[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 160 (2014), Part 9]
[House]
[Pages 13383-13384]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                         FAILED ENERGY POLICIES

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Tennessee (Mr. Duncan) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. DUNCAN of Tennessee. Mr. Speaker, President Obama told the San 
Francisco Chronicle editorial board in 2008, under his environmental 
policies ``electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.''
  To be even more specific, he said:

       If somebody wants to build a coal-fired power plant, they 
     can. It is just that it will bankrupt them. Under my plan, 
     electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.

  Now listen to this story from The Washington Post just last week:

       Pueblo, Colorado. Sharon Garcia is stumbling around her 
     dining room in the dark, trying to find Post-it notes.
       As she has for years, Garcia wants to affix the notes, 
     marked with dollar signs, to light switches all around her 
     house. The message to her five kids: light is expensive.
       ``Why do you need to turn the lights off?'' she asks her 
     son, Mariano.
       ``Because otherwise there's no money,'' he answers, 
     dutifully.
       ``And when there's no money?''
       ``You can't feed us or take us anywhere.''
       Bingo, again.

                              {time}  1100

  I am still quoting from the Post story:

       It's not just the light switches, though. Ever since her 
     power was shut off in 2010, Garcia has adopted a Depression-
     era obsessiveness: she doesn't use the oven in the summer, 
     because it heats up the house, and uses only one small air-
     conditioner. Even the aquarium goes dark when someone's not 
     in the room.
       And yet, no matter how much she rations and cuts, Garcia 
     cannot keep ahead of the fast rise in rates. In Pueblo, the 
     residential rate per kilowatt hour has risen 26 percent since 
     2010, and on a per-household basis, is now among the highest 
     in the State.
       But in Pueblo, it happened in a way that has left poor 
     consumers gasping for relief.
       To a wealthy community, skyrocketing electricity rates 
     might not have much of an impact. When you have a decent-
     paying job, what's a few more dollars a month on your utility 
     bill?
       Pueblo is not that kind of place. With a poverty rate of 
     18.1 percent, incomes far below the State average, and a 
     third of the population on some sort of public assistance, 
     those few dollars can make a big difference here.

  Now, I realize that almost all environmental radicals come from 
wealthy or upper-income families. Perhaps they just do not realize how 
harmful all these environmental rules and regulations and red tape are 
to poor and lower income people.
  As Charles Lane, The Washington Post columnist, said, climate change 
is ``a rich man's issue.''
  Perhaps it doesn't matter to wealthy environmentalists that all this 
environmental overkill has sent millions of good jobs to other 
countries over the last 40 or 50 years.
  Now we have ended up with the best-educated waiters and waitresses in 
the world as millions of college graduates or very intelligent non-
college graduates are having to work at jobs far below the levels of 
their education or below the level of their skills, talents, and 
abilities.
  Perhaps it doesn't matter to rich or upper-income environmentalists 
if utility bills or prices for everything go way up, but it sure does 
matter to millions of people like Sharon Garcia.
  Perhaps it doesn't matter to wealthy environmentalists that their 
policies over the years have driven very small- and medium-sized 
companies out of business.
  Perhaps they are pleased that their policies have helped give job 
security to bureaucrats and have helped extremely big businesses and 
foreign energy producers.

[[Page 13384]]

  This administration even had a Secretary of Energy until a few months 
ago who said we need to be paying the same price for gas as they do in 
Europe--$8 or $9 a gallon.
  Then, of course, all the wealthy environmentalists would have to 
fight a whole lot less traffic because they would be about the only 
ones who could afford to drive.
  We have made tremendous progress over the past many years in cleaning 
our air and water. I have voted for many of these laws and voted many 
years ago for the toughest clean air law in the world.
  But as Charles Krauthammer said: If we shut our whole country down, 
it would make almost no difference on carbon emissions because China 
and India together are opening coal-fired plants at rate of almost one 
per week, and Indonesia is the third-largest emitter.
  Some environmental groups hate to admit how much progress we have 
made--how much cleaner our air and water are--because it would reduce 
their contributions. They have to keep telling people how bad 
everything is so their contributors will keep sending them money, 
especially money and contributions from foreign energy producers.
  But we need to make people realize that only a prosperous country 
that allows free enterprise can generate the excess funds to do good 
things for the environment that everybody wants done.
  Communist and socialist countries have been some of the biggest 
polluters in the world because their economies have been barely able to 
feed, clothe, and house their people. And certainly they have been 
unable to spend the kinds of money that it costs to help the 
environment.
  We must not allow big government environmental regulators at both the 
Federal and State levels to cause our country to move so far to the 
left that it destroys our economy.

                          ____________________