Climate Action Now Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Chairman, I am probably going to be a little different than some of the folks you are going to have come speak from our side. I actually, though, like the goal that we agreed to, or the President agreed to in 2015.

I believe it is an abdication, though, of our responsibility to actually build what the plan is--we will call it the smorgasbord of options out there--because, if you think about it, once again, it is Congress passing the buck saying, well, here's the goal; let someone else take the blows of it.

So if we are going to have an honest conversation, let's say I am a State that uses heating oil. Heating oil is functionally filthy. Okay. Are you willing to encourage that community, that State, to allow more natural gas extraction, more pipelines so we can actually hit the numbers? Or is it easier passing it on to the White House to let them take the slings and arrows of what it takes policy-wise?

If you actually look at the reality, 2015, the year that President Obama agreed to this, that year, every functioning benefit from all of the solar that was adopted in 2015 was removed because of the amount of nuclear that went offline that year. Are we ready here to step up and say, hey, if we want baseload, clean, non-CO, non-greenhouse emitting, we are going to step up and get this nuclear back online, because it is a type--just that 1 year of the number of nuclear facilities that closed equaled every solar panel in the country that was added.

Are we willing to continue to do as we did in Ways and Means last year, moving forward with carbon sequestration tax credits?

Turns out there is some new amazing technology of mining CO2 right out of the air. There is a utility scale, industrial scale facility going up in Canada now that has broken the Holy Grail on the code on how to do it. These are pro-growth policies that we, as this body, should be adopting, not passing it off to the bureaucracy and the administration to make the hard choices.

Understand, we did some math a couple of years ago that, if we would do a pipeline loop in West Texas to capture methane flare-off, capture that gas and make it--utilize it, it had a huge effect in getting us, like right now, that last 13 points of gap that we have to get in the next 7 years.

How many of my brothers and sisters on the other side are ready to stand up and promote more natural gas, more pipelines, more tax credit mechanisms for carbon sequestration? Those are policy decisions. That is our job here in the House.

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