[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 41 (Thursday, March 7, 2024)]
[House]
[Pages H1004-H1005]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       WEAPONIZING CO2

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
California (Mr. LaMalfa) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. LaMALFA. Mr. Speaker, I am going to speak to you, once again, 
about our atmosphere, climate, and, most specifically, carbon dioxide, 
which has been weaponized in the argument around here, with government 
agencies against the people, as a tool, I think, to take more control 
of the economy and people's personal property.
  Carbon dioxide, I will remind you, is 0.04 percent of the entire pie 
of our atmosphere; oxygen, 21 percent; nitrogen, 78 percent; trace 
gases other than that, 0.03. Argon is much bigger in our atmosphere 
than CO2. Yet, you would think, with the CO2 
numbers creeping up slowly, it is the end of the world.
  Everything around here has to be run through a CO2 filter, 
a climate change filter, and it is much to the detriment of our economy 
and the U.S. position in the world.
  Most recently, the Securities and Exchange Commission has adopted 
rules on their own to decide that people are going to have to start 
disclosing their climate impact of how they operate their businesses. 
You are going to have to start accounting for your CO2 
production and report that to a Federal entity.
  This is pretty much going to mean everybody if they are connected to 
a certain size of business and what have you. Small suppliers to larger 
corporations that are caught in the snare of this will have to account 
for that.
  For food production, let's say you have ingredients that are placed 
into a larger recipe for food products that you could buy from maybe a 
larger conglomerate. There are also individual small growers--say, a 
carrot farmer, a bean farmer. He is now going to have to disclose his 
CO2 production on his farm because he might be selling to a 
larger entity that is caught in the snare of the SEC.
  Where does this all end? How much time does an individual like that 
have to chase around and figure out what his CO2 impact is 
going to be, especially since it is only 0.04 percent of our 
atmosphere?
  There is much debate about what amount of the CO2 is 
caused by human activity. Some want to say, oh, it is 50 percent. 
Others believe it is very small, a tiny percentage, like maybe 3 
percent.
  There are those that want to say, well, the science is settled, 
merely because they want to move on and take control over so many 
aspects of our economy.

  What are some of the issues that we have seen grow out of that? We 
have what is known as ESG, environmental, social, and governance.
  The country of Sri Lanka, just a few short years ago, decided to 
adopt and try to meet these ESG goals, much to the great harm of their 
economy. It almost collapsed good portions of their economy because 
they went whole hog as a whole country on that to try to adopt ESG 
goals.
  On the environmental side of the E, they forced farmers to completely 
convert to organic materials for their fertilizer and whatever 
pesticide products they were able to use organically. What immediately 
happened? Rice yields in the country dropped 20 percent. The price of 
rice went up 50 percent for consumers.
  We saw that that blew a great big hole in the ag economy in that 
small country. Their country had to come in and start doing bailouts, 
basically, to help keep those farmers afloat until they finally got 
their senses and abandoned a lot of those ESG goals.
  They are also an important tea exporter, which caused their exports 
to fall. They lost hundreds of millions of dollars on that as well.
  Their economy collapsed by trying to meet some arbitrary ESG goal 
brought on by outsiders that really have this idealistic, elite whim of 
what people should be doing instead of what actually works.
  I run this all by you here because the Biden administration has been 
causing this kind of harm on our own economy in this country. The focus 
of every agency seems to be climate, climate, climate all the time 
because of a tiny increase in CO2.
  CO2 is a rounding error in the overall atmospheric chart 
here, and the increase of that is minute. How much can we blame on 
human activity versus what might be happening with other naturally 
occurring issues?

[[Page H1005]]

  What do we have? Our economy is being outclassed by China and others 
in the Pacific Rim that can produce at will, and they are the much 
larger so-called polluters than we are of CO2.
  Do you want to have a situation where we can actually have better 
control and reasonable regulations on how things are produced in this 
country, or do we want to export it all to China and places like that 
and have basically almost no control on how they are doing that?
  What we are going to hear tonight when the President is going to be 
in this room, he is probably going to talk a whole bunch about climate 
and some new initiatives on that. Instead, why doesn't he focus on 
something that could have immediate help for the devastating things 
going on on our border in this country, eight steps he could take with 
the swing of a pen to clean up our border problems instead of blaming 
Republicans for his mess?

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