[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 8]
[House]
[Page 10586]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




              PRESIDENT PANDERING TO ENVIRONMENTAL GROUPS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Texas (Mr. Poe) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. POE of Texas. Mr. Speaker, the President this week declared he's 
going to unilaterally stop climate change. That's right, he's going to 
part the oceans and change the temperature to his liking. How's he 
going to do this? Well, he's declaring war on fossil fuels--again.
  This week it's coal. Mr. Speaker, coal counts for 37 percent of our 
Nation's electricity. How does the President plan to make up for that 
37 percent? Well, the ruler doesn't really say. I guess that 37 percent 
will just have to do without heat come winter. In his radical climate 
change manifesto, to a room packed full of his environmental lobby, the 
President issued a edict to the EPA to regulate coal out of existence.
  Both Congress and the American people have overwhelmingly rejected 
this policy in the past. Never mind the will of the people, never mind 
Congress has said ``no'' to these ideas. The President is pandering to 
the environmental groups, and he wants it his way. So he's just going 
to issue another one of those--what I believe is unconstitutional--
executive orders.
  Mr. Speaker, there are consequences for such rash actions by the 
President. The White House war on coal will raise the cost of energy 
for American families, cripple the economy, and destroy hundreds of 
thousands of jobs of people who work in the energy industry. The war on 
coal is really a war on the American people.
  Mr. Speaker, maybe the President is not aware that the coal plant 
over here on South Capitol Street heats part of the Capitol. Is this 
his way to silence Congress? Who knows. But this is just another day 
from the administration whose energy policy is ``nothing from below.'' 
Nothing from below the ground, nothing from below the sea. No oil, no 
coal, no gas, and no jobs. That's the result of this policy. That's why 
I've introduced the Ensuring Affordable Energy Act. My bill will put an 
end to this back-door attempt by this administration to go around 
Congress and circumvent the will of the people. This bill would 
prohibit any EPA funds from being used to implement the regulation of 
greenhouse gases. This has passed in the House, but it has yet to 
become law.
  Now let's talk about natural gas. Down the street from the White 
House is another marble bureaucratic palace they call the Department of 
Energy. Sitting on their oak desks are dusty folders holding 
applications to export liquefied natural gas. In 2010, the oil and gas 
industry contributed almost $500 billion to our economy. And over the 
last 7 years, the amount of recoverable natural gas in our country has 
skyrocketed. For the first time in our Nation's history, we have more 
natural gas than we can use here in the United States, even if we 
tried. America can sell that gas on the global market for billions of 
dollars, creating thousands of jobs in the process; but we're not doing 
it, for one simple bureaucratic red-tape reason--the Department of 
Energy.
  In typical Washington-style fashion, we've seen delay, delay, delay 
by the Department of Energy to approve these permits. Over the last 70 
years, this bureaucratic hurdle was hardly noticed as the U.S. was an 
importer of natural gas, but not so anymore. Technology has changed all 
of this. There are some 18 export applications sitting over there on 
those desks in those dusty folders for the DOE to approve. The 
Department's response: no response. In the last 3 years, the DOE has 
granted only two applications. Meanwhile, countries that want to buy 
American natural gas are going to our worldwide competitors, like China 
and Russia. Isn't that lovely.
  Understand this, Mr. Speaker, there is already an agency, FERC, the 
Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, that is in the pipeline to 
approve applications such as this. So we have duplication with the DOE 
and FERC. So what we have to do is remove the DOE from the process, 
remove this duplication.
  Mr. Speaker, we have enough oil, natural gas, and coal in America to 
make the Middle East turmoil, Middle East politics, and Middle East 
energy irrelevant if we would just use our own God-given natural 
resources. Washington bureaucrats sit at their large oak desks sipping 
on those lattes every day, and they are regulating American energy out 
of business. It's time to take the padlock off the marble palaces of 
the EPA and the DOE and remove the bureaucrats from the energy 
business. Let's use the resources the good Lord has given us to take 
care of America.
  And that's just the way it is.

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