[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 12]
[House]
[Pages 16750-16756]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]


                            ENERGY AND JOBS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 6, 2009, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gohmert) is recognized 
for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the time.
  This is a trying time. And I appreciate my friend from Texas' belief 
and hope in the future. I just have read enough of this bill and know 
enough to understand the consequences. And this isn't the whole bill. 
This is two-thirds of it. The other 300 pages, they allowed me to 
borrow a copy briefly earlier today during debate right before the 
debate closed. But this is about two-thirds of it.
  We're having a job fair in Longview, Texas, Monday. That arose when I 
met with a bunch of my constituents, most of whom were African 
Americans, in a North Lufkin church a month or so ago who had lost jobs 
because jobs were being moved overseas. Energy was too costly here. The 
corporate tax is over twice as much here as what it is in China. And I 
have been hearing from other manufacturers that we have in our district 
that if this cap-and-trade bill goes through and becomes law, there 
will be many more lost jobs.
  And it breaks my heart. It broke my heart to meet with those people 
there in North Lufkin and others around my district who have lost jobs. 
So that's why I got to thinking what can I maybe do to help. I know the 
Texas Workforce Commission does a good job of having job fairs and 
trying to match up job openings with people's job skill sets and try to 
get people a job.
  As someone said on the floor earlier on our side of the aisle, Our 
people are not interested in unemployment benefits; they're interested 
in a job. That's what they want. That's what they had.
  We have continued to take actions for the last 2\1/2\ years since our 
friends across the aisle have been in the majority to place more and 
more of our energy off-limits, to make it more expensive.
  I also have plants in my district that use natural gas as feedstock, 
feedstock meaning that natural gas is absolutely the most essential 
element to producing the things that they do like plastics and other 
materials. And natural gas under this cap-and-trade bill will naturally 
skyrocket. Our Democrat majority leadership is pushing to regulate and 
tax hydraulic fracking, which will make much of the gas that we're 
currently getting unavailable and will shove those prices even higher. 
I lost around 900 jobs in my district when the Abitibi paper mill 
closed because natural gas was more expensive here in the United States 
than it was virtually anywhere else. It was a Canadian company. They 
held on to the property hoping that one day they could reopen it and 
get back those 900 good jobs, but eventually they have announced they 
will not be reopening the plant. That was the price of natural gas that 
did that.
  So I know with the job fair I've got coming up in Longview, we have 
over 60 employers there that will be offering jobs. We had over 600 
people show up looking for jobs at the job fair in Lufkin, and I'm 
hoping it will go well.
  But I have read enough of this bill and I know enough about the 
energy industry because we produce a lot of it in East Texas. We've got 
coal, we've got oil, we've got gas, solar, wind. But this bill is going 
to put a lot of people out of work. It's going to put people out of 
work all over the country. So the job fairs are not going to be 
adequate for the damage that this bill is going to do.
  I have been joined by colleagues here on the floor who I think are as 
heartbroken as I am. And you would think we'd be giddy, you know, that 
our friends across the aisle have passed a bill that's going to come 
back to haunt them. It's going to cost jobs. It's going to make 
Americans mad. But I'm nothing but brokenhearted because I know what 
this will do to individuals.
  And I know that my friend Mr. Souder is likewise affected, and I 
would like to yield to him.
  Mr. SOUDER. I appreciate the honor of being an honorary Texan here 
tonight because in Indiana we're still unusual. I mean we still make 
things. We don't have the mountains like they have out West or beaches. 
What we have are hardworking Americans who are still competing 
worldwide in manufacturing.
  And if you go into any of the types of plants--earlier I was talking 
about our steel mills in addition to the two SDI mini-mills with 
recycled steel. Everything they use, they recycle and use recycled 
materials, as does NuCor. I have a Valbruna steel mill. One of the 
interesting things that Valbruna has done is they built an additional 
facility because they're the number one provider of steel to the 
refinery industry in Texas and Louisiana. So in my district we're 
making the things still in America. Your options are basically Korea, 
Brazil, China, or Indiana steel in many of these cases.
  But these factories take an incredible amount of energy. Some of our 
factories, we have 85 percent coal, 15 percent nuclear in our basic 
provision of things. And basically this bill doesn't like things that 
we can use in Indiana. It doesn't like coal. They really aren't too 
fond of nuclear. I think that a lot of the question of what to do with 
waste, I used to think it was driven by Jane Fonda in ``The China 
Syndrome'' movie, but that's us old people. I think the younger people 
are thinking of Homer Simpson coming in and kind of blowing up the city 
of Springfield all the time, and they think of that as nuclear energy. 
There are 13 or 15 or more plants on the drawing board right now, but 
it may take 20 years to get there.
  What do I do if I don't have coal? Well, I could use gas and oil, 
but, boy, those are kind of bad. We tried to get the BP Refinery done 
in Indiana to handle Canadian tar sands. There's another one over by 
Detroit. But they're going to be tied up for 10, 15 years. They were 
half of EPA discharge. But Rahm Emanuel and others are saying, Oh, no, 
we can't build that refinery. We don't want any refineries in America. 
Well, we make 58 percent of the RVs.

