[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 184 (Wednesday, October 20, 2021)]
[Senate]
[Page S7095]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                                 ENERGY

  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, the Federal Government's own analysts 
of the energy sector are predicting that this winter American families 
could face home heating bills that are 54 percent higher than last 
year--54 percent higher than just last year. On average, the price for 
our households running on natural gas is expected to jump 30 percent. 
For homes that use propane, a different assessment says the forecast 
looks like ``propane-market Armageddon.''
  As the head of one aid organization put it, ``After the beating that 
people have taken in the pandemic, it's like: What's next?'' What is 
next? Well, astonishingly, what is next is yet another reckless taxing-
and-spending spree from Washington Democrats, including more 
inflationary spending to push costs even higher and more anti-domestic-
energy taxes and regulations that would only compound these problems.
  That includes new, crushing taxes aimed at domestic natural gas 
production. They want to reprise the Obama administration's War on 
Coal. But this time the target is also--in addition to coal, the target 
is also the natural gas that provides electricity for our communities 
and heats families' homes. And then there are the new mandates and new 
penalties that are essentially designed to make 49 States' electrical 
grids move more in the direction of California's--paying higher costs 
for less reliable power.
  Now, unfortunately, this has been the Biden administration's playbook 
going back to the very beginning. Remember, killing the Keystone XL 
Pipeline and thousands of American jobs was a day one--a day one--
priority. Then it was the ban on new development of domestic energy 
reserves and the hasty mission to rejoin the toothless Paris climate 
accords, where virtually nobody--nobody--but America seems to be 
remotely interested in achieving their nonbinding ``commitments.''
  So for all the leftwing's apparent urgency to pass radical climate 
policy, they seem not to care much about tackling the biggest sources 
of the world's carbon emissions. The so-called international community 
that had scraped together the failed Paris deal could only get the 
world's most prolific polluter, that is, China, to agree--now, listen 
to this--to curb its increase in emissions 9 years from now. That is 
all they got out of China: an agreement to curb their emissions 9 years 
from now.
  That is what this administration calls a good deal? America signs up 
for self-inflicted pain today, and China maybe--maybe--thinks about 
beginning to follow suit in another decade.
  So, listen, China continues to produce more than one-fourth--one-
fourth--of the world's carbon output, roughly 2\1/2\ times as much as 
the United States.
  Instead of fighting back against our adversaries, Democrats' reckless 
taxing-and-spending spree would just hand-deliver them one big gift 
right after another, like the big new tax hikes on American businesses 
that would leave our industries paying higher tax rates than businesses 
in communist China; like doubling down on the anti-energy policies that 
already have the Biden administration going hat in hand to Russia and 
OPEC and begging them to up their own production for us.
  As our colleague Senator Barrasso pointed out yesterday, before the 
Biden administration took over, America was enjoying energy 
independence for the first time in seven decades. Before the Biden 
administration took over, America was enjoying energy independence for 
the first time in seven decades, but now, we are heading the other way. 
America has doubled our oil purchases from Russia on President Biden's 
watch. We are twice as dependent on Russian oil today as we were before 
this administration took power. And President Biden green-lighted 
Putin's new gas pipeline that will give Moscow even more leverage over 
the European continent.
  So Democrats want our Nation on a path toward less energy 
independence and higher costs for working families. Their reckless 
taxing-and-spending spree would make it all dramatically worse.

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