs outside of the coal and utility industry 
losses. Workers recently laid off in Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia 
are feeling the devastating impacts of the rule. Sadly, these lost jobs 
are all part of Obama's wider war on coal and fossil fuels.
  You might remember that he admitted this was his goal in the campaign 
of 2008 when he said:

       If somebody wants to build a coal-fired plant they can. 
     It's just that it will bankrupt them. And under my plan of a 
     cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily 
     skyrocket.

  When the cap-and-trade failed, Obama began aggressively pursuing 
these goals through an executive regulatory barrage of unelected 
bureaucrats. So companies such as Solyndra got big cash payoffs while a 
regulatory train wreck was unleashed by the EPA to destroy America's 
fossil fuel industry.
  The political climate is much different now than it was in the days 
when global warming alarmists could bask in their historical gloom-and-
doom predictions about the end of the world. Now, President Obama 
wouldn't dare say anything like that because the American people no 
longer are buying it. Instead, he has begun touting oil and gas 
development and saying he is for an all-out, all-of-the-above energy 
strategy. In an election year, he knows the American people want the 
hundreds of thousands of jobs and affordable energy prices that come 
with domestic oil and gas.
  But he is clearly still determined to achieve his global warming 
agenda. His war on affordable energy is moving underneath the radar and 
wrapped in lies about protecting public health. Make no mistake, the 
train wreck will achieve all of Obama's global warming objectives, and 
it will severely undermine our Nation's economy in the process. So I 
will spend just a moment on that.
  When President Obama could not achieve cap-and-trade through 
legislation, he said he would just do it through regulations. EPA's 
greenhouse gas regime will cost American families between $300 billion 
and $400 billion a year. This is important because no one has refuted 
this. We have gone through the Kyoto convention, and that was a range 
that was given to us by the Wharton econometrics survey at that time. 
And several others chimed in--MIT chimed in, CRA chimed in. So the cost 
of regulating greenhouse gas

[[Page S857]]

would be about $300 billion to $400 billion a year.
  When we talk about billions and trillions of dollars, I am like 
everybody else. I have a hard time seeing how that really affects us. 
In my State of Oklahoma, I regularly determine each year how many 
families in my State of Oklahoma are going to file a tax return, and 
then I do the math. This particular one, at $300 billion a year, would 
cost each family filing a tax return in my State of Oklahoma about 
$3,000 a year. Now, that is not just once, that would be every year.