                              {time}  2030

  What are you going to do, put a little fan up on the roof to try to 
make these RVs go? International designs--800 people to design the big 
trucks in my district. How are we going to deliver goods to market? The 
rail is already jammed, the canals are jammed, the rivers are jammed. 
If we can't use trucks, which take up about 40 percent of the energy on 
our roads, how are we going to move around?
  The foundries take this--it was the biggest ice cream plant in the 
world, an Edy's ice cream plant until they built one additional. But 
when you go in an ice cream plant, how do you think ice cream is made? 
You have got to deliver it there, the milk in, then you have got to 
process it and you have all these electrical machines powering this. 
You know, they can't do that with a couple of solar panels.
  I have Kraft Caramels in my district, all sorts of things, not just 
kind of windshields and axles and stuff. How do you power these kinds 
of things? I am not against alternative energy at all. I worked hard.
  In my district, in fact, Guardian windshields has learned that their 
process of windshields, if you think about it, took solar heat for a 
long time. And these solar panels in Nevada and other places are 
cracking. By going with Guardian, they are learning that they can make 
these panels more efficient, get 20 percent or more energy,

[[Page 16751]]

and they don't crack. Spain is using them. The new model projects in 
the U.S. are using them, and they are going to have possibly hundreds 
of jobs making the windshields for the solar panel industry.
  Of course, they had near a thousand jobs making windshields for SUVs, 
pickups and things that are now kind of on the bad list, so we will get 
green jobs, maybe half as many as we had before in that category.
  I have Parker-Hannifin in New Haven. We have had an earmark to help 
them, to try to get the heat down inside of everything from your 
handheld, your BlackBerry, to wind turbines, and could possibly make 
the wind turbines 20 percent more efficient. We may have, at some point 
here, 200 people doing windmill turbines and other things, but that 
plant had 1,200 supplying traditional energy industries.
  I have worked with people who are coming, trying to come up with 
alternative car engines.
  One of my friends and supporters is putting in a huge wind farm. In 
Indiana, we have two basic areas that we can put wind farms. We might 
get to 4 percent, but we can't reach the targets in these bills. It's 
not that we are not committed to alternative energy, but we don't have 
as much wind and solar. We have to have traditional forms of energy: 
oil, gas, nuclear, coal, not just the alternative form, especially if 
they are going to put limitations on ethanol and biodiesel. So this is 
a critical time, really, where we are trying to decide in America, are 
we going to have manufacturing or aren't we going to have 
manufacturing?
  Are we basically going to basically have service jobs and then high-
tech jobs? Yes, at a coffee house at different universities they sit 
around and go, Oh, this stuff sounds really great. And the others in 
their beach houses on the coast go, Oh, this stuff really sounds great. 
But what's missing in America is we are getting increasingly two 
classes of people, and the blue collar class of people who made things 
and had a decent living where they could get a house, maybe a boat 
where they could go on vacation, they are disappearing.
  And the knowledge class, often in the liberal upper groups of the 
Democratic Party, are basically saying goodbye to their working class. 
And they are saying, You can either basically maybe bring us a drink, 
grill us a hamburger, or go get a doctorate and teach at a university.
  What we are losing is the middle group of blue collar Americans who 
worked with their hands and worked in their fields, and they are 
basically knocking them out, and those jobs are going to other 
countries.
  Mr. GOHMERT. And perhaps, Mr. Souder, that's why, on this map we have 
here, the dark red is high vulnerability under cap-and-tax to losses of 
jobs. That's why Indiana is in this area up here where apparently it's 
in the high vulnerability for high losses of jobs.
  Texas, where I am from, it's in the medium vulnerability, but I 
already know. I have seen the loss of jobs we have.
  And actually, we have some of the same industries. We have a Nucor, 
but we have Tyler Pipe, Lufkin Industries involved in steel, but there 
is going to be a lot of loss of jobs.
  Mr. SOUDER. The Heritage study showed that my congressional district 
is number one is loss. Next to the me is Joe Donnelly in the South Bend 
district, who was number two. Congressman Latta, who asked for the 
split out, just to my east in Ohio, is number three. Mike Pence, who is 
just to my south in that part of Indiana is number four. Congressman 
Jordan is number five and Congressman Boehner is number six. Because 
not only do we have manufacturing, we tend to use coal and nuclear 
because alternative energy is less of an option in these heavy 
industrials. Then it kind of jumps up to Michigan.
  The other thing that's noticeable in that map where the dark red is 
and the other is that's really where most of the water is in the United 
States, coming out of the Mississippi, and to manufacture, you need to 
have water and access to water. You are not going to move--you will see 
some in the orange States. You can move some steel and manufacturing 
into those areas, but basically you can't really transfer to those 
light yellow because that's mostly desert area. And you can't power 
these big plants with just solar or wind, and they don't have enough 
water to supplement the traditional that you need in refineries and in 
steel mills and that type of thing, and they don't really have a plan.
  That's why we Republicans, when you look at the actual details--if 
you could even stomach, by the way, the government making all these 
decisions rather than market, that's bad enough. I mean, that document 
basically is page after page of the government telling us how we should 
live, the government telling us how we should make things.
  But the bottom line, when you look at that map, if it goes out of the 
red zone, it's basically going to Mexico, to China, to Korea, to South 
America. Because the areas that are lighter, where you conceivably 
could shift it, it's just not possible to build these plants there.
  Mr. GOHMERT. I appreciate that, that's an excellent point.
  For this heavy manufacturing, you do have to have water. Regardless 
of any other energy source you may have, it takes water. That's a great 
point, which is why the traditional iron belt was up here in the 
Midwest. In those areas, you had water. You had all the things you 
needed. You had good workers. You had everything you needed to produce 
those things.
  And just as an aside, as a history major and history buff, it needs 
to be noted. When a Nation can no longer make the things from scratch 
that are required to defend itself at a time of war, then the country 
will be lost in the next big war. We are losing the steel industry 
weekly, and it won't be long before we cannot produce tanks, airplanes, 
things.
  Right now, we are barely able to produce tires because so many of the 
tire plants have moved overseas. You have got to have tires. You have 
got to have rubber. You have got to have wood. You know, we cut out so 
much of the wood industry, and that continues to happen, and people 
would be surprised how much that's used for.
  Natural gas helps--is part of the process of making so many of the 
parts for weaponry, and that will become more and more difficult to 
obtain.
  Mr. SOUDER. Yes, I don't mean to monopolize the time, but when you 
say these things, to illustrate the manufacturing in my district, 
Michelin bought a U.S.--bought a BFGoodrich tire plant in my district 
with 1,600 people in it. They have invested $15 million a year if they 
can become 5 percent more efficient, so they put $120 million into this 
huge plant, and people don't even realize what they are putting in. And 
I was just part of a suit to say stop the dumping, because we can 
compete with China without the dumping, but not if you add 7 percent 
health care and then add a cap-and-trade and then add the other OSHA 
and all the types of regulations that are coming back that we had 
restricted, we can't compete in tires.
  I have a lot of the defense industry. I have a BAE plant with 2,500 
people working in it. They do a lot for Boeing. One Member just a 
moment ago referred to Wilbur and Orville Wright and the amazing thing, 
but, you know, we are going to go back to these kinds of paper 
airplanes if we are not careful here. Boeing, that's metal. It takes 
energy to build every part in that plane, and it takes energy to launch 
the plane. And it's not--let's just say, they don't have windmills on 
this thing. They don't have solar panels to get a jet up in the air.
  I have NASA satellites. The ones that feed into The Weather Channel 
are made by ITT in Fort Wayne, and they actually are looking at being 
able to track, as my friend from Texas earlier said about, we don't 
really have the science on that. Well, that's what one of the companies 
in my district is looking at; can we get satellites up in the air to 
track the climate change? Because the truth is, we are doing this bill 
with no data.
  But put a satellite up. You know what, it has aluminum on it. You 
know

