[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 162 (2016), Part 11]
[House]
[Pages 14712-14715]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                             CLIMATE CHANGE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 6, 2015, the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Benishek) is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. BENISHEK. Mr. Speaker, as a lifelong resident of northern 
Michigan, I know how important it is to protect and conserve our 
precious natural resources. Northern Michigan's economy

[[Page 14713]]

depends on our Great Lakes and our outdoor spaces for tourism, 
agriculture, and sporting activities.
  Generations of people in my district have grown up experiencing the 
outdoors from the shores of Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore to 
Isle Royale National Park. However, we need to make sure that there is 
a balance and that we do not undertake rash and unproven regulatory 
policies that are almost guaranteed to negatively impact our economy in 
the hope of some potential--and often unquantifiable--environmental 
gain.
  I just got back from northern Michigan. As a matter of fact, I was in 
Ottawa National Forest hunting. What strikes me about the regulatory 
nature of the Federal Government is it doesn't really take into account 
what is happening in the wild. The Ottawa National Forest, for example, 
hasn't been properly managed. The regulations as far as managing the 
forest make it so difficult that the forest is aging and the trees are 
actually falling down and rotting rather than being harvested. This is 
just one of the policies of this administration, and I am really 
hoping, now that we have a new administration coming forward, there 
will be a lot of change in the regulatory policies to actually develop 
policies that make sense for our environment and make sense for our 
people. That is why I wanted to speak tonight about many of these 
policies that affect our environment and global warming.
  A lot of policies of the last administration, even the administration 
before that, really don't have the globe at the forefront of solving 
these problems. What they have been doing is just writing more and more 
regulations that stop whatever we are doing, and they don't have any 
particular effect on the global environment.
  I am bringing this up for a reason. I just brought this little 
pollution-by-country chart, and this is the global pollution for the 
whole world. We know the United States is a pretty big part of that. 
The EU is a big part of that. India is big, and China is the biggest. 
The rest of the world provides, probably, the largest. But what strikes 
me about this is the fact that we in America haven't done things right 
all the time, but we are constantly striving to make improvements.
  My problem with the way that the regulations are written under this 
administration is the fact that we are killing our economy to improve 
the global environment, and yet we are a relatively small part of the 
problem of pollution and global warming--if you believe that it is 
manmade--and we are not really doing anything about the rest of this.
  We are putting so many regulatory burdens on our industry, like, for 
example, energy production. The cost of energy production is a big part 
of making steel, for example. Many of the countries around the world 
are buying steel not so much from us but from China and India because 
they are polluting the planet in order to produce cheap steel, and we 
are really helping the environment with all our regulations and 
everything to the point that we are losing all of our jobs. That 
doesn't make any sense. If we were allowed to harvest our energy in a 
very environmentally friendly way, we would have more jobs here in this 
country. These guys would have less jobs. I want to keep jobs here in 
America.
  This is just one of the examples. Wait until you see some of the 
pictures I have.

