[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 11]
[House]
[Pages 15131-15138]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                           CLOSING GUANTANAMO

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mrs. Kirkpatrick of Arizona). Under the 
Speaker's announced policy of January 6, 2009, the gentleman from Iowa 
(Mr. King) is recognized for 60 minutes.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, I appreciate the honor to be 
recognized and addressed here on the floor of the House of 
Representatives. And I appreciate the collaboration of my colleagues 
from Texas, the two judges from Texas, that addressed this subject 
matter of the czars in the last hour.
  A lot has been said about the czars, and now maybe I will just 
transition from that into another subject matter, Madam Speaker. But 
the idea that we are going to see the end of the Gitmo closing czar, 
it's pretty interesting to me. We have an Attorney General that seemed 
to have gotten that assignment. I remember the look in his eye as he 
was trying to figure out what to do with that January 22, 2010, 
mandated closing date that was established by the President in his 
executive order.
  I have also been down to Gitmo and seen down there in the commons 
area where the Gitmo inmates--the detainees, the enemy combatants, the 
terrorists, the worst of the worst--where they get in their communal 
area just off of where their little soccer field is, and it's an area 
where they play foosball and sit in the shade just off of where their 
big screen TV is, where they get their refreshments and their education 
in the English language and the cultural education that takes place. 
Just off of there, Madam Speaker--and not to set the scene too 
distinctly--there is a bulletin board just put up, it's a ply board. 
And on that ply board is the executive order, the President's executive 
order dated January 22, 2009. It's seven pages long, the English 
version of it, and that's set on this ply board. And then the Arabic 
version is about the same number of pages. And there is Plexiglas over 
the top of it. So these inmates, these worst of the worst--however many 
we have left down there--they can interrupt their soccer game, or stop, 
or if they're waiting their turn to play foosball, or whatever it might 
be, they can go over there and read or reread the executive order which 
says--it's a promise to the worst of the worst, the Gitmo detainees, 
that they're not going to be down there in Gitmo one day past January 
22, 2010. That's the pledge to them.
  When I looked at that, I had been involved in a lot of this 
discussion that had to do with the Gitmo detainees and the utter logic 
that says keep them there, don't close Guantanamo Bay. You couldn't 
have a better--no nation has treated the people they picked up in 
warfare as well as we have treated the Gitmo detainees.
  So these individuals are down there, and they live in air 
conditioning. And they say their cultural temperature is

[[Page 15132]]

between 75 and 80 degrees, so they, essentially, are the ones that set 
the thermostat in their residences--which they are cells, private 
cells. They don't share a room. They have private cells with a nice 
little arrow on the floor that shows them where Mecca is. And our 
operations down there stop five times a day for 20 minutes each time--
that's 100 minutes a day--while our guards stand respectfully and wait 
while the five prayers a day go on. This 100 minutes isn't interrupted 
by their opportunity to fill out the menu. They do that at a different 
time.
  They get to choose from nine different items--five-times-a-day 
prayer, 100 minutes a day, nine different items on the menu every day 
they can choose from, check the box and decide which ones of these 
Islamicly approved meals do they want to eat in the three squares a day 
that they get--all within the air conditioning that they live in if 
it's not their desire to go outside in the fresh Caribbean air and play 
a little soccer and foosball and schmooze around a little bit.
  So there is a pledge on that bulletin board, and that pledge is the 
executive order with the Plexiglas over the top of it. It is President 
Obama's executive order that is the commitment from the President of 
the United States that Gitmo will be closed.
  Now, when I saw that, I came to the conclusion that no matter how 
much logic there is that supports sustaining Guantanamo Bay, no matter 
that it is the best place in the world for these Gitmo detainees, no 
matter that it's air conditioning and nine Islamic meals to choose from 
in a day and outside exercise and indoor climate control and arrows for 
prayer and the fancier prayer rugs that I don't know anybody that has 
rugs this fancy in their house, and a skull cap and a Koran--no Bibles, 
by the way. Out of the 800 or so inmates they've had down there, one of 
them requested a Bible, but it caused too much unrest among the rest of 
them so Bibles are not allowed. Neither are American guards allowed to 
touch a Koran. It comes in a special little bag carried in and 
everybody gets this Koran.
  Well, of all of these things going on down there at Gitmo they have a 
promise, no matter how logical it is to keep it open, no matter how 
logical it is to process these enemy combatants through the procedures 
that this Congress has lawfully set up, Gitmo will be closed despite 
all logic. And it convinced me of that when I saw the bulletin board 
with the executive order on it. The President is not going to rescind 
an executive order that they have posted in front of the Gitmo 
detainees, the enemy combatants, the former terrorists. That is the 
strongest message that I picked up while I was there.
  I will be happy to yield to the gentleman from Texas.
  Mr. CARTER. I thank the gentleman for yielding.
  As you were talking about Guantanamo Bay, it dawned on me that the 
world talks about American treatment of political prisoners, they call 
them. We call them enemy combatants, which I think, since we pick them 
up from the battlefield, we've got a pretty decent argument. We don't 
hear anybody talking about our enemies' treatment of our combatants 
when captured on the battlefield. There is a reason, I think. First 
off, we do everything in our power to make sure that we don't lose any 
of our soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines to the enemy. We even 
remove our dead. We leave no soldier on the battlefield; it's the pride 
of our military. But there is also an underlying principle here 
because, if you will recall, less than, I think, 3 or 4 years ago, they 
got their hands on some people and they dragged them behind cars and 
hung them from the bridge in Baghdad. They got their hands on another 
guy; and on television, with everybody watching, they cut his head off 
in front of anybody who wanted to watch it.
  So let's compare nine selected menu items, temperature regulated to 
suit your lifestyle, and your religious material of choice treated with 
great respect--which is our way of dealing with prisoners versus 
decapitation, dragging, setting on fire, and hanging from a bridge. 
Where is the outcry? Well, there certainly can't be any comparison of 
treatment because we're doing our dangest not to see that happen again. 
And I'm proud to say that our guys are doing a great job on that; 
they're protecting Americans on the battlefield. It's because the enemy 
has no qualms with what they're going to do. Do you really think the 
enemy would be providing Bibles to the Christians that they captured? 
Do you really think, if they were from the border regions of Texas, one 
of their choices on the menu would be Mexican food? Give me a break. 
Anybody that's got any logic at all knows exactly what would happen to 
American prisoners that were captured, and that's why we fight so hard 
to keep them safe. I yield back.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time and thanking the gentleman from 
Texas, I think it's an especially important point, and very 
illustrative, when you asked the question, Do you think the enemy will 
provide Bibles to any of our soldiers that they might one day capture 
as prisoners of war?