[[Page 16752]]

what takes an incredible amount of energy to make, aluminum. The 
electrical systems in a plane and a satellite are copper. You can't get 
copper if you can't mine for copper. You can't make--the smelting of 
copper takes an incredible amount of energy. Aluminum and copper take 
as much or more energy than steel. How do they think we are going to 
get airplanes? How do they think we are even going to track the climate 
change?
  It is baffling that this bill could have gone through a Congress. I 
am going to make a flat-out statement. If most of the Members of 
Congress were businessmen, this would have never passed.
  Mr. GOHMERT. I appreciate my friend's point, and that is a good 
point.
  I think if most of the people in this House had read this bill and 
been given a chance to read the additional third that was added at 3 
a.m. or so this morning, then I don't think this would have passed 
either.
  But we have been joined by another friend, a former fellow judge, a 
district judge also. I would like to yield to my friend, Mr. Poe.
  Mr. POE of Texas. Thank you for yielding, Judge Gohmert. You know, we 
approach what we consider the most important of all days for our 
Republic, and that's Independence Day.
  And this legislation that unfortunately passed tonight has not made 
us more independent, but it has made us more dependent. As a Nation, we 
are more dependent upon, now, government control of every aspect of our 
lives, our personal lives, our business lives.
  When the government starts telling you what type of electricity you 
can have in your home, when the government starts telling you that you 
have to pass an energy efficiency before you can sell your home, maybe 
we have gone too far in the government controlling our lives. But 
that's just a smidge of what has occurred in the passing of this 
legislation.
  I am not sure what the goal of the legislation was. We heard 
different things. One was that it's going to create more jobs for 
Americans. Well, that's just not going to happen. All the sane studies 
show that that's not going to occur in the United States.
  There will be government programs, which means subsidies paid by 
taxpayers to go to, quote, green jobs. Those are programs, and they 
will be created, subsidized by the taxpayers, to move us in a direction 
of the green environment, which I will say just a little bit more about 
in a minute.
  But one group that has not been mentioned today in the House debate 
that talked about jobs, the National Black Chamber of Commerce said 
this legislation will cost 2.5 million jobs almost immediately. Well, 
that's a lot of Americans being put out of work when we are already 
having Americans losing their jobs.
  We do have an example of a country that has tried this legislation. 
Although they didn't sign this one, it's one very similar. Spain has 
had this so-called idea of trying to control carbon emissions in their 
country for several years, and they have created jobs, but they have 
lost jobs. For every green job that they have created, by their own 
statistics, two other jobs have been lost.
  Now, I am not a CPA like Mr. Conaway is, but it would seem to me the 
more green jobs you create, the more jobs you are going to lose.
  And that's what Spain has done, and now they are trying to get out 
from under their own legislation that has cramped their economy because 
they are losing jobs by moving to this so-called green job economy. So 
we are losing American jobs overseas for a lot of reasons already, and 
a lot of it is because of the high cost of energy. Now we are going to 
have energy cost increase. So first idea, a goal to create American 
jobs, that's just fiction.
  The second thing is that this is supposed to be a bill to save the 
planet. You know, humans are bad and that we are creating all this gas 
that we need to control, and it's all because of energy. And so if we 
have this legislation that passed, we are going to save the planet.
  Up until a few months ago, we heard from those people. That was 
called global warming. But since global warming is not occurring, it is 
now changed to climate change. We changed the title, because global 
warming does not appear to be what those who claim it to be is 
occurring here.
  Now we hear from the Congressional Budget Office, when they testified 
before the Senate several weeks ago, that the effect of this 
legislation will have little or no effect on climate change.