                              {time}  1930

  My district was once a huge mining area. We mine iron ore, 
construction sand and gravel, salt is produced in Michigan, and copper. 
And these are all good-paying jobs.
  I am going to give you a great example of one of the weirdest 
regulations that have come out of this administration. And that is we 
do have a mine in my district that recently opened, a new nickel mine, 
the first nickel mine in this country, I think, in over 50 years. The 
road to the mine, there is no good road to the mine. There is 68 miles 
of road through a downtown and around a roundabout to the processing 
mill to process the nickel ore.
  The local county road commission wanted to build a 22-mile road that 
would bypass the 68 miles of road through a downtown, but they can't 
get a permit to build the road because EPA blocked it. Now, the Federal 
Government in Washington, D.C., is telling a local county in my 
district that they can't build a road because it involves some 
wetlands. Well, there is about 5 acres of wetlands that have to be 
filled in order to build this road. Believe me, you can't build a road 
anywhere in this country without filling in some wetlands in order to 
have the grade be safe.
  We have had environmental laws in this country that said: if you are 
going to fill in some wetlands to build a road, you have got to create 
some wetlands somewhere else to mitigate for the fact that you have 
taken away some habitat from some species maybe and that sort of thing. 
Well, the road commission put up 100 times the acreage of the wetlands 
that they were going to use for the roadway to mitigate for that. But 
that wasn't good enough for the EPA. As a matter of fact, the EPA 
stopped the road without even listening very well to the mitigation 
plan.
  This was bad for jobs. It makes it difficult for the mine to do 
business. It makes the longevity of the mine not as good because it is 
more expensive to process the ore. And it creates more pollution 
because the trucks are driving 68 miles to the ore processing plant 
versus the 22 miles on a new road. Besides, the new road would open up 
a lot of other areas for economic development as well.
  Well, this is the type of rule and regulation that doesn't make any 
sense to the people that want to protect their environment with fewer 
miles on the road with diesel trucks and also provide economic 
opportunity in an area that needs jobs. So I am really hopeful that we 
will continue with a new administration to improve and stop this 
ridiculous rulemaking that has absolutely no effect on the 
environment--if anything, it makes it worse--all because people in 
Washington here under this administration have decided that they know 
better than the people in Michigan who actually live there, and they 
can't make a decision for themselves because you can't possibly know it 
would be good for the environment because you are just living on the UP 
and you don't really know what is what. That has been my frustration in 
my time here in Congress. That is a really good example of what is 
going on.
  I want to show you a couple of pictures of some places around the 
world that aren't managing the environment, such as the United States 
is. Here we have a factory, a Chinese factory that is putting out all 
kinds of pollutants without any significant environmental controls on 
them at all. These are the kind of factories that we are competing 
with, with our factories, which are much better.
  We just had a coal-fired power plant stopped in my district several 
years ago by the EPA because of this administration's war on coal. This 
coal plant was a state-of-the-art coal plant. It didn't even produce 
CO2 because, in my district, they are able to harness the 
technology to capture the CO2 and sell it and actually use 
it to pump in the ground to help the production of local oil wells. The 
CO2 is not an issue. So we are actually competing with 
people that do this to our environment, and losing jobs overseas 
because of the tight regulations we have here, but we are not doing 
anything about this that is going on across the world. None of the 
policies that we have instituted on our industry are in effect over 
there. We haven't put any significant demands on the Chinese to make 
them stop doing this.
  I was talking to some biologists from the University of Michigan. We 
have an environmental research station in my district. The University 
of Michigan has been studying the environment for the last 100 years or 
so. And one of the things that I found really interesting was the fact 
that one of the great concerns about coal mining and coal used for 
energy production was the mercury in the air. I was talking to these 
guys from the University of Michigan and

[[Page 14714]]

