[Congressional Record Volume 169, Number 204 (Tuesday, December 12, 2023)]
[House]
[Pages H6824-H6825]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1045
                      END HYPE OVER CO2

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
California (Mr. LaMalfa) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. LaMALFA. Mr. Speaker, several hundred private aircraft have left 
Dubai after a couple of weeks of wining and dining in the hot climate 
there in order to tell us how we should live our lives. They want to 
tell us how we should cut back or eliminate meat in our diets and how 
we should change our agriculture in this country to just be less of it. 
I guess they want to put us all on a forced diet, according to their 
view of the world.
  What does that really mean for us here? Less agriculture and fewer 
products grown in this country and in the European countries that want 
to play along with the Paris accords and such.
  One interesting little fact that gets in the way of all that is that 
the U.S. and Europe have already reduced their CO2 emissions 
down 10 to 15 percent in the last 2 years. This is without the Paris 
accord even having come fully into effect yet.
  It is other countries, like Asia, where numbers are dramatically 
increasing on CO2.
  That assumes that CO2 is actually a problem. 
CO2, carbon dioxide, is only represented by 0.04 percent of 
our atmosphere. That is 4/100ths of 1 percent is what CO2 
makes up.
  I talk to people on the street or at gatherings and events where I am 
speaking. How much of the air do you think is actually CO2? 
They have been hyped so much since grade school. They have kids scared 
to death. They say that CO2 is somewhere between 20 and 50 
percent. No. It is 0.04 percent.
  It is not a poisonous gas. I have had the argument of, well, it is 
like having fentanyl in your cereal or something like that. No, it is a 
necessary gas for plant life. We are all breathing it in right now. We 
are exhaling it right now. There are plants somewhere gladly absorbing 
it.
  If we go below 0.02 percent, plant life starts dying off. We would be 
in a pretty bad way. Yet, the hype over CO2 continues as 
they have the COP28 in Dubai. They sit there hatching plans to control 
our lives, especially in the Western countries.
  The plans for China and places like that continue to ramp up with 
more coal power plants and much more use of oil and gas. Oil and gas 
have been villainized by California, the EPA, and so many, including an 
idea over there that the Arab countries have produced so much 
petroleum, so they were supposed to have that conversation at COP28. 
They kind of put that off as getting rid of oil and gas.
  If we were even to contemplate that, you couldn't do it for at least 
four or five decades because we are so engrained with using that 
product to do anything--planting crops or transporting anything. If you 
got it, a truck

[[Page H6825]]

brought it. It is probably a diesel-powered truck.
  You see so many failed efforts to electrify vehicles, cars, trucks, 
et cetera. There are a few out there getting around, yes, but not on a 
dependable basis to keep our supply chain going.
  What we keep learning is that you have elites over at conferences 
like this saying that we need to cut back on meat, cut out agriculture. 
They want us to cut 30 percent of our agriculture. There is already a 
food shortage in much of the world, and even in some of our urban areas 
in this country, what we call food deserts.
  What is their reality with that? There is no reality to this. This is 
a way to control our lives, our choices, as they want to phase out meat 
and agricultural products grown in this country.
  Do you want to depend on it coming from somewhere else? That works 
really great. Wait until they have a food embargo like the fuel 
embargoes we had in the 1970s. The rest of the world does not look out 
for the needs of the United States like we do ourselves.
  It is about time we put aside this nonsense of getting to some kind 
of zero output of carbon by 2035 or 2050 or whatever round number they 
dream up as a goal. Like my home State of California, they do it all 
the time.
  At the same time that they are saying less carbon, they are also 
taking away the means to produce carbon-free electricity, such as 
tearing out the dams on the Klamath River and other dams up in Oregon 
and Washington that make clean hydroelectric power, low-cost power.
  Why do we need to have our electricity cost so much because of some 
people's wild dream, and controlling dream, on eliminating 
CO2, which is really not a problem? It is not a poisonous 
gas. It is not negative. Carbon is a building block of all of what we 
have and what we do.
  That isn't talked about a lot. Instead, we hear this side of the room 
half the time--it is all about carbon. Every conversation, every 
committee has to filter something through climate change. Climate 
change is a constant in our lives and on our planet. That reality 
doesn't get talked about, it is just hype, hype, hype.
  Czar Kerry comes back with more and more ideas on how to control us 
and take away the basic sustenance that makes this country strong with 
its energy and self-provision of food that keep us strong.

                          ____________________