February 14, 2019 - Issue: Vol. 165, No. 29 — Daily Edition116th Congress (2019 - 2020) - 1st Session
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CLIMATE CHANGE WAITS FOR NO ONE; Congressional Record Vol. 165, No. 29
(House of Representatives - February 14, 2019)
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[Pages H1999-H2000] From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov] CLIMATE CHANGE WAITS FOR NO ONE The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Casten) for 5 minutes. Mr. CASTEN of Illinois. Mr. Speaker, the very survival of humankind is in peril, and there is no greater threat to our continued existence than climate change. From the inaction of this administration, you would never guess the seriousness of the risk confronting us. For the sake of our very survival, I urge my colleagues to put aside their concerns about how our party leaders or how our base will judge us. All that truly matters is how our grandchildren will judge us. There are those who claim they don't believe in climate change. Those doubters deserve no more of our time or attention than those who don't believe in gravity. Science doesn't care. There are those who claim we can't make progress until we have a new occupant of the White House and a Democratic majority in the Senate. To those I say, We have no time to wait. Two years of inaction is 2 years we can never get back. We in this body need to begin tackling climate change now, and we need to start by talking about it differently, not as an unproven scientific theory, not as a political inconvenience and not as a job killer. It is an economic opportunity. Action on climate change can be the path to making the U.S. more globally competitive. I don't speak on this floor today as a theorist. From 2000 to 2016, I built multiple companies with missions to profitably reduce greenhouse gas emissions. My colleagues and I made U.S. manufacturers more competitive by reducing their energy expenses. We built more than 80 projects and $300 million of capital investment, and I can now say three things with certainty: One, there are no thermodynamic barriers to drastically lowering CO2 emissions; and two, there are no economic barriers to businesses pursuing profits. That leads me to three, that there are a lot of legal barriers to profitably reducing greenhouse gas emissions. This gives us an opportunity, because while we can't change the laws of thermodynamics, and we can't change the laws of economics, we can change the laws of the United States. We don't need to reinvent the wheel. Switzerland, Germany, and Denmark all use half as much energy as we do per dollar of GDP. Those countries have the same access to talent, the same access to capital and technology as we do, but they use half as much energy. If all we did was copy them, we could cut CO2 emissions by 50 percent. I think we could do better. Consider this: in 2007, over a decade ago, Congress tried and failed to pass the Lieberman-Warner climate bill which was seen by some as being too ambitious because it sought to cut U.S. electric sector emissions by 17 percent. It didn't pass, and there was a powerful Senator who said at the time that the bill would drastically increase energy costs and cost millions of American jobs, all for no environmental gain. As Warner Wolf says, ``Let's go to the videotape.'' CO2 emissions since then in the electric sector are down by nearly 25 percent per megawatt hour and real power prices are down by 4 percent over the last decade. Just imagine what we could have done if we tried. So why did emissions fall? Because of economics. We have gradually been building more efficient, cleaner, and cheaper power plants, and once those plants are built, they always run more than the older, less efficient plants, because here is the little secret: businesses like to make money, and you make more money if you spend less on fuel. Mr. Speaker, if my colleagues take nothing else away from this speech, I hope they will understand that point. Everything we do to make our economy less dependent on expensive fossil fuel lowers CO2 emissions and makes our businesses more profitable. That protects American jobs and makes our citizens wealthier. So let me take this opportunity to speak to those who don't believe the science and to those who believe the science but think a warmer world is a good thing: Keep your beliefs. Hold on to them. All I am asking is that you be greedy. Greedy for America, as our President has boasted. Because if you are greedy, you will work with me to see CO2 reduction as an opportunity for cost reduction and profit maximization. I mentioned at the start of my remarks that the primary barrier to meaningful CO2 reductions are U.S. laws. That is not to say that those laws have been written with bad intent. To the contrary, many of those well-intentioned laws have had unintentional, negative consequences. Well-intentioned aspects of our Tax Code often cause capital to flow to the least economic technologies. Well-intentioned portions of the Clean Air Act discourage energy efficiency. Well- intentioned social policies obscure the true cost of fossil fuels, distorting capital markets away from cheaper alternatives. But that is great news because we can fix all of those things. So let's make U.S. manufacturers more competitive. Let's help them cut energy [[Page H2000]] costs. Let's protect U.S. jobs. Let's make our energy system more resilient. And let's lower CO2 emissions. I think that is pretty bipartisan. And as I go to work on the Select Committee on Climate Crisis, I will be working toward writing and introducing legislation, and I look forward to hearing all the great ideas from my colleagues in this body. I don't claim to have all the answers, but I know that we do. But for goodness' sake, let's not wait. ____________________
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