they said: we solved the mercury problem in this country decades ago; 
that is not a problem anymore.
  Most of the mercury that is in our environment here in the United 
States comes from China and India. Because it is over in China and 
India doesn't mean that it is not a global problem. That stuff goes up 
in the atmosphere. It takes the jet stream, and it comes all the way 
over here. The majority of the pollutant mercury in our country is 
coming from places like this. This administration has done nothing 
about it except for putting more stringent controls on our energy 
production, making our energy more expensive, and making people want to 
buy steel and other products from countries that do this to our 
environment.
  This is not the right way to deal with this issue. If we are going to 
deal with global pollution, global production of harmful toxins, or 
global warming, we have to talk to people that are bad actors around 
the world and make them do their part and not make our industries 
really the joke of everyone else in the world because they are making 
money and we are losing our jobs and it doesn't make any sense 
whatsoever.
  Let's see another picture here. This is a pretty good one from India. 
This is a river in India. This is all trash in the middle of the river 
in India. I went to India, and I was appalled by how filthy it was and 
the lack of environmental rules. This is what we are dealing with.
  Now, I know the Indians and, perhaps, the Chinese are not as 
developed as we are, but they are competing in the same environment for 
industry as we are along the globe. I am hopeful that the coming Trump 
administration is going to take this kind of stuff seriously, unlike 
the Obama administration, which his only answer to global warming and 
global pollution is to put more and more restrictions on our industry, 
killing jobs in this country and giving more jobs to people around the 
world that do this.
  This picture is a good example of the way things are done across the 
world. Now, I come from a timber district where we want to harvest 
responsibly the timber that we have in our national forests. That means 
cutting trees down as they mature in a logical fashion so that there 
are a lot of healthy trees in the forest that are not overcome by 
disease and fire, which is what we have seen out West over the last 
couple of decades because those forests are not being managed.
  Originally, the national forests were developed as a place for 
multiple use--for harvesting for logs, for entertainment to go hunting 
and fishing. I hunt and fish in a national forest. But when the trees 
become over mature and they are not managed in a way that allow new 
growth, there is a limited amount of species that can exist in that 
type of a forest.
  This is what they do in Indonesia. This is a forest in Indonesia that 
was clear-cut for miles and miles and miles. This is the way it was 
left. Now, that is not the way it is done in Michigan, not where I 
live, not in my Federal forests. The problem is we are not doing enough 
of the select cuts, the limited clear-cuts that allow spreading of new 
growth. We are competing on our timber products with people that do 
this to their environment.
  Now, in this country, private forests and State forests are managed 
with the stewardship program where third-party stewards of the forest, 
who are registered, licensed, and trained how to manage forests, are 
given the opportunity to manage forests over decades, over centuries, 
so that there is always a healthy forest with mid-term growth, long-
term growth, new growth. There is a multiple of species that can live 
amongst that. People can hunt and enjoy that area. I just want to try 
to, Mr. Speaker, make sure the American people are aware of the fact 
that our environment is a place where we live, we want it to be good 
and healthy, and we want it also to be able to provide jobs for the 
people that live in my district and across the country.
  Some of the statistics I could give you about the Chinese, for 
example, is that in 2012, China was responsible for over a quarter of 
the pollution worldwide. As you saw in that circle, the total pollution 
in China currently equals the pollution from the United States and the 
European Union combined. This is expected to only increase.
  Now, China is run by a centralized government that has not 
traditionally respected the environment or the concerns of the locals 
when it comes to major decisions or projects. This is the type of 
policy that we can talk to the Chinese and have a discussion about what 
they can do to improve their behavior.
  India is currently the world's fastest growing economy and already 
the fourth largest polluter. As the Indian economy grows, these 
emissions are going to continue to rise.
  As you see from Indonesia, there is deforestation and clear-cutting 
in the rain forest. I want to have responsible and sustainable forestry 
practices because timber is a renewable resource.
  Now, our environmental actions have been incremental in nature, but, 
until this last administration, they haven't been killing our industry. 
Now with the Obama administration's war on coal, significant areas of 
our economy have fallen into disrepair. I am so thankful, frankly, that 
we have a new administration coming in that is going to, hopefully, put 
a stop to those policies that have been driving our jobs overseas and 
making it difficult for us here at home.
  I just want to show another graph here for U.S. employment in 
manufacturing industries. Now, starting in 1980 into 2014, as you can 
see, thousands of jobs in the manufacturing industries have gone down. 
I am not saying that environmental regulations are the complete cause 
of this, but I think this should be a pretty major part of our 
decisionmaking process as to how we do these things.
  We have a regulatory and approval process in the United States that 
most other countries don't even approach or even pretend to go through. 
Having incremental change consulting with industry and still having 
strict standards, I think, can all happen at once. But when the current 
administration has had a policy of killing our industry and not doing 
anything about these foreign people, we need to put a change to that 
and turn this manufacturing number around and bring manufacturing back 
to where it should be.
  This slide was made up before the election, so I wasn't sure it was 
going to happen in the next administration.

