[Congressional Record Volume 172, Number 75 (Wednesday, April 29, 2026)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2102-S2103]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                             S.J. RES. 139

  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am speaking in advance of my 
colleague from Colorado Senator Bennet's effort to seek redress in this 
body for a wave of pollution that is being unleashed in his State and 
neighboring States as well.
  One of the things about our failed Environmental Protection Agency 
right now is that one State can't regulate pollution that comes to it 
from another State. And yet the good neighbor policy that somebody has 
to be able to say ``Hey, wait a minute; you can't pollute my State from 
another State'' is one that EPA has just walked away from.
  In this case, the problem is a coal facility in Colorado. And just 
start with coal. It is really indisputable that coal is America's 
dirtiest, deadliest, and most expensive energy source. It is a dying 
industry for market reasons. It can't compete because it is dirty, 
deadly, and expensive.
  And yet, since taking office, President Trump has worked desperately 
to keep coal on life support, perhaps because the coal industry paid 
$3.5 million in 2024 to help him get elected, and Trump is a man who 
understands a quid pro quo.
  The Trump administration has taken every possible action to benefit 
the coal industry; never mind our health. Remember, it is the deadliest 
of energy sources. And never mind our bank accounts. Remember, it is 
the most expensive of energy sources.
  He even rolled back health-protecting standards for mercury and toxic 
emissions from coal plants. Mercury is pretty seriously, deadly stuff; 
and he rolled back those standards.
  He exempted one-third of all coal plants nationwide from toxic 
pollution standards. Who loses? Anybody exposed to the toxic pollution 
they emit. Who wins? Trump's big donors.
  He even directed the Secretary of Energy to issue orders under the 
Federal Power Act to force coal plants to stay online, driving up 
consumer costs against the wishes of the utilities and even the plants' 
owners. But they still had to buy and burn coal. So there is somebody 
out there who is going to make money off that.
  And now Trump has perverted the Clean Air Act to trample on States' 
rights to protect their own citizens.
  Coal plants are the Nation's most significant source of haze. The 
same coal pollutants that drive health issues and deaths nationwide 
drive haze formations. Under the Clean Air Act's Regional Haze Program, 
States establish plans to reduce haze-causing pollution. States may 
choose to include coal plant retirements in their plans. Often, that is 
consistent with the utility and the plant owner's wishes, as an old 
plant ends its useful life. When the EPA approves these plans, the 
retirements then become enforceable.
  In 2022, Colorado submitted a regional haze plan to the EPA that 
included coal plant retirements that Colorado utilities had 
independently and voluntarily planned for. ``They do better with 
cheaper, cleaner renewable energy'' is the simple answer.
  In January of this year, the EPA turned around and disapproved 
Colorado's plan, making the argument that Colorado's plan, voluntarily 
entered into with these utilities, could represent a ``taking'' under 
the Constitution.
  So we have here a really flagrant abuse of Federal authority: Make it 
more difficult for Colorado to protect its own citizens from toxic 
pollution and to provide affordable energy. And the resulting pollution 
won't just endanger Coloradans. This is a national issue because the 
haze blows, with prevailing winds, toward eastern States.
  My State of Rhode Island, for instance, has occasions when we have 
bad air days. And if you are driving into work in the morning and you 
are listening to the talk radio, they will say: Today is a bad air day. 
Children should stay home. Elderly people and people with breathing 
difficulties should not go out.
  It looks like a beautiful summer day. Kids will want to be in the 
yard, but it

