Opposing Green New Deal

Floor Speech

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Mr. BABIN. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Arizona for yielding.

I rise today, Mr. Speaker, in strong opposition to H. Res. 109, the Green New Deal. This resolution is nothing short of a socialistic takeover of our energy, our transportation, and our agricultural industries that aims to change every single aspect of our lives, including how Americans eat, travel, stay warm, build their homes, and even what jobs we take.

As a fiscal conservative, I believe that the Green New Deal is entirely irresponsible. Recently, our national debt exceeded $22 trillion, and we have no realistic plan for paying that off. The Green New Deal would add trillions more to our debt, while simultaneously destroying the American economy.

It would also transfer tremendous costs onto the taxpayers, a total of $93 trillion over 10 years. For example, every home and every building would need to be retrofitted at the cost of $2.5 trillion over the next decade.

Additionally, the Green New Deal's stated goal is to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions in that same timeframe, which will cost the taxpayer $11 trillion. Our current tax base could not support this catastrophic level of new spending. Therefore, taxes will need to be raised on every single American and business, inflicting massive damage on our economy due to the loss in take-home pay for the average family and resulting in job losses in the private sector.

Proponents of the Green New Deal also want to see all our American power come from wind or solar or batteries. This is completely unsustainable, currently, and will lead to blackouts, a dwindling food supply, and an all-out assault on private property rights.

The Green New Deal also contains no plan on what we will do with all the refuse and the trash that will be resulting from the millions of appliances, batteries, and buildings that need to be replaced or retrofitted.

This proposal, as grand in its scope as it is absent in its specifics, betrays a shocking naivete and a total absence of understanding of basic economic principles or even of our electric grid and infrastructure.

Most importantly, the authors of this proposal fail to appreciate the love of liberty and freedom that the American people share. Americans will never stand for such a radical, socialistic restructuring of our economy, and it must be strongly and emphatically rejected.

Over the last century, we have seen socialist governments around the world make the same empty promises of unlimited peace and prosperity if only their citizens would just relinquish control of their affairs and give up their freedoms and liberty to an overbearing government. The result has inevitably been the same: barren fields, crumbling infrastructure, broken economies, oppressed peoples, and, eventually, fleeing populations, as we have seen firsthand in Venezuela, Cuba, the Soviet Union, and many other failed socialistic states.

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