                              {time}  1945

  Here are the economically significant regulations this government has 
put out all the way back to 2000. The number of regulations are 
expected to cost $100 million or more to the American people. You can 
see that, consistently, from the beginning of the Obama administration 
that that number has significantly increased. I am so happy to hear 
that Mr. Trump has promised, for every new regulation, to cut two. 
Let's start with the cutting.
  At the end of the day, we need to protect our environment. However, 
hamstringing our economy will not save our environment. The other 
people on the planet provide for most of the pollution and for the 
other things that people are afraid of in the environment--more than we 
are by far. All too often, the consequences of overburdening 
regulations here in America is the flight of manufacturing and industry 
to nations such as China, Indonesia, and India. I am hopeful that my 
colleagues here in the House and in the Senate, along with a new 
administration, will change that and make logical regulations. I think 
this will benefit our planet. It will certainly benefit the American 
citizens. We shouldn't be implementing expensive nonsolutions to a 
problem of which the extent and impact remain uncertain.
  I have been criticized in the past for talking about global warming 
and what the future is going to bring. With anything you talk about 
with regard to the administration's being over-regulatory, then you are 
accused of being a polluter of the planet. I ran for election several 
times, and these are the types of arguments that people will make to 
try to make you look bad, to make you look as if you want to pollute 
the planet. I think, really, Americans are tired of that baloney. We 
want to have a decent living; we want to have a clean

[[Page 14715]]

planet; we want to make sure that the people around the world have the 
same values and interests that we do in that, if we are going to work 
hard to try to make our planet cleaner, they should, too, so that we 
are competing on an even scale here. With what we are doing now, we are 
not competing on an even scale.
  It is very important that we don't allow people to intimidate us when 
we say: ``I want to have more mining in this country. I want to be able 
to use coal.'' They just immediately say that you are an anti-
environmentalist, and it is just torture. Most of the people who say 
this kind of stuff have never been to a community that actually does 
mining. They just see it from afar. They don't see the end result of a 
mine that has been rehabilitated and that is covered with green.
  They don't have any idea what is really going on. They just use it in 
fear so that the American people don't really realize the truth of what 
is going on, and they want their vote. They are causing fear in the 
American people by their saying: ``This guy doesn't want to protect the 
environment.'' I mean, I want to protect the environment. I come from 
one of the most beautiful places in the country, I think. I want it to 
be clean and healthy for my children as well, and it is going to be 
really clean and healthy if nobody lives there because there are no 
jobs. We need to protect our environment, have policies that allow jobs 
to continue to occur in this country, and have reasonable regulations 
that make sense and that have sound, scientific studies.
  This administration has hid the scientific studies behind closed 
doors in many cases. I am a physician. I wrote research papers. I had 
to show my evidence to the world and have other people criticize what I 
wrote so that they could say: ``You didn't do that right,'' or ``your 
technique was flawed,'' or ``the study you did didn't really show what 
you said it shows.'' That is what happens in scientific research--you 
have to have your research open to criticism. This administration has 
used science in the way that they say: ``The scientists say `this,''' 
but they don't want to show you the data because they don't want other 
people to criticize what they have done. They say that other people who 
might criticize them are just politicized when they, themselves, are 
politicized. They also don't want the other side to speak, because they 
will say: ``You are just anti-environment.''
  We need to have an open discourse of scientists on both sides of 
issues--and consensus--before we make policies and regulations that 
kill millions of jobs and that cost families as their raises for the 
last 8 years have been meager. We need to be sure that science is open 
and not politicized as it has been in this administration.
  I encourage my colleagues to not be afraid to stand up for what is 
right and for jobs in this country. I encourage the people who may be 
watching, too, to think about what the politicians they listen to are 
saying and how it affects jobs and how it really affects the 
environment because, although we want a clean environment, we are not 
going to write rules that kill jobs and that do not do anything about 
the real polluters on this planet, who care nothing about the 
environment, and who are causing the majority of the problems around 
the globe.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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