[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 29 (Thursday, February 14, 2019)]
[House]
[Pages H1999-H2000]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                    CLIMATE CHANGE WAITS FOR NO ONE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Illinois (Mr. Casten) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. CASTEN of Illinois. Mr. Speaker, the very survival of humankind 
is in peril, and there is no greater threat to our continued existence 
than climate change. From the inaction of this administration, you 
would never guess the seriousness of the risk confronting us. For the 
sake of our very survival, I urge my colleagues to put aside their 
concerns about how our party leaders or how our base will judge us.
  All that truly matters is how our grandchildren will judge us. There 
are those who claim they don't believe in climate change. Those 
doubters deserve no more of our time or attention than those who don't 
believe in gravity. Science doesn't care. There are those who claim we 
can't make progress until we have a new occupant of the White House and 
a Democratic majority in the Senate. To those I say, We have no time to 
wait. Two years of inaction is 2 years we can never get back.
  We in this body need to begin tackling climate change now, and we 
need to start by talking about it differently, not as an unproven 
scientific theory, not as a political inconvenience and not as a job 
killer. It is an economic opportunity. Action on climate change can be 
the path to making the U.S. more globally competitive.

  I don't speak on this floor today as a theorist. From 2000 to 2016, I 
built multiple companies with missions to profitably reduce greenhouse 
gas emissions. My colleagues and I made U.S. manufacturers more 
competitive by reducing their energy expenses. We built more than 80 
projects and $300 million of capital investment, and I can now say 
three things with certainty: One, there are no thermodynamic barriers 
to drastically lowering CO2 emissions; and two, there are no 
economic barriers to businesses pursuing profits. That leads me to 
three, that there are a lot of legal barriers to profitably reducing 
greenhouse gas emissions.
  This gives us an opportunity, because while we can't change the laws 
of thermodynamics, and we can't change the laws of economics, we can 
change the laws of the United States. We don't need to reinvent the 
wheel. Switzerland, Germany, and Denmark all use half as much energy as 
we do per dollar of GDP. Those countries have the same access to 
talent, the same access to capital and technology as we do, but they 
use half as much energy. If all we did was copy them, we could cut 
CO2 emissions by 50 percent.
  I think we could do better. Consider this: in 2007, over a decade 
ago, Congress tried and failed to pass the Lieberman-Warner climate 
bill which was seen by some as being too ambitious because it sought to 
cut U.S. electric sector emissions by 17 percent. It didn't pass, and 
there was a powerful Senator who said at the time that the bill would 
drastically increase energy costs and cost millions of American jobs, 
all for no environmental gain.
  As Warner Wolf says, ``Let's go to the videotape.'' CO2 
emissions since then in the electric sector are down by nearly 25 
percent per megawatt hour and real power prices are down by 4 percent 
over the last decade. Just imagine what we could have done if we tried.
  So why did emissions fall? Because of economics.
  We have gradually been building more efficient, cleaner, and cheaper 
power plants, and once those plants are built, they always run more 
than the older, less efficient plants, because here is the little 
secret: businesses like to make money, and you make more money if you 
spend less on fuel.
  Mr. Speaker, if my colleagues take nothing else away from this 
speech, I hope they will understand that point. Everything we do to 
make our economy less dependent on expensive fossil fuel lowers 
CO2 emissions and makes our businesses more profitable. That 
protects American jobs and makes our citizens wealthier.
  So let me take this opportunity to speak to those who don't believe 
the science and to those who believe the science but think a warmer 
world is a good thing: Keep your beliefs. Hold on to them. All I am 
asking is that you be greedy. Greedy for America, as our President has 
boasted. Because if you are greedy, you will work with me to see 
CO2 reduction as an opportunity for cost reduction and 
profit maximization.
  I mentioned at the start of my remarks that the primary barrier to 
meaningful CO2 reductions are U.S. laws. That is not to say 
that those laws have been written with bad intent. To the contrary, 
many of those well-intentioned laws have had unintentional, negative 
consequences. Well-intentioned aspects of our Tax Code often cause 
capital to flow to the least economic technologies. Well-intentioned 
portions of the Clean Air Act discourage energy efficiency. Well-
intentioned social policies obscure the true cost of fossil fuels, 
distorting capital markets away from cheaper alternatives.
  But that is great news because we can fix all of those things. So 
let's make U.S. manufacturers more competitive. Let's help them cut 
energy

[[Page H2000]]

costs. Let's protect U.S. jobs. Let's make our energy system more 
resilient. And let's lower CO2 emissions.
  I think that is pretty bipartisan. And as I go to work on the Select 
Committee on Climate Crisis, I will be working toward writing and 
introducing legislation, and I look forward to hearing all the great 
ideas from my colleagues in this body. I don't claim to have all the 
answers, but I know that we do. But for goodness' sake, let's not wait.

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