                              {time}  2145

  It sounds even ridiculous when you say it because it's so far out of 
the realm.
  We are talking about one of the pieces that have to do with 
immigration, talking about renewing the religious workers visa, and 
we'll have about 5,000 religious workers come into the United States 
each year. And they should be and generally are required to, and often 
it doesn't work out that way, be affiliated with existing religious 
observations. They might well come from countries like Saudi Arabia or 
other countries in the Middle East, for example, those countries that 
aren't very tolerant of our missionaries going in there. So it occurred 
to me that if we really wanted to have religious workers visas here in 
the United States, we should turn around and require reciprocity. Just 
simply say to them, Fine, send your imams here to the United States, 
but the condition is we're going to send you some Baptist ministers and 
Catholic priests.
  I yield to the gentleman from Texas.
  Mr. CARTER. That's a very interesting position, and I agree with you 
actually. That would be the kind of world we would create. That's the 
fairness that Americans give to others. It's not the world of those we 
fight against. The world we fight against is an autocratic world in 
which it's their way or the highway.
  One more thing I want to point out. I get kind of tired of hearing 
people say we've got to close Gitmo because it is the target for 
creating more terrorists. So let's see. What do you think is going to 
be the target if we take everybody out of Gitmo and put them in 
Leavenworth? Then next year the recruiting tool is going to be, guess 
what? Leavenworth. So now we're going to close Leavenworth, because it 
could cause people to go over to the terrorist side, and send them to 
La Tuna down in El Paso. But wait a minute. In a year that's going to 
be the target. That's going go to be the evil Guantanamo. So eventually 
they're going to end up in the Williamson County Jail. But wherever you 
put them, until they are back home on the enemy terrorists' 
battlefield, they will recruit based on that holding facility. It's a 
ridiculous argument to say you have to close Guantanamo because it 
becomes a recruiting tool for terrorists, because if they were in 
Leavenworth, it would be the recruiting tool for terrorists.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time and thanking the gentleman from 
Texas, I would add to that that the representation of Gitmo is 
something that's created by the liberal news media and the liberal 
mindset and the MoveOn.org people. Name a criticism of Gitmo, and 
chances are that criticism is just simply untrue. One of those is that 
there were people waterboarded at Gitmo. Not true. It didn't happen. It 
didn't ever happen. But the public believes it did. So if there's a 
rumor out there, if there's an urban legend that exists about 
something, do we go eradicate it because there's a rumor?
  I don't understand what the criticism was of Gitmo in the first 
place. They had to go somewhere. It's a very humane thing to do. No, 
waterboarding

[[Page 15133]]

