[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 5]
[House]
[Page 6194]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                       REVENUE NEUTRAL CARBON TAX

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Inglis) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. INGLIS. Madam Speaker, the last couple of weeks I have been 
discussing opportunity and the danger that we confront with our energy 
insecurity. There is this enormous danger that was talked about over 
the last couple of weeks. There is also this incredible opportunity to 
create new jobs.
  And to give you an idea of what that means in a district, the Fourth 
District of South Carolina, one of the six in South Carolina, has the 
wonderful fortune of having General Electric make gas turbines and wind 
turbines there. They have somewhere around 1,500 engineers and 
somewhere around 1,500 production employees, and at that facility they 
make wind turbines. They tell me that 1 percent of the world's 
electricity right now is made by the wind.
  If it goes to 2 percent, it's $100 billion in sales. I am pretty 
excited about that because, presumably, a lot of that money would be 
attributed to the Greenville facility and jobs would be created there.
  So the question is how do you get from here to there? By the way, 
Madam Speaker, the Department of Energy says that we can, in the United 
States, get to 20 percent of our electricity being made by the wind, 
and we consume 25 percent of the world's electricity. So it's a 
tremendous business opportunity.
  So how do we get from here, the intention of having fuels of the 
future, to the reality of fuels of the future? Well, I think it's all 
about economics. It's all about whether there is a price signal and an 
internalizing of the externals associated with fossil fuels--and that's 
what I talked about last week here on the floor--is the need to 
internalize externals associated with some of our fossil fuels, 
especially coal in the case electricity; and in the case of the 
national security risk we are running with petroleum, the externalities 
associated with what comes out of our tail pipes and the national 
security risk associated with what we put in the gas tank.
  So if you start attaching those externals to the price of the 
product, then some good things start happening and we start moving 
toward this incredible opportunity. So the opportunity at hand for us 
in a place like Greenville, South Carolina, is to create jobs by having 
a price signal sent through the marketplace that coal, for example, is 
no longer going to get the freebie that it has gotten. Right now, it's 
free good in the air. You can belch and burn all you want without any 
accountability for what's going up there.
  That's a pretty good deal if you are the one belching and burning. 
But if you are the guy across the street who has got a better 
technology, a cleaner technology, a technology of the future, rather 
than of the past, then you are not going to take out that incumbent 
technology until a price signal is sent that could be sent by attaching 
the internals associated with the production of electricity by 
something like coal.
  So what I am here to suggest, Madam Speaker, is that what we should 
be looking at is a revenue neutral carbon tax, revenue neutral in that 
you start with a tax reduction, reduce payroll taxes. In fact, I would 
like to eliminate them, but reducing payroll taxes is a first step.
  Second step, apply a transparent tax to carbon. The result would be 
that no additional taxation would be coming to the U.S. government. The 
burden would not be greater on the American citizen, but we would send 
a price signal that would cause companies like General Electric to be 
able to see their way clear to make those wind turbines and electricity 
generators to buy those gas turbines because the freebie, the free good 
in the air, would no longer be going to the coal-fired plants.
  So it's an incredible opportunity for us, Madam Speaker, that we 
begin this move towards fuels of the future. It starts with sound 
economics, conservative principles of accountability and of attaching 
externals to internalize the externals associated with some fossil 
fuels.
  If we do that, Madam Speaker, the future is very bright in creating 
jobs in America. I am very excited about that and look forward to 
talking about it more with my colleagues as we go forward to figure out 
a way we can break this addiction to foreign oil and to power our lives 
in cleaner and job-producing ways.

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