                              {time}  2045

  Now, the first goal, create jobs, is a fiction. The second goal, to 
control the climate from bad humans, is not going to have any effect 
because of this legislation. And the third thing about this legislation 
is it costs too much; we can't afford it. We can't afford it even if it 
did create jobs or save the planet. But the billions of dollars in that 
1,200 pages you have in front of you there, Judge Gohmert, that's going 
to cost Americans. It's not going to result in what we were all 
promised. So those are two items that I see as a major problem.
  And another problem that I think is very paramount is the fact that 
we're going to turn our lives, our businesses over to government 
control. The government is going to control all energy in this country 
and it's going to tax it all. You turn on these lights here in the 
Capitol--of course this is the government, they don't have to pay their 
bills--but if you turn them on at home, the cost of electricity is 
going to go up. If you use natural gas, a hot water heater, that's 
going to go up. You drive down the street using gasoline, that's made 
from crude oil, that's going to go up. Because everything that uses 
energy--which is everything--will cost Americans more. The energy 
companies, the ones that stay in America, they will pass that tax on to 
consumers, and the consumers pay because the consumers always pay.
  But the hardest hit group is going to be, as Mr. Souder from Indiana 
said, the small manufacturing plants in the United States. They have to 
use energy to produce their products. Whether it's a paper mill in east 
Texas or whether it's a van up in Indiana or whether it's a small steel 
mill in my district, they have to use some form of energy to produce 
the product.
  Now, the cost of that energy is going to go up so high they cannot 
produce the product and sell it. Because, you see, over in China, 
they're producing the same product and can ship it to the United States 
cheaper because they're not bound by all of these energy regulations 
and are not taxed for use of energy as American manufacturing companies 
will be. And that's a sad thing because it has always been the small 
business--and really the small manufacturing companies--that's been the 
heart and soul of the American economy.
  You know, there was a time when you could go into a Wal-Mart--you've 
got them in your district, I don't know if Mr. Conaway has them in his, 
but we have a lot of Wal-Marts--but you could go into a Wal-Mart and 
they had a big sign that said ``Made in America.'' They claimed that 
everything they sold in that Wal-Mart was made in America. Well, that 
sign isn't up anymore; it hasn't been up in years because I don't think 
they make anything in America that they sell at Wal-Mart. It irks me to 
no end. This time of year, you go into a Wal-Mart and you want to buy a 
flag, just like that one behind the Speaker, and it's made in China. We 
can't even make our own flags because manufacturing in this country is 
being killed by the cost of doing business. And that bill in front of 
you, Judge Gohmert, is not going to help that at all. It's going to 
just make the situation worse.
  The last thing that bill does not do is create more energy. It taxes 
energy. It does not provide for more energy for Americans. Nuclear 
energy, I mean, even France, 80 percent of its energy comes from 
nuclear energy. And it can be done and created in a clean and safe way. 
We don't have any more nuclear plants in this country because of the 
fear tactics that have been placed upon the thoughts, so we don't use 
nuclear energy.
  So we're not doing anything. We're not drilling offshore even for 
natural

[[Page 16753]]

