[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 12]
[House]
[Pages 16746-16747]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                      CAP-AND-TRADE NOT THE ANSWER

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from California (Mr. McClintock) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. McCLINTOCK. Mr. Speaker, I had a strange sense of deja vu as I 
stood here on the floor of the House and watched all of the self-
congratulatory rhetoric a few moments ago on the passage of the cap-
and-trade bill, and I feel the need to rise to issue an urgent warning 
from the west coast.
  I stood on the floor of the Senate of California 3 years ago and 
watched a very similar bill adopted and watched the same sort of self-
congratulatory celebrations as we just saw here, and I have watched 
over those years as that measure has dramatically deepened California's 
recession. It uses a slightly different mechanism than cap-and-trade, 
but the objective is exactly the same, to force a dramatic reduction in 
carbon dioxide emissions.

                              {time}  2000

  Now, up until that bill took effect, California's unemployment 
numbers tracked very closely with the national unemployment rate. But 
then, in January of 2007, California's unemployment

[[Page 16747]]

rate began a steady upward divergence from the national jobless 
figures. Today, California's unemployment rate is more than two points 
above the national rate and is at its highest point since 1941.
  What happened in January of 2007? AB 32 took effect and it began 
shutting down entire sectors of California's economy.
  Let me give you just one example from my own district. The city of 
Truckee, California, was about to sign a long-term power contract to 
get its electricity from a new EPA-approved coal-fired plant way off in 
Utah. But AB 32 and companion legislation caused them to abandon that 
contract. The replacement power that they acquired literally doubled 
their electricity costs.
  So when economists warn that we can expect electricity prices to 
double under the cap-and-trade bill, I can tell you from the bitter 
experience of my district that that is not some future prediction. That 
is a historical fact.
  Governor Schwarzenegger assured us at the time that AB 32 would mean 
an explosion of new, green jobs--exactly the same promises that we 
heard on this floor today.
  Well, in California exactly the opposite has happened. We have lost 
so many jobs that the UCSB economic forecast is now using the D word--
depression--to describe California's job market.
  Mr. Speaker, the cap-and-trade bill proposes what amounts to 
endlessly increasing taxes on any enterprises that produce carbon 
dioxide or other so-called greenhouse gases. We need to understand 
exactly what that means. It has profound implications for agriculture, 
construction, cargo and passenger transportation, energy production, 
baking and brewing--all of which produce enormous quantities of this 
innocuous, ubiquitous compound. In fact, every human being produces 2.2 
pounds of carbon dioxide every day--just by breathing.
  So applying a tax to the economy designed to radically constrict 
carbon dioxide emissions means radically constricting the economy. And 
this brings us to the fine point of the matter.
  When we look back on the folly of the Hoover administration and how 
it turned the recession of 1929 into the Depression of the 1930s, the 
first thing that economists point to is the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act 
that imposed new taxes on 20,000 imported products.
  The Waxman-Markey bill, I'm afraid, is our generation's Smoot-Hawley 
that imposes new taxes on an infinitely larger list of domestic 
products on a scale that utterly dwarfs Smoot-Hawley.
  Let's ignore for the moment the fact that the planet's climate is 
constantly changing and that long-term global warming has been going on 
since the last ice age. Let's ignore the fact within recorded history 
we know of periods when the Earth's climate has been much warmer than 
it is today, and others when it's been much cooler. Let's ignore the 
thousands of climate scientists and meteorologists who've concluded 
that human-produced greenhouse gases are, at most, a negligible factor 
in global warming or climate change.
  Ignore all of that and we're still left with one lousy sense of 
timing. In the most serious recession since the Great Depression, why 
is it that Members of this House want to repeat the same mistakes that 
produced the Great Depression?
  Watching how California has just wrecked its own economy and 
destroyed its own finances, why would Members of this House want to do 
the same thing to our Nation?
  Mr. Speaker, this is deadly serious stuff. It transcends ideology and 
politics. This House has just made the biggest economic mistake since 
the days of Herbert Hoover.
  Two things are certain if this measure becomes law. First, our planet 
is going to continue to warm and cool, as it's been doing for billions 
of years. And, secondly, this House will have just delivered a 
staggering blow to our Nation's economy at precisely that moment when 
the economy has been the most vulnerable.

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