  What do you get for it? And this is the thing that I think is 
important, and the American people finally have caught on. They have 
admitted that through the EPA, when you ask them if we were to pass one 
of these things regulating CO2 through the cap-and-trade 
legislation that we have defeated, would this reduce greenhouse gases, 
the answer from the Administrator of the EPA is, no, it wouldn't 
because this only would affect the United States of America. This isn't 
where the problem is. China would still be doing its thing, India would 
be doing its thing, and Mexico.
  I have contended if we are regulating these in the United States, it 
could actually have the effect of increasing the emissions because, as 
we chase our manufacturing base overseas to find energy, they would be 
going to countries such as China and India where they don't have the 
regulatory restrictions we have in this country.
  So the Utility MACT is second only to the greenhouse gas regulations 
in terms of what it would cost, in terms of costing the people in terms 
of jobs and money. Actually, the regulatory thing would be worse when 
we are talking about greenhouse gases because under the bills that were 
introduced starting in 2003--that was the McCain-Lieberman bill, going 
all the way forward to the Waxman-Markey bill--the assumption has been 
that they would regulate industries and emitters that were over the 
25,000 tons a year.
  Now, if we do it through regulation, as they are trying to do it 
right now, the Clean Air Act has a limit of 250 tons. So we would be 
talking about regulating virtually every church, school, and hospital 
in America and not just the very large utilities. So that is where we 
were on that issue.
  On oil, President Obama has been congratulating himself on decreasing 
the imports of oil from the Middle East, but he fails to mention his 
policies have been consistently against oil and gas. In fact, he and 
people in his administration have said they want to do away with fossil 
fuels. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu said they wanted to ``boost the 
price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.''
  Well, that is $7 or $8 a gallon. Right now we are looking at $4 a 
gallon, and that is what they want to do. What is their motive? To do 
away with fossil fuels. He claims to care about energy security, yet he 
stopped the Keystone Pipeline.
  I am very proud of a lot of Senators in here who have talked about 
it. Senator Hoeven, for example, is very familiar with it because of 
the production in his State. We are talking about the sands up in 
Alberta and bringing them down through the United States. I am 
interested in this because Cushing, OK, happens to be one of the 
intersections that is there for the pipeline.
  So here is something there is absolutely no reason to do away with 
except to kill oil because we know the pipeline is going to bring oil 
down into the United States through, I might say, my State of Oklahoma 
down to the coast where it can be used. A lot of people don't 
understand this because they have been told things that, quite frankly, 
are not true.
  In terms of oil, gas, and coal, the United States of America has the 
largest recoverable reserves in the world. People keep saying over and 
over again: Well, we only have 3 percent of the reserves. Yet we use 25 
percent. Quite frankly, they are talking about proven reserves. You 
can't get a recoverable reserve until you drill. If they don't let us 
drill because of the policies of this administration, then, obviously, 
we would be stuck with just the very small amount we could produce. 
Nonetheless, it is out there. We are the only country in the world that 
our politicians don't allow us to explore and recover our own 
reserves--the only country in the world.
  Natural gas. We know it is happening right now. We know in areas like 
New York and Pennsylvania with the Marcellus debate, we have 
opportunities we have never had in this country. We have the 
opportunity to recover more natural gas. When the President made a 
statement in the State of the Union Message about being supportive of 
``all the above,'' talking about natural gas, he slipped in one little 
statement: Well, we don't want to poison the Earth--or something like 
that.
  What he is talking about is they have spent countless hours trying to 
regulate a process called hydraulic fracturing--a process that started 
in my State of Oklahoma in 1949. There has never been a documented case 
of ground water contamination since they have been using hydraulic 
fracturing. And we can't get into these tight formations without 
hydraulic fracturing. It can't be done.
  So the President can get by with saying he wants to produce the 
natural gas we have locally, and at the same time take over the 
regulation of hydraulic fracturing by the Federal Government. We know 
what that would mean. I think the best evidence of that is President 
Obama in his current budget is doubling the funding for the 
antifracking agenda in the 2013 budget. Nuclear? That is agreed. If we 
believe in ``all of the above,'' you have to have fossil fuel as coal, 
oil, and gas, but also nuclear. It is a very important component. It is 
interesting that only yesterday President Obama sent his Energy 
Secretary, Steven Chu, to Georgia, to take credit for the 5,800 jobs 
that will be created when two new nuclear reactors are built there. As 
Secretary Chu said yesterday:

       In his State of the Union Address, President Obama outlined 
     a blueprint for an American economy that is built to last and 
     develops every available source of American energy. Nuclear 
     power is an important part of that blueprint.

  Yes, nuclear power is so important that President Obama forgot to 
mention it in his very long State of the Union message. To send 
Secretary Chu to Georgia is kind of ironic, given that Chu is the one 
who said that nuclear power is the ``lesser of two evils.'' It was the 
President himself who designated a Chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory 
Commission who had been leading the antinuclear energy group for quite 
some time. In fact, Chairman Jaczko tried to delay the progress on 
licensing the very reactors in Georgia that they went up to try to take 
credit for.
  We see this over and over again.
  What does this all mean? President Obama knows he needs to talk the 
talk on domestic energy because people have caught on. I think people 
know now that we have the recoverable reserves to be completely free 
from the Middle East. All we have to do in a short period of time is 
develop our own resources. I know my environmental friends are already 
saying, about the CRA on the Utility MACT--the NRDC jumped on the story 
today with the headline ``Let Loose the Defenders of Mercury 
Poisoning.'' Nothing could be further from the truth.
  I remember in 2003 and 2005 when we had the Clear Skies bill. The 
Clear Skies bill would have had mandatory reductions--keep in mind we 
are talking about 2003--mandatory reductions on mercury emissions by 70 
percent by 2018. It was a matter of a few years from now, that would be 
reality. Think about it, 6 years from now we would already have a 70-
percent reduction if the Democrats had not stopped the bill. The reason 
they did is because we refused--we want to have SOX, 
NOX, and mercury, which are the real pollutants, reduced and 
reduced in a rapid fashion, faster than President Clinton or anybody 
else has tried to do it. They held it hostage because they also wanted 
CO2 included in it, so we got none of the above as a result 
of it.
  The EPA's Utility MACT is designed to destroy jobs by killing off the 
coal industry. EPA admits itself that the Utility MACT rule would cost 
an unprecedented $11 billion to implement. Of course these costs will 
come in the form of higher electricity rates for every American. 
Importantly, the EPA also admits that the $11 billion in costs will 
yield a mere $6 billion in direct benefits.
  Do the math. It means the agency has by its own admission completely