gas. Natural gas is supposed to be the product that we go from this one 
environment to this beautiful environment. Of course, we can't get 
there from here. And now the other side that voted for this bill says, 
well, we need natural gas to bridge that gap because it's clean. Well, 
they don't allow drilling. You can't drill anymore. You can't drill 
offshore. You can't drill anywhere that there is natural gas. So how 
are we supposed to have energy to get to the clean energy if we cannot, 
as a Nation, even drill for natural gas?
  So there's no nuclear, no natural gas, and of course we can't use 
clean coal. We don't want to use any more of that nasty old crude oil, 
even though crude oil and its byproducts is in everything Americans 
use, from plastics to our radios to our cell phones. It's in 
everything. And it's a derivative of some product of crude oil. We are 
always going to need crude oil to build the products that we have in 
this country. You can't build them all from biodiesels.
  And so the bill does not do what it's supposed to do. It doesn't 
create jobs, it doesn't help the climate, it doesn't give us a new 
alternative for energy until we get to this supposed clean energy. And 
of course I think the worst thing is it takes control of Americans and 
their independence and makes us slaves to the Federal Government and 
the Federal bureaucrats to run our lives every day.
  I will yield back, Judge Gohmert.
  Mr. GOHMERT. I appreciate so much those sterling observations about 
what this bill does and the effect it's going to have.
  I know last summer I was approached by so many different people about 
the high price of gasoline. And I know those same people are going to 
get hammered again as time marches on--the summer into the fall into 
winter--if this becomes law. And the only thing standing between it now 
and becoming law is the Senate, because the President is sure going to 
sign it if it gets there. But a single mom saying I don't make enough 
money to live in town, so I'm out in the rural area, which means I have 
to pay for more gasoline to get into town, I'm maxing out my credit 
card every month just on gasoline. And it's getting close on whether I 
have enough leeway each month on my credit card to get enough gas to 
keep going back and forth to my job, because if I lose my job, I can't 
pay anything, including my credit card bill. And just the desperation 
in their eyes.
  The things that are in this ``crap and trade'' bill, they're an 
inconvenience to the wealthy. They will be an inconvenience; but to 
people like that single mom and to so many others that are just 
struggling to get by--one 80-plus-year-old lady told me last summer, 
she said, you know, I started out in a house that had no running water 
and no power, we cooked with wood. And she said, Because of the price 
of fuel now, it looks like I'm going to finish my life in a house the 
way I started. This bill is going to do that.
  And I know that privately there are people who are so pleased about 
this bill because they really believe if gasoline goes to $10, $20 a 
gallon, people won't use it and they will save the planet. And what 
they don't seem to understand is the only way you ever get a grip on 
pollution is to have an economy that is just thriving, that's doing so 
well in an advanced society, like ours has been, and then they're able 
to do something about pollution. But with this bill being passed, it is 
going to so cripple our economy. And when people lose their jobs and 
they're struggling and they can't make ends meet and they're using wood 
to cook food, they could care less about the environment. It's 
unfortunate, but it's true. They care more about living and 
sustainability.
  And so what happens is these jobs will go to places like China, 
India, Brazil, where the pollution standards are not what they are 
here. And so they will put out, as we've already heard today, three, 
four, five, six times more pollution than we would if we kept the jobs 
here. And guess what? That pollution goes into the same atmosphere that 
these people over here are complaining about.
  So by passing a bill that drives jobs, which this will, to other 
countries who don't have our pollution control and don't have our 
sensitivities to pollution, then we are doing such a disservice to the 
environment.
  Mr. POE of Texas. Will the gentleman yield?
  Mr. GOHMERT. I certainly will.
  Mr. POE of Texas. Let me just speak to that issue of jobs. As you 
know, in my southeast Texas district I have 20 percent of the Nation's 
refineries; and those are blue collar jobs, union jobs. And it's a 
tremendous concern for not just management, but for those people who 
work in those refineries when they're told that the cost of producing 
energy--because they have to use, as you mentioned, fuel to produce 
energy--that they will be driven out of business and somewhere else 
where they didn't sign this 1,200-page bill. You know, China didn't 
sign that, Cuba didn't sign it, India didn't sign it. They laugh at us 
for signing it. And they're really doing a better job of making sure 
that they produce energy cleanly.
  Perfect example: as you know, and have also advocated, we should 
drill in the Gulf of Mexico for more crude oil and natural gas. We can 
do that safely and cleanly. But we're not doing it. So who's going to 
do that? The Cubans and the Chinese are going to be drilling in waters 
that are near the United States where we ought to be drilling. And I 
can assure you that those platforms that the Cubans are building and 
the Chinese are helping them build are not going to be near as safe, 
pollution safe, as what we can currently do. And so it makes no sense 
that we hurt ourselves in producing energy and automatically say we're 
going to punish energy consumption by taxing energy and its consumers, 
the American people, out of business in hopes that we can get a cleaner 
environment. We'll all be riding bicycles and living in towns where we 
used to have to use candles because we're not going to have the energy 
to take care of ourselves as we are doing now.
  I would yield back. Thank you.
  Mr. GOHMERT. Well, I appreciate those observations.
  And we've gotten testimony and evidence in other hearings that 
indicate if we were to open up the Outer Continental Shelf of this 
country where drilling is not allowed, it would, within a couple of 
years, have added 1.2 million jobs--not just on the platform, we're 
talking about most of those jobs would be added throughout the country.
  We also understood from evidence presented that if you allowed 
drilling in ANWR, 1.1 million jobs added, there would be a handful, 
there would be some up in ANWR, but around the country to deal with all 
of that oil that would be produced. There are slopes in Alaska where 
drilling is not permitted that have incredible amounts of natural gas, 
that if allowed to drill, there is another 1.1 to 1.2 million jobs that 
would be added. If we just used the energy with which God has blessed 
our country, we would have 3.5 million more jobs. And then the 
President--it would suit me fine if President Obama took credit for it. 
If we start producing that, then he could live up to his pledge and 
say, see, I told you I would produce 3 million more jobs. Then he 
changed that to ``save or produce'' 4 million jobs because he knew 
nobody could prove if he saved a job or not. But this would nearly 
produce 4 million jobs. And I would be happy with him taking credit 
just to have people employed and producing energy, making us less 
reliant on countries overseas.
  And I appreciated the point our friend, Mark Souder, made earlier 
about you do have to use energy to produce these products. And it's the 
same with agriculture. You know, we have a good bit of agriculture in 
east Texas where I'm from. And as one farmer pointed out, they don't 
make a Prius tractor. There is no hybrid tractor. And when you get away 
from the barn and you've got to have power, to my knowledge nobody 
makes a hybrid generator--which is a joke because a hybrid means you 
plug it in, and if you plug it in, you wouldn't--anyway, I won't 
explain it. But you have to use

[[Page 16754]]

diesel, you have to use gasoline, kerosene, something to produce the 
energy that agriculture needs to produce.
  And then the fertilizer, goodness sakes, it takes massive amounts of 
natural gas to produce the fertilizer that the farmers use to produce 
all the food we get. And so it is heartbreaking to know how 
agriculture, you know, it's just going to devastate the middle class, 
the lower middle class, particularly. And what we are going to see in 
the next days ahead is heartbreaking.
  We are joined also by a friend who Mr. Poe indicated is a CPA. And I 
always appreciate the way he looks at things because it's such a 
straightforward approach. So I would like to yield to my friend, Mr. 
Conaway.