didn't take place at Guantanamo Bay, but some really evil people reside 
down there. And they are not just innocent people that randomly were 
picked up. These are not goat herders down there. These are evil 
terrorists who believe their path to salvation is in killing us. And 
they have a command-and-control structure even to the extent they could 
order a simultaneous attempt at suicide that took place a couple of 
years ago; four that tried, three succeeded. Exactly a year to the day, 
there was another attempt. One succeeded. Now we have them all on a 
suicide watch where no one down there that's an inmate goes more than 3 
minutes without eyes on from at least one of our guards.
  One of the other things that's happened is you think about abusive 
treatment of prisoners. I see nothing but a culture of--it bends over 
backwards. There's too much respect down there, in my view, for these 
evildoers that are there. But on the other side of this thing is that 
on an average of 20 times a day, these inmates attack our guards. Half 
of the time they're throwing feces in their face, and the other half of 
the time they're physically assaulting our guards. And the worst thing 
we can do to punish them is reduce their outdoor exercise time down to 
2 hours a day. And this is an evil empire nation and we ought to close 
down Gitmo because MoveOn.org is critical and liberal socialist Western 
Europe is critical and the people on the other side of the great divide 
of Western civilization are critical?
  Many of them have designs on working against the United States, and I 
certainly don't include Western Europe in that. But I did have a 
conversation with the leadership of the Germans, and they said, Well, 
we think that you ought to close Gitmo, and they have been pushing hard 
for that, and that we should disperse these, at the time 241, detainees 
around to other countries in the world. But the Germans aren't going to 
take any of them as long as they might pose a threat to Germany. And 
how do they measure this? Well, if we're not going to bring them to the 
United States, then they must be dangerous for us to bring here; so why 
would they take them there? In other words, they put a condition on us 
that says they won't be accepting any; they'll just be pressing us to 
close Guantanamo Bay.
  My answer to that is if you won't take any of these inmates, then it 
looks to me like you don't have anything to say about Guantanamo Bay. 
Your opinion, I believe is invalid, along with most of the other 
criticism that flows out on the behavior.
  A nation has got to be able to stand some criticism. We didn't elect 
a President to run around the world and apologize to every continent 
and do a contrition tour of the world. That's not going to make people 
like us any better. And, by the way, I'm not so interested in being 
liked; I'm interested in being respected. And that's the thing that 
will bring about the right kind of results from the enemies we have. 
When they see us knuckle under and go wobbly because of a little 
criticism, and we'll close a place like Guantanamo Bay, thinking that 
then their criticism is going to move along because somebody said it's 
their best recruiting tool--who says, and why? And if that's their 
recruiting tool, there are many things that they can gin up over the 
Internet that would stimulate people to join their side.
  What do they say? ``Remember Guantanamo Bay''? Is that like 
``Remember the Alamo,'' a recruiting tool for 140 years or whatever it 
is? It doesn't hold water, in my analysis, and I just believe that this 
backpedaling from international criticism doesn't get you anything 
except more international criticism in a different area, and that's 
something that I think that the judge and I agree on.
  Mr. CARTER. I thank the gentleman for yielding. Don't be comparing it 
to ``Remember the Alamo.'' That's pretty sacred stuff from where I come 
from.
  But, seriously, today I was watching the news, and I saw these four 
detainees who are now living in probably the most luxurious setting I 
believe I've ever seen in, I believe it's Bermuda. I mean it's a 
beautiful house overlooking the ocean with a swimming pool. It's like a 
three-part swimming pool, a swim area and I guess that's the lounging 
area or maybe a kiddie pool. I don't know what it is. And these guys 
are sitting there. Like the guy said the other night about what was 
reported on the money we were going to spend to send to Palau, where 
they were talking about putting some people out on that island. He said 
at that rate of spending, $200 million for 12, I think it was, that 
were going to go to Palau, if that's the rate of spending, why don't we 
just buy the Waldorf Astoria and put them all in there because it would 
come out cheaper? And, you know, it would.
  I think that the world is going to look and say, Look at how the 
administration is reacting to this criticism of Guantanamo. They're 
pulling them out of a state-of-the-art prison which has state-of-the-
art rules and state-of-the-art treatment and they're moving them to the 
tune of $200 million to an island out in the middle of nowhere?
  By the way, none of these guys are on the no-fly list. Because I 
remember we voted on that less than 2 weeks ago to put them on the no-
fly list, and the majority killed it in a big, big way.
  Now, we pay $200 million to Palau. They go out there and hang around 
a while until they kind of get their feet on the ground, and then 
they're on a great white jet headed anyplace they want to go. And 
they're not under detention there. In the Bahamas where those four guys 
are, they've got freedom of the island. In the Bahamas you could get on 
a boat and go to the United States. We've got drug smugglers probably 
that smuggle that route.
  But, seriously, this is ridiculous how we are overreacting to this 
thing and doing things that I'm sure the rest of the world has got to 
be saying, These guys are crazy in the United States, setting these 
guys up in a seaside resort in Jamaica. Insanity rules.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Texas.
  We were having a lot of discussions here about some things that were 
heretofore unimagined just a few months ago or even just a few years 
ago. And as we transitioned over into this discussion about Guantanamo 
Bay, this discussion will go on, but the bottom line of it comes out to 
be this: Yes, there are a few of them that could potentially be facing 
a death sentence. A few. I don't know how big that number is, and I 
can't get a definitive response. I guess I should pass my request over 
to the Gitmo closing czar and ask him how many are facing a death 
sentence.
  But let's just look at it in this fashion: And that is that it looks 
like they are going to close Guantanamo Bay. They're going to disperse 
these people to places wherever they can get rid of them. Some of them 
are likely to be released in the free world, some into the United 
States of America. These are the worst of the worst. We have about a 
one-in-seven recidivism rate of those 558 that we'd released that were 
the nicest guys of the lot. The least dangerous is a more accurate way 
to describe them. And even out of those 558, we see a recidivism rate 
where they have turned around and attacked Americans and free people 
one out of seven that we know. And I don't know what percentage it is 
that we don't know. But if one out of seven will come back and attack 
Americans when you pick the best of the worst, what will be the attack 
rate on free people when you release the worst of the worst? It will be 
greater than one out of seven. And this number is 241. So divide your 
seven in there and multiply it by whatever that factor is, a two or a 
three or so, and you'll come up with a number. I think we're going to 
see 50 or more of them that will turn around and attack Americans or 
other free people.
  The bottom line of the executive order is that most or all will 
eventually be released and they will attack free people and innocent 
people will die. And among those innocent people are likely to be 
Americans, and that will then be the news story that will come back. 
And then we will replay this and unravel it all the way backwards 
again, and it will be, well, only one or two or three mistakes that 
only cost 20 or 30 or 40 lives, so that we could avoid this criticism 
and shut

[[Page 15134]]

