Energy Policy

Floor Speech

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, several years ago when the majority party, the Democratic Party, controlled 60 seats in the Senate and had literally the numbers to do whatever it wanted to do, the majority leader tried to push through a new massive energy tax bill known as cap-and-trade. Not only did it fail to pass, the majority leader never even brought it up for a vote, primarily because members of his own party recognized there would be huge costs associated with this new energy tax, and that the benefits, indeed, on balance did not outweigh the costs or, perhaps most charitably stated, were neutral. There were hardly any real benefits to speak of on the plus side, but there were plenty of negatives, including lost jobs, lost wages, higher utility bills, and a less competitive U.S. economy.

Now the Obama administration, we learn, is in the process of enacting a backdoor energy tax, not through the votes of Members of Congress--the only people who could be held accountable for how we vote--but rather through the regulatory process through the Environmental Protection Agency.

Much like the cap-and-trade bill that collapsed in 2010, the EPA regulation that was announced earlier today would impose major new costs on America's economy while doing virtually nothing to improve the environment. I will explain my reason for saying that in a moment.

I will talk about the economic costs in a second, but first I want to emphasize that over the coming decades America's contribution to the growth of worldwide carbon dioxide emissions will be virtually nonexistent.

Consider these numbers from the Energy Information Agency: Between 2005 and 2012, America's energy-related carbon dioxide emissions actually declined by more than 10 percent. Between 2005 and 2012, our carbon dioxide emissions did not go up but they declined by more than 10 percent. By contrast, over the same period of time China's energy-related carbon dioxide emissions grew by nearly 64 percent.

So ours went down 10 percent and China's went up by 64 percent.

As a result, China is now producing far more carbon dioxide emissions than the United States.

Looking ahead, the Energy Information Agency has projected that developing countries--countries that don't have a developed economy like the United States but do want our standard of living and a better life for their people--will be responsible for 94 percent of the growth in global carbon dioxide emissions between 2010 and 2040, with China alone accounting for 49 percent of that increase. As for the United States, during that same period of time carbon dioxide emissions will barely increase at all.

I mentioned these figures because some of my friends across the aisle have repeatedly declared that President Obama's backdoor energy tax will help us ``fight climate change.'' Given the numbers I just listed, it should be clear to us that any rule such as what the EPA is proposing would do little to affect global emissions unless developing countries such as China and India do exactly the same--assuming that is something we would want to make as a priority, and assuming the benefits outweigh the costs.

The fact is that China has no interest in sacrificing economic growth for speculative long-term climate benefits, nor do India or other developing nations. We have to remember that these countries alone still have hundreds of millions of people living in abject poverty. They want a better and growing economy, so why in the world would they impose these restrictions on themselves? It is not going to happen, and that is what they told us.

In short, President Obama's EPA rule would place America's economy--an economy that shrunk by 1 percent last quarter--at a competitive disadvantage without having any substantial effect on global climate change or on CO

2 emissions overall. In other words, it would be all pain and no gain. As I mentioned, the pain would be very real. It would come in the form of lost jobs due to a slowing economy, lost wages, and higher electricity prices.

In my State, the month of August gets to be pretty hot, and our grid operates at maximum capacity. Due to a variety of EPA regulations, the price of those higher electricity prices is borne by the people who are least able to absorb those costs--particularly people on a fixed income, including the elderly. Also, the job loss would be concentrated on blue-collar workers in the fossil fuel industries--most notably the coal industry. These workers have already been hurt by EPA regulations, but these new proposed regulations would make that pain even worse. The higher electricity costs and higher utility rates would affect all of us, but the heaviest burden would fall on people who are at a low or fixed income; in other words, the people who are least able to pay more for their utility bills.

If a regulation can't pass the basic cost-benefit test, then in my view it has little business being enacted--and it should certainly not be enacted by nameless, faceless bureaucrats who are unaccountable to the American people or for the consequences of what they are passing. That is especially true when our economy is suffering through the weakest economic recovery and the longest period of high unemployment since the Great Depression. Why--if this makes sense at any time--would we want to do it now?

Median household income has also declined by nearly $2,300 since the recession formally ended. We have had a period of anemic economic growth in this country, a high unemployment rate, the slowest economic recovery since the Great Depression, and the highest percentage of people who dropped out of the workforce because they are discouraged about the prospect of finding jobs at any time since Jimmy Carter was President.

In the meantime, if you are buying your health insurance in the ObamaCare exchanges and your health insurance premiums have gone up--we know the cost of fuel and gasoline has gone up, and the cost of food has gone up. The middle class will be disproportionately burdened by this EPA regulation in a way that does not, on net, change the global environment, and would kill jobs and hurt families in return for negligible, or even nonexistent, benefits.

Once again, we see that the President has decided to place ideology--his wish of how the world ought to look--ahead of the numbers. He is famous for saying, let's do the arithmetic.

Let's do the arithmetic. The arithmetic does not make the case that these regulations should be passed; indeed, it defeats the argument that they should.

Sadly, rather than engage in the normal legislative process that would allow my colleague, the Presiding Officer from Maine, who may have a different view from mine, and others to debate and vote on these issues and make policy so we can be held accountable for what we do, the President has decided to skirt the legislative process and instead rely on unaccountable bureaucrats to enact measures that would never pass through Congress. Yet the idea of this President is: I have a phone and a pen, and I can go it alone. He can do it by himself.

Well, he can't. Our Constitution does not allow that. Sooner or later the American people are going to hold folks accountable for enabling this sort of unilateral activity. In my view this is an unforced error that will damage our economy, hurt our workers, and raise the cost of living for middle-class families and those on a fixed income.

I find it astonishing that this misguided regulation is being considered now when our economy is growing so slowly and so many people are out of work or have left the workforce, and the median household income is down, yet costs for health care, food, gasoline, and other commodities are going up.

I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

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