Providing for Congressional Disapproval of A Rule Submitted by the Environmental Protection Agency

Floor Speech

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Mr. RATCLIFFE. I thank the gentleman from Kentucky for his leadership on this important issue.

Mr. Speaker, every day Washington hits the American people with more regulations that hurt families, but very few will hurt these families more than President Obama's so-called Clean Power Plan because, according to the U.S. Energy Information Agency, the average electricity cost for a Texas household each year is $1,800, which is already 26 percent higher than the national average. To put this in perspective, almost half of all Texans spend more than 15 percent of their annual household budget on energy costs alone.

To stand up for middle-income families, we have an obligation to fight for policies that will keep energy costs down. Unfortunately, the administration's new regulations do exactly the opposite, which is why I introduced resolutions to combat these regulations immediately after they were announced and garnered the support of cosponsors from 15 different States. Americans across every corner of this country are impacted by this administration's overregulatory zeal, and we have got to do everything we can to stop it.

The facts are clear. These regulations will shut down vital power plants across the country, costing thousands of hardworking Americans their jobs, and in the process driving up electricity costs for every American. To that point, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas anticipates that these regulations will increase retail power prices in Texas by up to 16 percent; and when family budgets are already stretched so thin, they simply can't afford this increase. In developing these regulations, the Obama administration once again has ignored everyday Americans and instead doubled down on its extreme ideological agenda.

Making matters worse, the EPA itself admits that these regulations come at a cost of anywhere between $5.1 billion and $8.4 billion in year 2030 alone.

What are the benefits of these regulations, you may ask? In exchange for crushing American families, losing American jobs at a cost of billions and billions of dollars, what profound effect will these regulations have on our environment?

Well, the scientific experts estimate that these regulations would only reduce the global temperature by one one-hundredth of a degree Fahrenheit and reduce sea levels by a mere two-tenths of 1 millimeter. Mr. Speaker, we simply can't let the Obama administration force Americans to sacrifice so much when even the most optimistic of calculations predict that the return would be negligible at best.

I urge my colleagues to support both pieces of legislation which are so critical to stopping these regulations dead in their tracks.

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