down an operation that has actually been built up to accommodate the 
people that are there now, including the Uyghurs, who are now wasting 
away in ``MargaUyghurville'' from what I understand. I can't even say 
it because I get Jimmy Buffett and Warren Buffett mixed up, I think.
  Mr. CARTER. That's good. I like that.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. If this subject matter has been utilized, I think, 
adequately, I want to take some of this discussion over, Madam Speaker, 
and talk a little bit about where we are with cap-and-trade and cap-
and-tax.
  It looks like this administration and the majority in this Congress 
are determined to push through a Waxman-Markey bill or some version of 
it, probably the version that came out of committee here a few weeks 
ago. And I have taken this position, and I hold it, and that is that 
they are wrong on the science, and they're wrong on the economics.
  I want to address the science in a fairly short degree here, and it 
turns out to be this: Remember our history. This issue was brought 
before this Congress, I think the year was 1988, although I haven't 
referenced that. That's strictly from memory. It was a hearing on 
climate change. No, excuse me. It was a hearing on global warming. And 
the lead witness on that was Dr. James Hanson. By coincidence, he and I 
went to the same high school together. He was there ahead of me, and I 
don't recall him. But I understand that the testimony was midsummer. 
The room was not air conditioned. The humidity about matched the 
temperature. And as the Members of the Congress sat there and sweated, 
they were being told that this world was going to get warm and all 
kinds of calamities were going to take place. Well, 1988, that was only 
just a few years after we had all the interest in the ice age. There 
was a coming ice age that was published in some of the major national 
publications, and it was inevitable that the Earth was going to cool 
and we'd have to get ready for the glaciers to creep down from the 
north and push us off our cornfields, and Iowans were going to have to 
migrate to South Texas in order to avoid this. And that was 1970 and 
some of those years. And it's a fact that at least one and probably 
more than one of those scientists that were certain that we were going 
to undergo this ice age are now on the side of the argument that the 
Earth is going to get warmer, and it's going to get warmer fast--
perhaps as much as 4 degrees centigrade over 100 years--and that 
anything that's a weather anomaly is going to be the result of global 
warming.
  If you remember, a couple of years ago we had quite a few hurricanes, 
the result of global warming. A year ago hurricanes were way off, a 
result of global warming. Everything is a result of climate change, 
whether it's more rain or less rain or whether it's warmer temperatures 
or cooler temperatures.
  So I guess if you have a nice utility to blame it on, climate change 
blames everything on that's an anomaly. And you aren't going to have to 
be around when science actually evaluates the predictions that you make 
because none of us are going to live beyond 100 years. So if it doesn't 
get to be a 4-degree centigrade increase in the Earth's temperature 100 
years from now, nobody is going to point at Dr. Jim Hanson and say, 
You're wrong, Doc, or to Al Gore and say, You're wrong, because they 
will be at the same place I will be at that point.

                              {time}  2200

  And so it is a handy little excuse to just shift it off on to climate 
change and then ask for this great growth in government.
  Now, we had a meteorologist speak to the Conservative Opportunity 
Society a week ago last Wednesday morning, Dr. Roy Spencer. He is a 
NASA scientist. He is the one that is managing the satellite collection 
data that collects the Earth's temperatures from satellites. He has 25 
years of data. And as he talked about this, and this was a fairly quick 
once-through so it wasn't like a semester course, but as he talked 
about this data, he explained to us that the climate change models that 
they are using to predict global warming, they have to have 
assumptions.
  I asked the question, why is it that physicists tend to buy into the 
global warming argument more so than meteorologists do? He said, well, 
it is logical, because meteorologists understand the ambiguities. They 
are trying to predict the weather for tomorrow. The climate czar, he 
can't predict the weather for tomorrow, but they are predicting the 
temperature 100 years from now.
  So, I posed the question, I have a son that is going to have an 
outdoor wedding in August and I would like to know what the weather is 
that day. Of course, the climate czar is not going to tell me. We can 
find out in a couple of months whether he is right or wrong. One 
hundred years from now he will make a prediction, but he won't tell you 
what it is going to be like next week. But the presumptions that are 
there, meteorologists understand the vagaries of predicting the weather 
even tomorrow, let alone 100 years from now.
  Physicists have studied the exact sciences, so when they put together 
a climate change model, a computer calculation that brings in a lot of 
factors, there always has to be assumptions. The assumptions are 
plugged in by the meteorologists, and the numbers are calculated by the 
physicists and the other exact science people. They have great 
confidence in their numbers. They understand the interrelationships of 
the factors that they put on their calculations, but it is still based 
on assumptions.
  And the assumptions fall down to this. They assume that greenhouse 
gasses emitted by industry in the world, a lot of it from the United 
States, bring about more clouds in our atmosphere. Now, I can't quite 
explain why that is, but they believe that is. So if it is more clouds 
in the atmosphere, that is one assumption.
  The second assumption is more clouds make the Earth warmer. Now, that 
seems like an odd assumption to me, and they have been telling me this 
for years, and it never made sense to me.
  Dr. Spencer explains it the other way. He says, no, his data shows 
that more clouds bring about a cooler Earth, and they have 25 years of 
satellite data that shows that. And that is what makes sense to me. If 
a cloud blocks out the sun, the Earth is not going to be as warm, and 
if the cloud goes away and the sun shines on the Earth, it absorbs the 
radiation from the sun and the Earth gets warmer. That is the simple 
part of this.
  So if their assumptions are CO2 gas primarily in the 
atmosphere increases clouds and more clouds warm the Earth, then you 
get one result, the Earth gets 4 degrees centigrade warmer in 100 
years, or some variation of that.
  If you turn around and use the data and you back-feed Dr. Spencer's 
data into the model, then it turns this argument around on its head. 
But even then Dr. Spencer is very conservative and careful. He thinks 
maybe that data shows not a 4-degree centigrade increase, but more 
about half-a-degree centigrade increase, and the argument can be made 
that the Earth will get cooler. Plus the data we have shows that the 
world has gotten actually marginally cooler or else the temperature has 
been flat since 2002.
  Dr. Spencer argues or informs us that another 10 years this kind of 
data and it is going to be really hard for the alarmists to be able to 
make the argument that we are faced with this global warming that is 
only revokable if we follow their model.
  So I look at that science and I understand Dr. Spencer's 
presentation. I do not understand Dr. Hansen's or Al Gore's 
presentation. It does not make sense to me with the science I have in 
my background.
  So I simply asked the question, Madam Speaker, the foundational 
question: What are we trying to do here and with what? That would be 
the logical thing to ask.
  So the first thing is, how big is our atmosphere? Well, our 
atmosphere happens to be, and they measure this in metric tons, it is 
5.150 quadrillion metric tons of atmosphere. That is the

