[Congressional Record Volume 168, Number 70 (Thursday, April 28, 2022)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2226-S2227]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        ENVIRONMENTAL STANDARDS

  Mr. CASSIDY. Madam President, every Senator, when she or he goes 
home, speaks to families feeling the crushing burden of inflation, in 
large part driven by fuel prices--it is certainly true when I go home 
to Louisiana--and they hope for a better job; one, they would like a 
better job, but, two, they need the extra money in order to keep up 
with the inflation.
  There is a connection with their personal economic concerns, Putin's 
war in Ukraine, and China doing their best to take American jobs by 
ignoring environmental standards, using slave labor, giving subsidies 
to the businesses, making it almost impossible for American businesses 
to work here and compete with products made in China.
  As one example of just how successful China has been, in the early 
2000s, China was about 19th and 20th in manufacturing and carbon 
emissions.
  Since then, since the early 2000s, China has become No. 1 worldwide, 
both in the amount of manufacturing but also in the amount of their 
carbon emissions.
  Indeed, the increase in carbon emissions for China is more than the 
combined decrease of the United States, the EU, and the United Kingdom 
in that same period of time.
  We have been doing our best to improve our environmental standards 
for the benefit of the whole world, and China has exploited that, using 
their lack of enforcement of standards to attract our jobs to their 
country, and yet our global greenhouse gas emissions are worse off.
  Now, as I mentioned, the inflation, the hope for a better job, which 
is not realized, Putin's war, using energy as a national security tool, 
and China's concerted strategy are all interwoven. There is a nexus, 
and that nexus is between energy and the climate, the economy of a 
family and of a nation, and national security.
  So if we are going to improve the financial situation for that family 
in Louisiana, a working family in Nevada, or any of our States and do 
something about our national security concerns, then we must do 
something about energy, and that is related to emissions.
  The most effective way of doing this is looking at how China 
addresses their emissions and how the United States does.
  Now, when I speak of emissions, I speak of the fact that we now use 
natural gas instead of coal, and natural gas burns much more cleanly 
than coal, and so, therefore, we have cleaner air in the United States 
than we did even 20 years ago.
  But China uses coal for about 60 percent of their energy feedstock. 
And so to understand China as a competitor, let's look at their 
economic, geopolitical, and national security strategies against us, 
and we are going to look at it through the prism of carbon emissions 
because if we think about national security without thinking about 
energy and the associated emissions, if we don't think about them all 
at the same time, we are wasting our time, just wasting our time. So, 
again, examining as a nexus.
  There is a petrochemical plant in Louisiana that has invested heavily 
in lowering their emissions. We pay a little extra for the products 
they produce, but we accept that extra cost so that we have this 
cleaner environment.
  Just as an example, the plastic that is on the back of my phone, that 
plastic is made from natural gas usually, and the process of making 
that has rigorous environmental standards to make sure that we protect 
those who live around the plant. China does not do that. They do not 
enforce those standards, nor, as I mentioned earlier, do they use 
natural gas. They are much more likely to use coal, and they 
preferentially build their powerplants on the Pacific coast of China. 
So the emissions go into the atmosphere, and they blow across the 
Pacific, and they land in the United States. Much of the problems of 
the west coast of the United States with SOX and 
NOX are from plants that originate their emissions in China.

  And did I say it lowers their cost of production by not enforcing 
those? By lowering the cost of production, you attract American jobs 
away from the United States of America over there. And did I say it 
strengthens their economy? And by strengthening their economy, they 
have more money to invest in their military and more money to pursue 
their geopolitical strategy, which is to undermine the influence of the 
United States of America.
  By not applying our emission standards to China, giving them a free 
pass, we are allowing them to implement their strategy.
  Now, by the way, I am not against international trade. We can look at 
the treaties we have with Canada and with Mexico or with Central 
American countries, and we can see that there are certain labor and 
environmental standards that are embedded in those. And it is an even 
playing field, of sorts. So if we have a clean air standard here in the 
United States, there is something like that in Mexico and something 
like that in Canada. If we have labor standards here, we have something 
like that in Honduras and something like that in Guatemala. So we are 
still competing, but the playing field is more even.
  Now, there are other benefits of trading in the Western Hemisphere.
  About 40 percent of the goods that Mexico produces are reimported 
from the United States. There is an exchange that goes back so that the 
revenue that is produced in trade disproportionately comes from Mexico

[[Page S2227]]

back to the United States. So while that number is 40 percent with 
Mexico, it is only 4 percent with China. And it is not like we are 
sending all this money to China. We had about a $355 billion trade 
deficit with them last year. And I am not talking about the deficit; I 
am just saying that only 4 percent of that revenue comes back to the 
United States in order to reinvest in the American economy.
  So I am all for trade, but I want to have something which is more 
mutually beneficial and one in which there is a level playing field and 
one in which the disregard for environmental standards is not used as a 
strategy to strip jobs away from Americans in order to improve an 
economy of a competitor that uses that money to improve their military 
standing and uses that money to undermine our influence and, by the 
way, to attempt to expand their geopolitical viewpoint.
  Now, I will say once more, I love capitalism. It has the ability to 
elevate people out of poverty. Three generations ago, my family left 
Ireland and came to the United States because they didn't have enough 
to eat, and because this is the greatest capitalist country in the 
world, my family did quite well because of the system of government we 
have here. I am not arguing against that.
  But what we cannot tolerate is the arbitrage of rules that are put in 
place by developed countries to protect not just our own citizens but 
the global environment from the ill effects of certain types of 
activities, say, in this case, burning energy.
  If we are going to equalize the playing field, if you will, to 
lawfully and peacefully defeat a strategy which has explicit goals to 
take jobs from the United States of America and to eclipse us as a 
world power, we need to think strategically as to how to defeat this 
strategy.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Alaska.

                          ____________________