                              {time}  2100

  Mr. CONAWAY. I thank the gentleman. I appreciate that.
  These are troubling times, and this bill is awfully troubling. The 
science that surrounds this climate change issue, everybody gets an 
opinion about it; but there's only a certain set of facts that we ought 
to deal with.
  One of those facts is, if you would equate the Earth's atmosphere to 
a football stadium with 10,000 people in the stadium--to you guys from 
Texas, in Indiana we play a lot of football there. So there are 10,000 
people in the stands. About 7,600 of those people are wearing jerseys 
that say ``nitrogen'' on the front; and about 2,100 or so have jerseys 
that say ``oxygen'' on them; and about 100 of them, or so, would say 
``argon.'' The remaining 100 or so jerseys in that stadium are referred 
to as trace elements. Among those trace elements are four jerseys--up 
from three 150 years ago--four jerseys that say ``CO2.'' So 
the catastrophic disaster of biblical proportions that is being 
predicted by the zealots and the religious folks on this climate change 
thing argue that the addition of one more jersey that says 
CO2 on it to that stadium of 10,000 drives the change that 
they're talking about.
  Now I'm skeptical. I get to be that way because everybody gets their 
own opinion. That's a fact. You get to interpret that fact however you 
want to. But the truth of the matter is, that's what they're asking us 
to believe. If you look at the 21 models that the Intergovernmental 
Panel on Climate Change used to predict this disaster, and they start 
in the year 2000, and you plot them on a graph over time, and they 
start out with a bracket, you've got the worst-case scenario on the 
top, the best-case scenario on the bottom, and then all those in the 
middle. They start at a relatively narrow band, and they go out over 
time. They begin to spread a little bit. Then they get out a certain 
number of years, and they go straight up, big slash. It kind of looks 
like a hockey stick at that point. Right there is where Earth ends as 
we know it, life ends as we know it, under their scenario.
  So you've got that graph plotted over time, starting in 2000. If you 
had plotted Earth's actual temperature for the last 9 years on that 
exact same graph, it's below the best-case scenario, and it's falling 
away from the path that their predictions are on.
  Now, I've got a lot more experience in financial projections than I 
do climate change projections, but the concepts are the same. Whatever 
your time frame on your projection, the most accurate period is the 
near term. In other words, you should be able to get the close-in years 
right, so to speak. So what these climate signs are saying is, their 21 
models couldn't get it right in the first 9 years.
  Now what they've not been able to explain is there's some sort of a 
self-correcting mechanism in their scheme that somewhere out here, it 
brings them back in line with what's going on, and it marries it back 
up. So if your predictions don't get it right in the first 9 years, 
should we trust those predictions? The other question you have to ask 
yourself is, Did you come up with the model before you came up with the 
answer? Or did you come up with the answer, and then you derive a model 
to get there? I can't answer that question.
  Now these models look incredibly accurate because they are fraught 
with algebraic equations and all kinds of high math and calculus and 
trigonometry and all this kind of stuff that I'm sure you have built 
into these things. They look very great, and they look very 
intellectual. But they are predictions. They are guesses. They start 
with a series of assumptions. And if you take them back in time--I 
don't know that if you put it back in time and put the really out 
numbers in there and ran them forward that they'd get it even better. 
So the models themselves are not working, and that's what's driving the 
change in terminology from global warming to climate change, man-made, 
by the way.
  If you look at the quotes from our President, who is one of these 
aficionados, one of these people who has drunk the Kool-Aid, so to 
speak--this is a quote from Senator Obama who was then trying to 
convince us that he should be President of the United States. 
Apparently he convinced about 53 percent of us that that was a good 
idea.
  I guess he must have been really tired that day, talking to the 
editorial board because he got very straightforward and didn't mince 
his words too well. He probably wishes he had these ones back. But he 
said, ``Under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates 
would necessarily skyrocket.'' Well, to those of us from west Texas, 
that would mean that if I am paying $2 for something today, then to 
skyrocket means that I am going to be paying $7, $8, $9 for it at some 
point in the future. So it increased costs on the skyrocket thing.
  And there's a ellipse here of where he goes on to talk about coal-
fired powered plants and the coal industry having to be retrofitted and 
fixed and brought into the 21st century, so to speak, and the costs 
associated with those, that will cost money. And they, the energy 
producers, will pass that money on to consumers.
  Now you and I are the consumers. Anybody who pays for the turning on 
of a lightbulb is a consumer in this regard.
  Mr. SOUDER. Would the gentleman yield for a question?
  Mr. CONAWAY. Sure.
  Mr. SOUDER. If you could put your quote back up, I just want to say 
that you are just so incredibly not politically correct for this day 
and age.
  Because American electricity rates would go up, but we're world 
citizens now. Surely you are not claiming that rates would go up in 
Pakistan, China and other places. We use a disproportionate amount of 
the energy of the world. So we should be willing to sacrifice so that 
all the world's citizens can benefit more by taking our jobs and having 
a better standard of living. Then we can be all more equal. You are 
just not being politically correct tonight.
  Mr. CONAWAY. Well, I struggle with that, obviously.
  Mr. SOUDER. You are acting like an American, Congressman.
  Mr. CONAWAY. These are American consumers, American jobs and American 
families that our good colleague from east Texas has been talking 
about. If you look at what other nations have done--and I am never one 
to say, Well, if so-and-so is doing it, we ought to do it too. But if 
you can learn from their example and apply it to your own circumstance, 
then there may be some value there. Australia, there's an editorial in 
today's Wall Street Journal that recounts Australia's struggle with 
this issue. Their Prime Minister, much like our President, ran last 
year on a platform that he and Obama would, together, cure this issue. 
To get it through their House of Representatives, he had to delay the 
implementation of it under their legislation until 2011.
  So this urgency thing that you've been hearing about--that if we 
don't do something soon that life will end as we know it--apparently 
has softened a little bit under the new terms since the world's getting 
cooler instead of warmer. But the story went on to say that they would 
not get it through the senate in Australia.
  New Zealand right after last year, right after the new government 
took over, suspended their cap-and-tax program within weeks of its 
initial implementation because they didn't believe