[[Page 15135]]

force of all the air on the planet pushing down on gravity. So that is 
just a lot. That is a lot of air in our atmosphere.
  Then, so what is the cumulative total of all of the CO2 
that has gone into the atmosphere emitted by the United States of 
America since the dawn of the industrial revolution? About 45 percent 
of it goes into sinks, which means it disappears and they don't know 
where it went; 55 percent hangs out in the air and is accumulated. And 
that number sounds big, but not compared to our overall atmosphere.
  So let's put this in a perspective. It works like this. If you draw a 
circle that represented the size the atmosphere of the Earth and have 
that be an 8-foot circle, so roughly the size of the wall in your 
house, two 4-by-8 sheets of drywall, and draw a circle around that big 
in diameter, that would represent all the Earth's atmosphere.
  Then draw a circle in the middle of that to demonstrate the volume of 
the CO2 that has accumulated in the Earth's atmosphere since 
the dawn of the Industrial Revolution emitted by the United States. 
Your 8-foot circle is the atmosphere. In the center of that you would 
draw a circle that is .56 inch in diameter, just a little over half an 
inch in diameter, the end of my little finger. That is all the bigger 
the circle would be that would be the cumulative total of all the 
CO2 the U.S. has emitted that is in the atmosphere today.
  And we are talking with Waxman-Markey about, well, that is 205 years 
of accumulation. So we want to take 1/205th of that and reduce that 
down by 20 percent a year for a little while, and then by 40, then by 
60, then by 83 percent. With that tiny little bit in that 8 foot 
circle, we are going to set the Earth's thermostat and control the 
Earth's temperature?
  What utter vanity to think in that tiny little bit, and we can adjust 
that tiny little half inch bit in an 8-foot circle only by a little 
bit, and we are going to change the whole temperature of all the 
atmosphere in the Earth, in spite of looking at these climate changes 
that we have always had over time. We have ice ages and warming periods 
and sunspots and more solar activity on the sun, and sometimes you will 
see the Earth cool because a volcano will erupt and cloud the Earth.
  Why would we think that more clouds in the atmosphere would warm the 
Earth when more clouds in the atmosphere from a volcano cools the 
Earth?
  Each of these questions are logical questions for third, fourth, 
fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth graders to ask, and even at that level 
we are not getting answers from the people that advocate this.
  It is as ``if'' they had to create a convoluted science and back-
figure it back to be able to justify their idea that they want to do 
this cap-and-tax model, and the cap-and-tax model is a large taxation 
scheme that for every $5 collected puts $1 in the Treasury and wastes 
the other 4.
  I yield to the gentleman from Texas.
  Mr. CARTER. I thank the gentleman for his description of just exactly 
what is going on. Just as you were saying, it came to mind some of the 
things that just in my lifetime I can remember.
  If you study history, you learn when we put in the Panama Canal we 
had a horrible, horrible situation when we built the Panama Canal 
because of malaria and yellow fever that were insect-bearing diseases. 
We invented DDT, and we used DDT to hold down those bug populations, 
and by that we were able to build the Panama Canal.
  As a child growing up in Houston, Texas, without air conditioning, 
the DDT truck went by every Friday night and sprayed the whole 
neighborhood. And yet a lady wrote a book called Silent Spring. She 
said that all the research shows--I hate it when people say ``all the 
research shows''--all the research shows if we continue to use DDT, we 
will have no insect life on Earth and the birds will die and we will 
have a silent spring. When spring comes, the birds won't be singing, 
the crickets won't be cricketing, and they will go away.
  And being loyal, progressive believers, we launched a campaign to get 
rid of DDT, and we got rid of it. It has been gone. But we now have one 
of the--we actually give millions, maybe even billions now, of dollars 
from this Congress to fight malaria. Something that was almost 
eradicated when I was a kid is now a major worldwide problem because we 
did away with DDT. And, guess what? Now the research, the real, 
present-day, 21st century research, says everything they said about DDT 
is just not true.

                              {time}  2210

  It was made up. And now, we're even finding out the lady knew she 
made it up. But she just didn't like DDT.
  Now, you talked about global cooling. I can remember global cooling. 
I can remember people talking about why it was going to cool down. We 
were going to all be in the ice age. We were going to blame the 
Russians. It was going to be the Russians fault, okay? All this stuff. 
And we had to build big industries around global cooling.
  You know, we told our people, you better quit propagating, because 
you're going to run out of space on this Earth. By the 21st century it 
will be standing room only on the Earth, unless you limit the number of 
children you have. And being good, college-educated progressives, we 
launched out to reduce the amount of children we had. And we did it 
with birth control. And later we did it with that horrid invention, 
abortion. But we limited our birth control, and our Western European 
friends limited their birth control. We still replace ourselves. Well, 
I think 2.1 children to the family. But I believe the Europeans now, 
some of the countries over there are like 1.2. And I think some of the 
best countries over there are 1.8, so they're not even replacing their 
families with the number of children that they're having.
  And then we wonder why 12 million people cross the Texas and Canadian 
border to come into the United States to fill jobs, because we don't 
have enough people to fill these jobs. And we wonder why that is.
  And, hey, Europeans have got the same problem and they've had that 
problem--I can recall they had the problem in 1956. The Germans were 
importing Turks into Germany because they didn't have enough 
population.
  Now, when you buy into a program, as you point out, down the road, if 
they're not telling you the truth, it has major consequences. And when 
you made that 10-year comment, at the present rate this Congress is 
going, 10 years from now, we may find ourselves sitting around trying 
to watch television by candle light, okay? Because we're using 
batteries for our television sets. Because, quite frankly, we are in 
the process of trying to tax our energy industry out of business, every 
form or fashion that has any kind of carbon connected. So 10 years from 
now we could have, we could be a Third World country and wonder why.
  That's why this science is so very important. That's why knee jerk 
reaction, overreacting to things, which the government is famous for, I 
don't care if it's knee jerk conservatives or knee jerk liberals, any 
time you get in a hurry, bad things happen. And if you study the 
history of legislation in this country, it is absolutely true, and 
nobody will dispute it. You can look at slavery, you can look at the 
labor laws, you can look at the environmental laws, you can look at 
anything and see where knee jerk reaction and quick--that's why we have 
a Senate to slow things down because our Founding Fathers knew that 
knee jerk reaction created bad legislation. Well, we're about to knee 
jerk ourselves into the poor house if we're not careful.
  I yield back.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Texas. Watching this 
climate change argument unfold, and I think about this country that we 
are, the most successful Nation in the history of the world, strongest 
economic in the world, by far, strongest militarily. Our culture 
penetrates the rest of the world. We're kind of American-centric 
because we are self-sustaining for a lot of those reasons, militarily, 
economically, food, for example, and also culturally; and so we don't 
as often look at the United States from outside.

