[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 70 (Thursday, April 22, 2021)]
[Senate]
[Page S2139]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                          CLIMATE LEGISLATION

  Mr. McCONNELL. Madam President, yesterday, I mentioned that the DNA 
of the far-left Green New Deal is all over President Biden's spending 
bills. That wasn't just my opinion; it was the verdict of our colleague 
the junior Senator from Massachusetts.
  Today, the President is scheduled to meet virtually with a group of 
the world's leaders on climate policy. His agenda, reportedly, is to 
encourage them to expand their countries' Paris climate agreement 
commitments to meet even more ambitious emissions goals. The problem, 
of course, as our colleagues, no doubt, remember, is that the hollow 
commitments these countries made back in 2015 carry no serious means 
for enforcement.
  Under the last administration, even from outside this agreement, the 
U.S. economy proved more than capable of meaningfully reducing 
CO2 emissions. But many of the signatories within the 
supposed deal have largely ignored their stated commitments and 
continue to emit with reckless abandon.
  As the Biden administration climate envoy, John Kerry, once lamented, 
``[M]ost countries are . . . not getting the job done in living up to 
Paris.'' China, for example, has just kept emitting more and done it 
shamelessly. Their share of greenhouse gas emissions is now nearly 
double--double--that of the United States.
  On a recent trip to Shanghai, Kerry tried to echo President Biden's 
encouragement on emissions reduction, but the kid-gloves approach 
didn't seem too successful. China's Vice Minister for Foreign Affairs 
said: ``I'm afraid this is not very realistic.'' A direct quote from 
the Chinese Government.
  Democrats' zeal for imposing costly environmental agendas on our own 
country is not something our biggest foreign competitors seem to share. 
If that is true, our colleagues could inflict as many painful policies 
on American workers and American industries as they want and still not 
achieve a significant change in worldwide emissions or global 
temperatures.
  The cost of these misplaced priorities is already hitting Americans 
hard. Remember, revoking permitting for the Keystone XL Pipeline and 
killing thousands of jobs was a day-one priority for this new 
administration. Now their so-called infrastructure plan would aim at 
completely decarbonizing our electric grid, which means hurting our 
coal and natural gas industries and putting good-paying American jobs 
into the shredder.
  Borrowing money in order to kill jobs, now, there is a concept. 
Meanwhile, a mountain of redtape would keep public works projects 
smothered, literally smothered in endless environmental reviews, and 
their plan would thrust the west coast obsession with electric vehicles 
onto the entire Nation, onto rural school districts, onto industries, 
whether they like it or not.
  Next week, President Biden is set to address a joint session of 
Congress for the first time. I expect we will hear more claims like the 
ones that have been debunked by fact checkers that all this Green New 
Deal DNA would actually create a lot of American jobs. Fact checkers 
are debunking that claim.
  But even the most favorable analyses, even the administration's 
favorite projections, suggest that the President's plan would be 
terrible, just terrible at creating jobs. The rosiest numbers you could 
come up with suggest it might cost American taxpayers more than 
$800,000 for every job it might create--more than $800,000 per job.
  And Ivy League economists have calculated that the plan's long-term 
effects on GDP, capital stocks, and hourly wages would all be negative. 
Let me say that again. These multiple trillions of dollars would buy us 
less GDP, less investment, and lower wages. It almost takes talent to 
craft something that completely disastrous.
  So this is quite a one-two punch: toothless requests of our foreign 
adversaries and maximum pain for American citizens.

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