[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 163 (2017), Part 7]
[House]
[Page 9161]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                        THE PARIS CLIMATE ACCORD

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
California (Mr. McClintock) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. McCLINTOCK. Mr. Speaker, President Trump's most important mandate 
is to revive America's struggling economy. This simply cannot be done 
under the terms of the Paris climate accord.
  According to The Heritage Foundation, adhering to that agreement 
would have destroyed 400,000 American jobs and forfeit $2.5 trillion in 
lost productivity by 2035. That is about $20,000 in lower annual 
earnings for a family of four.
  There is a reason we suffered the slowest economic growth of the 
post-war era under Barack Obama: bad deals and bad policies like this.
  President Obama bound America to the Paris accord by executive fiat. 
He committed billions of dollars of taxes paid by American families to 
an international slush fund for developing countries, and then he set 
his agencies loose to suppress American industry, regardless of the 
costs imposed on working Americans.
  And for what exactly? The EPA's own modeling predicts that if the 
accord were fully implemented by 2030, it would reduce global 
temperature increases by 17/100ths of 1 degree by 2100.
  Its advocates have recently dismissed this inconvenient truth by 
explaining: Well, it would at least send a powerful signal.
  Well, we can already see the cost to average families of sending this 
powerful signal. European energy prices are more than twice as high as 
the United States, and their economies lag far behind even the anemic 
growth under Obama.
  California has adopted many of these policies and now bears one of 
the highest energy costs in the country, along with the highest poverty 
rate. Without the high-tech wealth of the bay area, California's 
economy would trail well behind the national growth rate.
  Paris apologists promise a new era of green energy jobs. Well, as 
long as consumers are coerced into buying overpriced green products and 
struggling families are forced to fork over billions of dollars through 
higher utility bills and taxes, well, of course, politically connected 
green energy companies will do very well, but at enormous expense to 
the overall economy.
  Those 374,000 solar jobs we hear about generate just 1 percent of our 
electricity. The 187,000 coal, oil, and gas jobs remaining in this 
country generate 65 percent of our electricity.
  The wide historical fluctuations in both carbon dioxide and global 
temperature suggest that natural influences vastly outweigh human 
causes. Paleoclimatologists tell us that atmospheric CO2 
levels were five times higher during the Jurassic Period, and global 
temperatures were 13 degrees higher during the Pleistocene-Eocene 
Thermal Maximum. That is long before humans or SUVs.
  In 2016, President Obama came to Yosemite Valley to warn that the 
last of Yosemite's surrounding glaciers would soon disappear. 
Ironically, if he stood on the same spot 20,000 years earlier, he would 
have been buried under about 2,000 feet of glacial ice.
  The first IPCC report in 1990, sounding the alarm over global 
warming, gives us some practical experience with its climate modeling. 
Actual global temperatures are now well below the lowest of the 
forecasts that the IPCC made 27 years ago. And 20 years before that, 
the scientific consensus warned that pollution was about to trigger 
another Ice Age.
  The fact is the current state of science is a long way from 
understanding the intricate natural forces and interrelationships in 
global climatology, let alone being able to accurately predict 
temperature changes over hundreds of years within fractions of a 
degree. That is perhaps why many prominent and respected climatologists 
continue to challenge and debate the question, despite claims that 97 
percent of the scientists agree and despite calls to silence them as 
heretics.
  As the fable of ``The Emperor's New Clothes'' illustrates, nothing is 
more menacing to a flawed consensus than a single dissenter. Thanks to 
our politically incorrect President, the United States has just stepped 
forward from the crowd and pointed out the obvious.
  The Paris accord points the way to a future of skyrocketing energy 
prices, lower productivity and wages, a massive wealth transfer from 
America to nations like China and India, and a permanently declining 
quality of life for our children.
  Fortunately, President Trump has a different vision, a future in 
which families can enjoy the prosperity that abundant energy provides 
and the quality of life that comes from that prosperity. We can't get 
there from Paris.
  But whichever course we take, one thing is certain, the Earth will 
continue to warm and cool as it has for billions of years.

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