[[Page 15136]]

  But I wonder what it must look like for, let's just say, Socrates, 
looking out across this country today. 3,000 years ago they sat around 
and in places like Athens, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and they carried 
on these conversations and they shaped the Age of Reason, the Age of 
Reason, which was the foundation for science and technology, the 
theorem, the hypotheses, and they built it into their culture to be 
proud of being able to rationalize, both deductive reasoning and 
inductive reasoning. And that rationale, and even though they didn't 
get their elements right, what did they have? Earth, wind and fire and 
maybe some other elements like that they used to argue with. They 
didn't have the tables to be able to put the atoms together and figure 
out the molecule, but they had a good rationale. The Age of Reason in 
Greece is the foundation of Western Civilization, and they took great 
pride in being able to think rationally.
  And if they would transpose themselves, fast forward through history, 
3,000 years, race through the Age of Enlightenment in Western Europe 
and primarily in France, and the dawn of the Industrial Revolution 
here, and how technology has flourished, and we've gone from an 
industrial economy to an information economy, and see all the things 
that we've developed from a technological standpoint, but yet, if they 
could look inside this Chamber and see where decisions are made in a 
civilized country today, and see how they're made, I think they'd be 
astonished that we have suspended the reason that they so carefully 
developed 3,000 years ago.
  And now, we legislate by anecdote. We legislate by somebody's 
emotions, rather than legislate by empirical data. And Judge Carter's 
mentioned a few of those. Pulled DDT off the marketplace, and then 
watch what's happened with millions that died because of the malaria 
that came back during that period of time.
  My mother read ``Silent Spring'' by Rachel Carson, and our lawn 
thereafter had to be full of dandelions, thistles, plant and leaf 
clover and African violets, but not much blue grass because we couldn't 
spray that anymore because it was going to kill the birds. Mom knew, 
though, the names of all of birds and what their songs were, and we had 
a lot of birds around. We'd have had them anyway without the weeds.
  And the alar scare comes to mind as well, Madam Speaker, the apple 
issue that took a lot of apple producers out of business because there 
was the allegation that the spray they used on them that kept the 
apples looking good and staying fresh was somehow dangerous. I think a 
carcinogen.
  These are scientific Malthusians. They are just simply always another 
calamity around the corner. They threaten, they scare people off the 
safety of our food. They tell us that the planet can only sustain about 
so many people. And these are the people that have determined that 
they're going to shut down, as Judge Carter said, our energy production 
in this country. And we spent last August pounding away every day here 
on the floor of the House of Representatives, calling for an energy 
plan that opened up all of the above, all of the energy that we have. 
We're an energy-rich Nation, not an energy-poor Nation. We just do a 
poor job of managing the energy that we have.
  And to give an example about how easy it should be to take this 
Nation to the next level of our economic determinism, if we just look 
over to countries like Japan and Korea, in the last 60 years or a 
little more, both of those nations, or at least their major cities, 
were destroyed in war. They've rebuilt their cities, transportation, 
telecommunications, the infrastructure that's there. They are modern, 
they're crisp, they're sharp, they work, they function. And yet in that 
60 or so years, each of those countries have imported almost 100 
percent of their energy and 60 percent of their food, and they still 
build modern technological societies.
  And we are here in the United States of America, with a surplus of 
food, and the energy that we need, if we just manage it; and we can't 
discipline ourselves to utilize our own resources.
  And we have a Speaker of the House who's trying to ``save the 
planet.'' And please put that in quotes. Shut down energy production in 
America.
  There are only about two or three kinds of energy that they would 
accept more of. One is wind, the other was solar, and the next one may 
be geothermal if you didn't have to use a drill rig to get it.
  And by the way, wind is okay as long as you don't have to see it off 
of Nantucket. Teddy Kennedy's offended by looking at wind mills. And so 
we can only put them in places where some of the liberals aren't going 
to have to look at them. By the way, I can see 39 of them from my yard. 
And so that's all right.
  But we need all of the above, and there is no way to meet this model 
on energy demand for this country, especially with electricity, under 
Waxman-Markey's bill. This has already, the intimidation effect and the 
existing regulations, have shut down any new coal-fired generation 
plants in America.