[[Page S858]]

failed the cost-benefit test. It has the advantage of reducing 
emissions without killing jobs and the Utility MACT would do little for 
the environment but destroy millions of jobs. Why did Clear Skies fail? 
As I said, it was held hostage because they didn't want us to just lose 
SOX, NOX, and mercury, the real pollutants. They 
wanted to include CO2.
  Before Obama's decision to halt the ozone rule, which would have put 
hundreds of thousands of jobs at risk, then-White House Chief of Staff 
Bill Daley asked: What are the health impacts of unemployment?
  That is a good question. What are the health impacts of skyrocketing 
electricity rates which hurt the poor the most? What are the health 
impacts on children whose parents will lose one of the 1.4 million jobs 
that will be destroyed by the EPA's rules on powerplants?
  The Senate needs to focus on promoting policies that improve our 
environment without harming our economy. The EPA's Utility MACT does 
the opposite. My CRA, I think, is one of the things about which they 
say: You will never get it done. I have criticized people for bringing 
a Congressional Review Act up against regulations where I know the 
votes are not there. It takes just 51 votes. The reason I think the 
votes should be here now is if the people at home care enough to put 
the pressure on. That is exactly what happened on the ozone 
requirements. They said the President was committed to ozone changes. 
He changed his mind because of that.
  Remember the farm dust rule? The President was going to have a farm 
dust rule on emissions that would hit the air. I always remember, I had 
a news conference in my State of Oklahoma, in the western part of the 
State. We had a couple of people there from Washington who had never 
been west of the Mississippi. We got down there in this area of 
Oklahoma. We were talking about farm dust. I said: You see this brown 
stuff down here? That is dirt. You see that round green thing? That is 
cotton. Hold your finger up in the air--that is wind. Are there any 
questions?
  There is no technology to do that, yet the expense to each of my 
farmers in a farm State like Oklahoma would have been hundreds of 
thousands of dollars a year and not accomplishing anything. We were 
able to get the public to write in to complain about that. As a result 
of that, the President pulled back.
  I hope enough people are concerned about Utility MACT and its 
devastating effect on our economy and on jobs in America that they will 
join in and apply the pressure necessary to help the people in this 
Chamber understand that we should pass this Congressional Review Act 
and do away with this particular, very harmful regulation that is 
before us.
  I have often said--a lot of people do not understand this--but 
Presidents are the ones who put the budgets down every year. A lot of 
times they try to blame the House or Senate, Democrats or Republicans. 
No. It doesn't matter. Who is in the White House, they are the ones who 
determine what the budget is. During the Bush years there was a total 
of $2 trillion of deficits in 8 years. However, after this budget came 
out last week, in the Obama 4 years the increase has been, in deficits, 
$5.3 trillion. That is $5.3 trillion in 4 years as opposed to $2 
trillion in 8 years.
  As bad as that is, I contend that the regulations of this 
administration are actually more expensive to the American people than 
servicing this debt. So I think it is important that we talk about 
this, talk about not just Utility MACT but all of these. Utility MACT 
is where we should draw the line, however, because that is one that 
directly affects our ability to provide energy for America, for our 
manufacturing jobs. We are right now a little bit under 50 percent 
dependent upon coal for our ability to run this machine called America. 
If you do this, we would lose, it is anticipated, 20 percent of our 
generation capacity and that translates into a lot of money, as I have 
noted.
  That is what we have introduced today. I encourage my Democratic and 
Republican colleagues to join us in passing the CRA.

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