[[Page 16755]]

 it was correct. Poland's leadership is now saying that we are 
skeptical on the science. The Czech Republic has folks saying, We are 
skeptical. There are scientists in this country that are beginning to 
say--politically correct now--to challenge this science associated with 
this because prior to this if you did it, you were called a 
Neanderthal, a knuckle dragger. One of our colleagues today called us 
``Flat Earth People.'' You know, those kinds of things. But now it's 
beginning to be a little more politically correct to be able to say, 
hey, the scientists never settle on any issue, certainly not something 
as unknown as this is going on. So the science is beginning to push 
back on them.
  And one final thing for my colleague who mentioned the 20 percent 
refinery. There was an article in Bloomberg today, talking about how 
major oil companies intend to cope with this bill, and they intend to 
cope by reducing their emphasis on refining. No more investment. They 
will shut them in. They would rather buy the oil, produce the oil 
overseas, refine it overseas and import refined products to this 
country to sell as opposed to buying it. What we would prefer to do is 
produce the crude oil from the U.S., and refine it in U.S. refineries. 
Those are all U.S. jobs. But companies will adapt to this. They will 
figure out how to make this deal work, and it will be at the expense of 
the American economy and American jobs and American families who will 
be punished with this legislation.
  So I appreciate my colleague leading the fight tonight, giving us 
this opportunity to talk to each other and the Speaker about what's 
going on because this is--as I mentioned earlier this afternoon, there 
is an old movie that was entitled, ``Bad Day at Black Rock.'' Folks, 
this was a bad day at Black Rock for this country.
  With that, I yield back.
  Mr. GOHMERT. Thank you, Mr. Conaway.
  Mr. SOUDER. Will the judge yield for a minute?
  Mr. GOHMERT. I will yield to my friend Mr. Souder.
  Mr. SOUDER. You have been making a number of parliamentary points 
today during the debate and on the floor. You are an experienced judge 
as well as a Congressman. Is he allowed to use factual science on the 
floor? I don't know if we're allowed to really debate this stuff. This 
is mostly an ideological bill, not a factual bill. As Mr. Conaway 
correctly said, did they come to a conclusion and then make the facts 
fit the conclusion? It is really disturbing. Much of what's behind us 
is, in fact, that there's a group of people who feel guilty about us 
being such a successful Nation and about Western nations being so 
successful and that we use a disproportionate amount of the energy of 
the world and that somehow we should not do that. Some of the other 
western countries, like Australia and New Zealand, as you pointed out, 
are like, Hey, what's going on here? Do we have to buy into this? What 
does it exactly mean that we need to sacrifice and go down in our 
lifestyle? What will we gain? Is the science really there?
  Then the developing countries that want to be like the United States, 
they look at us like a model, and they are going, like Poland, Hey, 
what is this stuff here? Is this something that you guys came up with 
at some university or a couple guys smoking some marijuana cigarettes? 
Or is this real fundamental stuff? And maybe we ought to prove this 
before we give up our cars, before we give up our SUVs and our station 
wagons.
  I mean, we've had this debate about the Volt and whether GM should go 
to an electric car that costs $40,000. We talk about gas and oil and 
how you power these big trucks that I make in my district and how you 
power the RVs. How exactly are you going to tow a towable with a Smart 
Car? That the challenge is, how are you going to move around? And one 
of the questions is, I think they think that electric cars, when you 
plug them in, that the electricity is in the wall. What is going to 
make the power to power electric cars? And how many, kind of, regular 
people are going to be able to afford a $40,000 electric car?
  Which gets to the core of this bill. We've had Members on the floor 
today say, Oh, well, we're going to fix this because low-income people 
are going to get exemptions, and there's going to be this class that 
gets an exemption. About 80 to 90 percent of that bill are government 
preferences to try to fix the problem they are creating.
  In fact, one of our colleagues, the Democrat from Oregon, Mr. 
DeFazio, in his 1-minute this morning made two terrific points. One 
was, the alternative jobs and alternative energy are being created 
faster now than they will be under this bill because we're moving in 
that direction already with the incentives in the market. And with some 
supplemental funding out of Congress, some tax incentives out of 
Congress, we're going to get major breakthroughs.
  I have a car company in my district that may be able to get 60 miles 
a gallon out of E85. The test case shows they got 100 in the first 
test, and it's a new motor. But if we mandate electric cars, it will 
never come to market. Government doesn't make efficient decisions, that 
if they protect this class, protect this company, protect the TVA power 
system but not this power system, you get all these special categories.
  But what we know is, as all of you have pointed out, the upper 
classes will figure that out. They're not going to get damaged much by 
this; and to some degree, they're going to try to cover and patch up in 
a mishmash of expensive government regulatory programs. And who gets 
lost in this? The very people that the other party promised to protect 
when they ran, the middle class, the forgotten man and woman and young 
person who is somewhere in the middle, working hard and not, as Mr. 
DeFazio pointed out in his other point, making money on credit swaps.
  We're going through one of the greatest financial messes in the 
world, and we have just set up a cap-and-trade. What does trade mean? 
We call it cap-and-tax. Cap and send the jobs to China. A number of 
different things. Mr. Gohmert a while ago just coined another version 
of the bill. But the bottom line is, the trade is trading credits and 
swapping and then securitizing those in markets and encouraging other 
countries around the world to do this. This will be a boondoggle. How 
many trees did you plant in Brazil to offset your ethanol plant? How 
many whatever did you do in damming up a river, which historically the 
environmentalists were opposed to damming. Now they talk about 
hydropower. Which is it? You did a hydroplant in Thailand. Therefore, 
you get to have a credit swap worth $50,000. You put that $50,000 out. 
A number of people bid on it. That gets leveraged 30 times. We're 
creating a bigger mess than we have now, based on trying to do all 
sorts of equalization. This is a disaster, and it cannot happen without 
basically destroying our country.
  We pointed out tonight different angles of this, and this is not--as 
Mr. Poe goes through his list on July 4 and our Founding Fathers and 
what they sacrificed for. They sacrificed for freedom, not for 
government setting up credit swaps, protecting one group of people 
against another group of people, one region against another group of 
people. Then when you complain, they make deals on the floor during the 
debate today. Oh, I didn't realize that. There's such a lack of 
understanding that it takes that many pages. By the time we get done 
with the regulations, there will be that stack across that whole top of 
the table, and they'll still be inventing it as people sue and go to 
court to judges, like my friend Mr. Gohmert said.
  Mr. GOHMERT. I appreciate so much, Mr. Souder, your great 
observations.
  Thomas Jefferson said: ``The natural progress of things is for 
liberty to yield and government to gain ground.'' And that's what we're 
seeing in this bill, the dramatic gains of the government's right to 
control your life in this bill are just extraordinary.