                              {time}  2220

  Now, we do have a nuclear generating plant that's under construction 
down in South Carolina. This plant is scheduled to come online in the 
year 2017. If my recollection is right, they've been working on it for 
2 or more years by now, and in 2017, it will come on line. This is a 
beta model. This is the model of nuclear generating plants. The 
engineering is not a problem. It's how do you jump through all of the 
regulatory hoops to get there? If they can get that done, then 
presumably it will be the cookie cutter so we can build more, yet not 
under the Obama administration.
  The Obama administration goes over and says to Ahmadinejad--I haven't 
heard him say ``congratulations'' yet for his election victory, but 
maybe that came out today. They're relatively silent on those results. 
It was, Well, we can't tell a sovereign nation that they can't develop 
nuclear power. The United States can't do that. He essentially said to 
Iranians, You have the right to develop a nuclear capability even if 
you do announce to the world that you want to use it to annihilate 
Israel.
  So, according to President Obama, Iran has a right to nuclear, but 
Americans don't. We can't build a nuclear power plant here to make up 
for the gap that's created by the regulatory constrictions that are 
coming out of the Left today in this energy plan. Those of us who 
produce energy from coal, for example, are punished States. Those 
States that do not are those that are recipients. If they put this on 
cap-and-trade, cap-and-tax, you will see a massive corruption bill 
within the United States as they trade the carbon credits.
  To give you an example of what goes on, when Speaker Pelosi received 
the gavel here in 2007, she decided that the Capitol complex, which we 
stand in the middle of right now, should be a greenhouse gas-emitting 
neutral facility, so she ordered that the power plant that feeds this 
Capitol complex, which is fired by coal and natural gas and oil, be 
converted from coal to natural gas. It doubled the cost of our power to 
come into this Capitol, but we still found out that her carbon 
footprint--I say hers, I wasn't calculating it as mine--of this Capitol 
complex was still too great. So Speaker Pelosi went on the board in 
Chicago, and she bought some carbon credits: $89,000 of our taxpayer 
dollars paid by carbon credits that were going to offset the carbon 
emissions here in this Capitol complex. That's designed to cause 
somebody to do something more to sequester this carbon that is going 
into the atmosphere from the natural gas that's feeding the power in 
the Capitol.
  So I thought I'd chase that $89,000 down and figure out where it 
went. Well, some of that money went to no-till farmers in North Dakota, 
to Farmers Union farmers, I believe, to people who had been no-till 
farmers for some time, I believe, to people whose behavior didn't 
change. So I don't think they went out and sequestered any more carbon. 
I think they just kept doing what they were doing, and they got a 
reward from the Speaker's checkbook--from our checkbook--for what they 
were doing.

[[Page 15137]]

  By the way, when you no-till, you can sequester some carbon, but if 
you turn around and till, that carbon is released into the atmosphere 
anyway, and the net gain is almost zero. So, as long as you keep up the 
practice of no-till and it's a plus, then that's your measure for good 
atmosphere.
  It didn't all go to the no-till farmers in North Dakota. Some of it 
went to a coal-fired generating plant in Chillicothe, Iowa. So I went 
there, and took a look at this coal-fired generating plant. What I saw 
was a good, well-run plant. Emissions were, I think, pretty good and 
were fairly modern, but they had received a government grant to set up 
an operation to be able to burn switchgrass and blend the switchgrass 
in with the coal at, I think it was, a 10 percent rate to be able to 
supplement the coal they were burning because switchgrass is carbon 
neutral. It sequesters it each year, and you burn it each year. Of 
course, coal is not.
  Well, I went in there, and they had two big sheds. They still had a 
lot of big, round bales--about 1,500-pound bales of switchgrass. They 
were stacked in those sheds. There was a big hammer mill and a conveyor 
and a blower system to inject that all in and blend it with the coal. 
The place wasn't running, and it hadn't run in a while. I could tell by 
looking at the hay that it was old.
  I asked: So how long has it been since you've burned any of the 
switchgrass here?
  Well, about 2 years. We ran our experiment. Then we shut the 
experiment down.
  So, first, they didn't have data for me for what they might have 
learned. The experiment hasn't yet yielded a result that we can utilize 
unless, maybe, they know and they haven't told us.
  The second thing is that this money that went to them for 
sequestering the carbon to give an incentive to burn switchgrass didn't 
change anybody's behavior. They weren't going to burn any more or any 
less switchgrass because they got a check from the Speaker of the 
House. In fact, they had shut down their switchgrass burning 2 years 
earlier, and this was just a check that went into the treasury of the 
people who had burned some switchgrass, but we didn't learn anything 
from it yet.
  Now, if that's the thing that's going to go on with cap-and-tax, cap-
and-trade and Waxman-Markey, if the Speaker of the House can't get the 
transaction to work when you go out and buy carbon credits, how in the 
world are we going to do hundreds of billions of dollars of carbon 
credits on a massive scale and have any kind of accountability to see 
whether it actually brings about anything that might sequester more 
carbon and cause somebody to act in a more favorable way?
  I think it is a bureaucratic impossibility, but we can learn from the 
Spaniards. The Spaniards did this experiment. The Sicilian Mafia came 
in to manage it because they were the best at it. They were the ones 
who were brokering the permits to put up the wind chargers, and they 
were deciding who were going to be the contractors and subcontractors 
who built them. They decided who would be the suppliers of the 
materials that went into the wind chargers. So they got all wrapped up 
with the Sicilian Mafia.
  By the way, with the political favors that were being handed out, the 
permits would be controlled by politicians in the end. Politicians were 
influenced by political contributions that came from the profits that 
were being extracted out of the construction and out of the operations 
of these wind chargers by the Sicilian Mafia, and it made a huge mess 
out of it all.
  I mentioned in the previous hour that, for every green job they 
created, it cost 2.2 private-sector jobs because it sucked that much 
capital out of the economy, out of the private-sector economy. The cost 
per green job was $770,000. The unemployment rate in Spain is the 
highest in the industrialized world--17.5 percent unemployed. The 
largest industries in Spain have left, and the ones that are left are 
looking at leaving. The electrical bills for the residents have gone up 
20 percent, and the electrical bills for industry have gone up 100 
percent in 3 years.
  They hit the threshold where they couldn't demand any more for the 
electricity they were generating. They had raised the cost of the 
electricity that much. So they went out on the market to bond that, and 
they pledged the full faith and credit of their grandchildren--the 
Spanish Government: We'll pay the bills later, but we can't pay our 
electric bills today because the price is too high. This is an example.
  President Obama has said we should learn from the Spanish. I agree. 
We should learn from the Spanish, but the lesson that I get from them 
is that it's a huge boondoggle that's full of corruption.
  I asked them: Why don't you repeal it? Their answer was: We can't 
because so many people who are so influential and powerful are making a 
profit from it and are tied up in it. We would have to demand that our 
politicians would confess that they'd made a huge mistake 8 or 9 or 10 
years ago.
  Well, a lot of them are still there, and they can't make that 
confession because they'll lose their jobs.
  So, once you get started into this, if we pass the cap-and-tax by 
Waxman-Markey--I'll tell you, at this point, the decisions made by this 
administration in this term, I believe, are reversible and are 
revokable by a Congress and a President who have cooler heads and a 
saner approach to economics. Yet, if we pass the Waxman-Markey cap-and-
tax, that becomes an almost irreversible policy because then you'll 
have so many people who will be profiting and who will be benefiting 
from the trading of these things that don't have any value in a real 
economy. There are so many political dollars that get infused into this 
process that you simply can't repeal it. That's my concern. That's my 
fear. I believe that Waxman-Markey is an irreversible policy.
  So I'm here, speaking against it for two big reasons: One is they're 
wrong on the science. I'm happy to debate them. The other reason is 
they're really, really wrong on the economics.
  When you have the Secretary of Agriculture who testifies before the 
Ag Committee that somehow he believes that increasing the costs to 
agriculture will result in more profits for agriculture because the 
innovative nature of American agriculture will overcome the handicaps 
that government is putting on them, that is an irrational degree of 
optimism to be stated by a Secretary of Agriculture who finds himself 
at odds with Democrats and Republicans on the Ag Committee in that 
hearing and in disagreement with it.
  There is no economic model that I know of throughout the history of 
the free market system that would dictate or that would show a result 
where, if you increased the cost to a business--to any business or to a 
sector of the business world--that you would see profits go up. They 
would go down.

