Big Government
Floor Speech
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Mr. TUBERVILLE. Mr. President, last week, I spent time on the floor urging my colleagues to prioritize freedom in the 118th Congress. By learning from the mistakes of overregulation in the past, we can focus on creating a brighter future and a more prosperous future for all Americans.
We should be doing everything we can to fix the problems created by the government and get Americans back on their feet by unleashing our economic potential and opening doors of opportunity. Unfortunately, too many here in Washington are still focused on growing the size of government and adding regulations they say will save the environment. However, very rarely does making the government larger benefit the American taxpayers and the American citizens of this country.
For decades, fans of Big Government have used climate change warnings to grow their power--for decades, for as long as I can remember. They have claimed we are near the edge of a climate cliff--a prediction they know is impossible to prove and has never come true. Of course, they claim the only solution to this cooked-up crisis is for you, the American taxpayer, to sacrifice even more of your freedoms to tackle this so-called climate dilemma. This sacrifice won't come from the elites, who flew their private jets to Switzerland just a few weeks ago--the ones who are crowing about this. They flew, just a couple of weeks ago, to lecture, while they were there, the working families of this country. No. These sacrifices are expected to be made by average, hard-working American taxpayers. That is what they want.
They want you to give up your affordable gas for imported fuel that is triple the cost. They want you to give up your ground beef for overpriced and underwhelming meat substitutes. They want you to give up affordable, abundant clean energy we could produce right here in America for the enormous cost of green energy policies. They even want you to be banned from cooking on gas stoves because how you cook in your own kitchen is now the government's business. They want our farmers to cut back and worry about emissions while they are focused on feeding the country and the rest of the world, which is a huge priority. Most importantly, they expect you, the American taxpayer, to foot the bill for their radical climate agenda--obviously.
Well, I think I speak for most Americans when I say: No way. We should say ``no way'' to overpriced electric cars that are made with cobalt, processed and sold by China, and plugged into a charger that is powered by fossil fuels anyway. How do we come up with electricity? By fossil fuels.
We should say ``no'' to fake meats--products that taste as bad as their price and that will eventually kill our livestock producers' way of life. What are we trying to do--put our farmers out of business? Exactly. That is what the climate agenda is about, even though, as we all know, our food security is national security, and we should be promoting domestic food production by protecting our Nation's farmers in every possible way we can--in every way.
We should say ``no'' to unreliable energy sources and the skyrocketing utility bills we are seeing today because America cannot operate and achieve economic success without fossil fuels. It is impossible. I don't know what we are trying to prove. We will come back, but, hopefully, it is not at the sacrifice of the American taxpayers.
We should say ``no'' to trillions and trillions of taxpayer dollars spent on an agenda that is based only on the rantings of failed candidates like Al Gore and John Kerry, global elites at a ski resort, and a European teenager who needs to go back to school and learn to read and write and learn math and stay out of politics at her age. That agenda is based solely on fearmongering and unproven theories-- unproven--but that is how the left likes it. That is how they use fear--to push policy. Their agenda ignores reliable clean energy sources, like nuclear and natural gas that should be viable, but that does not fit their narrative. That is the reason they don't talk about it.
They know nuclear energy--nuclear energy--is the answer, but the climate change group who continues to bark about this, they don't want answers. They don't want to talk about nuclear because the problem itself is too valuable for their pocketbooks and politicians' ambitions. Instead, their narrative has created a growing--growing-- group of Americans and people around the world who now genuinely believe they should live in fear every day. We are teaching it in our schools, we are teaching it in clubs, and it is wrong. These are the folks who throw soup at famous paintings while gluing themselves to the wall and shut down city streets and major highways, calling themselves climate activists.
For standing here on the Senate floor calling this out, some may call me a climate change denier, so I want to be clear. As a conservative, I believe in protecting our environment, conserving our natural resources, and doing what we can to make sure Americans live in a clean, safe environment, in clean communities that will last for generations to come. But I do not believe that we need to give up our livelihoods, our way of life, our access to affordable food and energy because of false claims that we are just a few years away from extinction. These claims are simply not true, and repeating them is dangerous. Instead, I believe we should be investing--investing heavily--in American energy production because we already produce some of the cleanest energy on the face of the Earth.
Giving up our cars, our farms, and our affordable gas prices will do nothing--will do nothing--to stop the changing climate. It has done it for millions of years, and nothing we can do is going to stop that. In fact, in recent years, the United States has only been responsible for about 11 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions--11 percent. In comparison, China, a country with zero plans to cut back, is responsible for 27 percent of global emissions. China's total emissions of greenhouse gases in 2019 were more than our country and every developed country in the world combined.
Our adversaries, like the Chinese, have no plans--they have no plans--to cut back their usage because their economies are growing thanks to affordable energy. In 2020 alone, China invested almost $475 million in coal projects. That was in addition to the 1,100 coal powerplants they already have in use--almost four times the number we have in the United States. Guess what. They are building 350 as we speak. They are not slowing down. Their emissions level will continue to increase rapidly.
Meanwhile, our country's emissions have fallen by about 17 percent since 2005, thanks--now, think about this--thanks in part to our turn to abundant, cleaner sources, such as natural gas, of which we have a 200-year supply already under the ground in this country as we speak. We couldn't use it in 200 years. But we refuse to dig for it, and we refuse to use it.
Not only can we produce the world's cleanest natural gas, we also have the ability to produce the cleanest nuclear power in all of the world--the cleanest. We have refused to use it. We want to import the dirtiest oil, refine it here in our country, and pollute our country because we are too stubborn to use our own.
That will eventually change. It always goes back around. We will use our energy and in just a short period of time. But the climate extremists running the current administration's energy policies would rather beg foreign countries and make deals with dictators whose countries produce all that dirtier oil. It makes no sense.
Blaming the United States for a global problem we didn't create is unfair to whom? The American taxpayers.
Importantly, the energy that we can and should produce at home is terrible for our own economy--that is what they are saying. It makes no sense.
We have to be able to do two things at once: Help our economy thrive and promote innovation that leads to cleaner energy production. We can do two things at one time, but a cult-like obsession with climate alarmism is making us weaker and poorer in the name of a problem created by politicians.
I am calling for commonsense solutions. Let American companies produce more energy. Recognize the benefits of clean energy, like natural gas and nuclear--that is the answer. Stop scaring people into depression by warning of the great climate extinction. Fear is a terrible thing to use. It is not true.
We should focus on solutions that will actually help our people. Last year, I introduced the Restoring American Energy Independence Act. This bill would have reversed President Biden's shutdown of American energy and returned American energy to full production. Of course, it went nowhere with a Democrat-controlled Senate. It didn't get to first base. I hope to see this legislation and other sensible energy solutions put forth in this Congress.
Sooner or later, we are going to use common sense, we are going to start looking after our country and the American taxpayer, and we are going to get off this high horse of thinking we have all the answers, when we do have them here, and it is our American energy.
I hope to see this legislation and other sensible energy legislation and solutions put forth in this Congress. We have to do something. We can't keep punishing the American citizen and the American taxpayer, because if we keep our energy policies woke, we are going to go broke. This country is going to go flat broke. We are going to lose our farmers, we are going to lose small businesses, our prices are going to continue to rise, and it seems like nobody cares.
We better start taking care of the American people. If we unleash domestic production, we can produce clean energy, we can make it more affordable, and we can make life a lot simpler and better for the American people and also our allies. Let's wake up and smell the roses.
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