                              {time}  2115

  I do want to make a couple of quick points. Apparently we have about 
7 or 8 minutes left.

[[Page 16756]]

  For one thing, Mr. Conaway had mentioned earlier that it will likely 
cost the average family across America an extra $3,031. And I know 
there will be some people out there who have seen some in the 
mainstream media say, oh, well, we saw where that guy from MIT said it 
won't cost that much. It may be $300 or $500 or $600, but it won't be 
$3,100.
  Those people just bought the Democratic talking points and didn't 
bother to check to see why it was that they are saying that it won't 
cost over $3,000. From what I have read, apparently they are saying it 
won't cost over $3,000 because even though the average family will pay 
more than $3,000 additionally because of this bill, they are saying 
what you will get back from the government in the way of services and 
benefits will be a wash because of all that you will get out of the 
government as a result of that extra $3,000 you pay for energy in the 
first year. It won't be that much, because you will be grateful for all 
you get. Baloney.
  And another thing we heard in debate on the floor today about was, 
gee, the AFL-CIO leaders and other union leaders, we heard these union 
leaders were in support of this bill. Well, how about that? They were 
in favor of the government taking over GM and Chrysler. Why? Because 
they got a deal. They get to own the companies. Who knows what they 
have promised the union leaders to support this ``crap-and-trade'' 
bill.
  It is a sad, sad day for America because the rank-and-file people in 
America are going to pay a severe price. This intrudes into their lives 
so much. And for my unfortunate Democratic friends who have not read 
this, they said, no, no, no. This will provide jobs, not take jobs. 
They just need to go to section 426 where it talks about the climate 
change adjustment allowance because there are provisions in it. They 
know that people are going to lose their jobs as a result of this bill. 
So it is built in here.
  Now, you have to understand, though, it says here, you won't get such 
allowance for the first week you are unemployed. But then it will kick 
in after that. There is good stuff here. Over here it does mention that 
you're not going to get an adjustment allowance for that first week 
either that you're unemployed. They know this is going to cost so many 
jobs.
  There is climate change adjustment assistance and relocation 
assistance. Unfortunately, it is not going to pay you to go get your 
job back from China, India, Brazil and Latin America. So that part of 
the relocation is not going to help. But I'll tell you the one that 
just galled me to no end. It says here, absolutely part of the law, the 
Secretary shall conduct a study to examine the circumstances of older 
adversely affected workers.
  In other words, if you're over 50 or so and you lose your job--
because you're going to, you're going to lose a lot of jobs here--and 
you lose your job, when you do as a result of this bill, don't worry. 
We are going to do a study about you and your lost job. That will warm 
your heart, won't it? It won't keep you warm on a cold night next 
winter when you lost your job as a result of this bill.
  But the good news is, the Senate has still not acted. Mr. Speaker, it 
is not too late for people to let their Senator know, look, I know 
you're a Democrat. I know the pressure is enormous. I know they are 
promising you all kinds of things to get you to vote for this bill. But 
don't get sucked in, because we will be the ones, the constituents will 
say, for paying the price for your sin and error.
  I would like to yield to my friend, Judge Poe, in our last few 
minutes.
  Mr. POE of Texas. Thank you for yielding.
  The concern that I have about this bill is that, as I mentioned at 
the outset, we love the fact that we are a free people and that we are 
an independent Nation. This bill makes us dependent on government. It 
will control our lives. We have to get permission from the government 
for every action we will take as individuals and as businesses. We do 
not have free will to make decisions, because the government won't let 
us have that free will to make decisions. Decisions will be made by the 
government. The government picks winners and losers in that bill 
because it creates great subsidies to some people to make them more 
dependent on government and government control.
  That is not what America is about. America is about freedom. It is 
not about dependence.
  So the sad part about the bill is the aspect that it creates right 
here in Washington, D.C., as Mr. Conaway said, the center of the 
universe to some, control over everybody from Indiana to Texas to 
California to Hawaii to Florida. And that ought not to be.
  Mr. GOHMERT. Thank you, and I appreciate your observations. I would 
like to also observe, though, we heard during the debate today that the 
National Association of Realtors was supporting this. Obviously they 
didn't know about the 300 pages added at 3:08 a.m. this morning, 
because whoever that Realtor was that pushed that should lose their job 
because it is going to cost Realtors jobs. It is going to cost them 
commissions. It is going to cost them royally.
  With that, Mr. Speaker, I would yield back time.

                          ____________________