[[Page S2103]]

is a bad air day. And so that health warning gets issued by the State 
of Rhode Island.
  And there is nothing the State of Rhode Island can do about it. If 
every car in our State was an EV, if everything ran off of clean 
electricity, we would still be out of compliance because we are a 
downwind State.
  And huge powerplants that push their pollution up into the sky, far 
enough that prevailing winds carries it out of their State and onto 
ours, they are the ones that are to blame, and there is nothing we can 
do about it.
  So I am very sympathetic to concerns that the EPA has a particularly 
important job when neighboring States are polluting one another and 
can't reach a regulatory solution because it is out of State, and that 
is exactly the predicament that we are creating here today.
  When Congress enacted the Congressional Review Act in 1996 to give 
Congress the opportunity to vote on regulations, well, that is why we 
are here today. We have a chance to undo this, and I hope we will 
because everybody here has a good chance of being a downwind State. 
Even California is often a downwind State from China. So you have got 
to be able to have protections from upwind pollution, and this would 
strip that.
  So the Trump administration's effort here--at breakneck speed--to 
tear down protections of Americans' health, safety, and environment we 
have a chance to claw back. Congressional Review Act resolutions like 
this one can help hold the administration to account.
  I will conclude by saying I just left the EPW hearing with EPA 
Administrator Zeldin. The point that I made in that hearing was that we 
are now headed into an election cycle in which the American people are 
desperately concerned about the cost of stuff. Stuff costs too much, 
and the Trump administration is ignoring the problem, if not making it 
worse. Those are basically the two buckets. They are either ignoring it 
completely or they are deliberately making it worse.
  With respect to electricity costs, the Trump administration is 
deliberately making it worse. They are raising costs for consumers on 
purpose.
  How are they doing it, and why are they doing it? Well, the ``how'' 
is that they are keeping inexpensive clean energy off the grid. We just 
went through this in Rhode Island. Our Revolution Wind offshore power 
facility was stalled by illegal orders of the Trump administration not 
once but twice, and the result was that power was delayed from coming 
ashore. Well, Revolution Wind has a contract to sell power onto the 
grid. That contract specifies a price. The price is 9 cents--9 cents. 
ISO New England--our grid operator--can do fairly easy math to show 
what the average grid price is for electricity. And guess what. It is 
18 cents. So this 9-cent power was stalled going into an 18-cent grid.
  Because it is 9-cent power, what would it have done? It would have 
been called up first by the grid because every grid calls up the least 
expensive power first. So that 9-cent power would have been flowing 
into the grid. It would have been filling up demand, and that would 
have meant that some dirty fossil fuel-polluting units would not have 
been called up. They were too expensive to run.
  So, when they push all that clean energy off the grid and buy time 
for the dirty, polluting fossil fuel plants--that is money directly to 
the fossil fuel industry--two things happen: One, costs go up for all 
consumers because those new, more expensive plants called online raise 
the price for everybody. So electricity bills go up. They are driven up 
on purpose by the delay of clean energy getting onto the grid.
  Where do those billions of dollars in extra costs that are extracted 
from American consumers go? Guess where--to the owners of those fossil 
fuel plants that are in the margin, the ones that get run because the 
clean energy has been kept off of the grid.
  It is a ginormous money pump out of the pockets of ordinary American 
ratepayers and into the pockets of the fossil fuel billionaires who put 
so much money into getting Trump elected. That is being done on 
purpose. Electricity costs are being driven up on purpose.
  Don't tell me that the Department of Energy or the Environmental 
Protection Agency or the Department of the Interior, for that matter, 
don't understand how the grid works. They have people who know exactly 
how the generation stack works. They know exactly that the least 
expensive units get run first and that the least expensive units 
displace the more expensive units, which is good for consumers, until 
the heavy hand of a fossil fuel-influenced government steps in and 
tries to prevent consumers from getting low-cost clean energy. Then the 
hole that that leaves that would have been filled by clean energy--you 
have got to go fill that hole by going up the stack to more and more 
expensive units, and virtually every time, that more expensive unit is 
a fossil fuel unit.
  So, like I said, what the Trump administration has created on purpose 
is a ginormous money pump to extract billions of dollars from regular 
consumers who would otherwise be enjoying the benefit of low-cost clean 
power, and they have done it as a reward for Trump's big fossil fuel 
donors, the ones who threw hundreds of millions of dollars at his 
campaign and who are now reaping a multiple-times reward with that 
investment.
  With that, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Schmitt). The Senator from Colorado.

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