                              {time}  2230

  And this Waxman-Markey legislation increases the cost to, especially, 
our energy users. Those who are the most energy intensive, the highest 
energy-using industries in America will get the highest increases in 
their costs.
  So let's just say that you're in the business of converting iron ore 
to iron and steel. Let's just say that you are in the business of 
converting natural gas to plastics or any other high energy-intensive 
operation, or let's just say you're a farmer and you use a lot of 
diesel fuel and you're looking at 88 cents a gallon added on to it by 
Waxman-Markey. All of these industries will see their costs go up. If 
you're generating electricity from burning coal, natural gas, fuel oil, 
for example, you'll see the cost of that electricity go up.
  An MIT professor did a study and calculated the overall dollars 
increased by Waxman-Markey, or a policy very close to that, and we 
simply divided the number of households into it, and the bottom line 
came out to be this: Increased annual average household costs for 
energy, $3,128 a year from Waxman-Markey's cap-and-tax bill. And as I 
said briefly earlier, for every $5 collected by this cap-and-tax bill, 
only $1 gets into the Treasury of the Federal Government. And the 
balance of that is consumed in the inefficiencies that are created.

[[Page 15138]]

  This is the most insidious, complicated tax. It's a tax on everything 
we do because energy is required in everything that we do. It will tax 
every gallon of gas, every gallon of diesel fuel, every kilowatt of 
electricity. It will tax every cup of coffee, every pair of shoes, 
every piece of paper, every flower on Mother's Day, and every 2 by 4 
that goes into your house.
  And it transfers, Madam Speaker, America's industry, America's 
energy-intensive industry off to other countries in the world like 
India and China who have pledged not to participate in a cap-and-tax 
plan because they say that this is their century to become 
industrialized nations. The last century or two were our centuries to 
be industrialized. They say this is theirs.
  They're building, between India and China, one new coal-fired 
generating plant a week belching smoke into the atmosphere. And these 
coal-fired generating plants do not meet the emission standards of 
American coal-fired generated plants. So for each time that we push 
industry out of the United States, we're pushing up coal-fired 
generating plants in India and in China. And if you're concerned about 
the atmosphere, this is creating a negative effect on our atmosphere as 
well.
  But I'm concerned about the penalty to America's industry, to 
America's businesses adding costs to everyone burdening each one of 
these households and thinking somehow we can overcome that burden on 
our economy and prosper. It is wrong thinking; it is wrong-headed. 
They're wrong on the science, Madam Speaker, and they're really, really 
wrong on the economics.
  And so as this debate unfolds here on the floor of the House and 
throughout the committees and subcommittees and through the media and 
through the living rooms of Americans, the American people need to 
understand and remember that if they can't make the case on the 
science, there is no sense of talking about the economics, because it 
falls on its face not having the science to underpin the argument.
  Even if they could make the case on the science--and they haven't and 
can't. And 31,000 scientists have signed a petition saying they can't 
support the conclusions of these climate change models, and we're 
getting more and more that will step forward and say, I can't take you 
there, I can't be with you. And these are topnotch experts: 
meteorologists, physicists, people that really understand these issues 
in a scientific way. More of them are peeling off and walking away from 
this and saying Al Gore is wrong.
  But even if they were right, even if one stipulated that--and I don't 
for a minute--but if one stipulated that the global warming models were 
right, the economic calamity that comes from adding to the cost of all 
of America's business is intolerable. And the burden that it shifts 
onto future generations and what it does to our economy, our culture, 
and our civilization are intolerable, Madam Speaker. And so let them 
make the case.
  Once as Muhammad Ali said after he fought Joe Frazier to a tie in 15 
rounds was this: Well, you tied. How come you're still the world champ? 
Ali said, You got to whoop the champ.
  Well, the champ is free enterprise. The champ is sound science. The 
champ is empirical data. The champ is the history of the United States 
succeeding by believing we can achieve and by making logical 
conclusions with the science we have and the economics we have. And by 
the way, it's free enterprise and it's not nationalization.
  And let's add an extra czar or two to this list of 22. Let's do the 
denationalization czar and the exit-strategy czar. Put those two people 
together, and maybe they can get to work to eliminate all of the rest 
of these czars and get us back to sense, Madam Speaker.
  And with that, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________