Executive Session

Floor Speech

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Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, the Senate is going to soon vote on the nomination of Bernard McNamee to be a Commissioner of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

If Mr. McNamee takes a seat on the Commission, it will mean that Christmas is coming early for the executive who wants big, dirty energy bailouts.

Mr. McNamee has had for some time a plan to bail out some of the oldest, dirtiest plants in America, and he wants typical Americans to pay for it with higher utility rates. That is right--a bailout for some of the dirtiest, oldest facilities--and a pretty small number of them at that--and then a big spike in rates for working families and seniors across the country. We shouldn't sugarcoat the McNamee plan. It is a rip-off, plain and simple.

All of this doesn't come out of thin air. Mr. McNamee, in fact, was directly responsible for this miserable proposal while he was at the Trump Energy Department. The plan was to interfere with utility companies' private business decisions, to force them to actually prevent utility companies from shutting down those dirty, old powerplants--some of them coal plants--even when the utilities wanted to move to cleaner, newer plants. So much for the free market. The utilities actually wanted to move to cleaner plants. Yet this would have prevented them from shutting down dirty, outdated plants to go to the more efficient, newer ones. So much for the free market. So much for protecting consumers.

This proposal was so flawed that every member of the Commission joined in a vote to reject it. Let me repeat that. Every member of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission that Mr. McNamee is so eager to join voted against his plan to stick it to all the consumers with a rate spike.

For a period, I chaired the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and we always saw that, traditionally, if a flawed proposal gets met with enormous rejection, the typical person in a rational way says: Hey, we had better get back to the drawing board and take a different tack. That is not so with the Trump administration.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission wouldn't green-light Mr. McNamee's rate-hiking plan to prop up the executives at these dirty facilities. So the President wants to put Mr. McNamee on the inside and give him a seat on the FERC. I have to say that I haven't seen anything like this sort of deliberate effort to hijack sound market-oriented principles that would naturally take you to cleaner power rather than to dirty old coal facilities. But what we have here is, in effect, an individual who has shown a track record of wanting to do the bidding of special interests.

FERC is supposed to be an independent, apolitical energy regulator.

As I said during the committee's hearing on this nomination, this is not a question of the fox guarding the henhouse. This is a question of putting the fox inside the henhouse. That is what this will do if the Senate makes a flawed judgment to approve this nomination. Several of us at the Energy Committee hearing--myself and other colleagues--asked Mr. McNamee if he would recuse himself from matters that he worked on that relate to this flawed bailout for dirty, outdated plants. He refused to commit to that.

Since the hearing, new evidence of his energy policy biases has come to light in the form of video footage where he candidly expresses that he is just plain, old biased against renewable power. The video reveals Mr. McNamee speaking frankly about his skepticism of wind and solar power. He basically says: You shouldn't regulate carbon dioxide as a real pollutant. His comments, joined with his recent actions, which I have described as the ``Trump Energy Department,'' make it clear to me that he is not going to bring the judicious, objective approach, if he is confirmed as FERC Commissioner, to these critical issues. He certainly is not in this to protect the American consumer, because his policies would pick their pocket with higher rates.

Finally, the nomination comes at a particularly troubling time, just after the scientists for the Federal Government released the ``National Climate Assessment.'' The report warned that without substantial and sustained measures to reduce emissions, climate change and worsening climate change would wreak havoc on our economy. Yet juxtapose or put right next to what the Federal scientists said about climate change worsening and then say: Here is going to be a Trump nominee who, if chosen for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, is going to say: Let's double down on support for the dirty, outdated facilities for generating electricity.

It doesn't sound very viable to me in terms of our economic future. On the entire matter of confronting the imminent threat of climate change, I think we have to recognize that this administration is defying the will of the American people. We are no longer talking about far-off theories.

In Oregon and across the country, we have seen Americans watch fires getting bigger and hotter. They are ripping through populated areas. They are not your grandfather's fires. In our part of the world, we saw a fire leap over the Columbia River. We have seen hurricanes making landfall with Biblical, unprecedented winds. Each year almost sets a new high mark for the hottest year on record.

The policies that this nominee is advancing are misguided. They would accelerate the problems that the scientists for the Federal Government cited last week.

I will close by way of saying that what the scientists said last week is that dealing with cleaner, more efficient energy and promoting it is urgent business right now because there is no time for going backward. What the McNamee nomination is all about, in one concept, is this: It is going backward--backward to bailouts and backward to supporting dirty, outdated plants.

We ought to be going forward.

Mr. President and colleagues, I urge that this nominee be rejected.

I yield back.

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