Providing for Congressional Disapproval of a Rule Submitted by the Environmental Protection Agency
Floor Speech
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Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
I have heard my Republican colleagues say over and over again that the President's Clean Power Plan won't have any impact on air quality and that it won't do anything to improve the environment. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The rule that we are discussing in this joint resolution and that the joint resolution would seek to disapprove establishes State-by-State targets for lowering carbon emissions. When it is implemented, the rule will reduce emissions from the power sector by 32 percent over the next 15 years as compared to emissions in 2005.
The final rule has public health and other benefits of up to $54 billion per year by 2030, and this includes thousands of fewer premature deaths from air pollution and tens of thousands of fewer childhood asthma attacks each year--emphasizing again, thousands of fewer premature deaths from air pollution and tens of thousands of fewer childhood asthma attacks each year.
I keep hearing from my GOP colleagues about the costs. What are the costs to society of air pollution and of people suffering from asthma and of premature deaths and of hospitalizations and of all of the costs? None of these things are calculated by the Republicans in their speeches. They just assume that somehow none of this matters.
Some of my Democratic colleagues have said over and over again that this is sort of a wasted debate because we know that the President has said he is going to veto the bill and that there wouldn't be enough votes in the House or in the Senate to overcome the President's veto.
The theme that you are getting from the Republicans is somehow a clean environment and a good economy don't go together. In fact, the opposite is true.
The fact of the matter is that, ever since the Clean Air Act was implemented years ago, we have seen reductions in air pollution. We have seen people's lives saved. We have seen fewer people suffer from asthma attacks and the other consequences of pollution. At the same time, the economy has improved.
In the Statement of Administration Policy, in which the President says that he will veto this resolution, he specifically says that, since it was enacted in 1970 and amended in 1977 and 1990, each time with strong bipartisan support, the Clean Air Act has improved the Nation's air quality and has protected public health.
Over that same period of time, the economy has tripled in size while emissions of key pollutants have decreased by more than 70 percent. Forty-five years of clean air regulation have shown that a strong economy and strong environmental and public health protections go hand in hand.
I just keep hearing these negative comments from the other side of the aisle. The fact of the matter is, when you reduce air pollution, you eliminate the consequences of people having bad health, of dying, of getting sick.
At the same time, the economy has improved because we have come up with alternatives to the awful pollution that has resulted which this Clean Power Plan is designed to thwart.
Again, I keep hearing my colleagues saying all of these things, but the fact of the matter is you can have clean air, you can have a good environment, and you can have a good economy and grow jobs. That is exactly what this rule that the President has put forward is designed to achieve.
I reserve the balance of my time.
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Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
Again, I listened to the previous speaker. House Republicans keep telling us that greenhouse gas emissions are falling in the United States. The previous speaker suggested that the United States doesn't need to do much more about climate change. That couldn't be more wrong.
U.S. greenhouse gas emissions did fall in 2008 and 2009 during the economic recession. Since that time, our overall emissions have grown. Cumulatively, U.S. emissions grew, not fell, in 2012 and 2013, the two most recent years for which data is available.
What matters really is whether U.S. emissions are on track to decline in the future by the amount needed to prevent dangerous climate change. Scientists say we need to reduce carbon pollution by 80 percent by 2050 to avoid catastrophic climate change. The EPA already predicts that, without any new policies to control carbon pollution, policies like the Clean Power Plan, the U.S. will only see a 2 percent drop in CO2 emissions by 2040 compared to 2005 levels.
So this data highlights the importance of the Clean Power Plan and the Obama administration's overall push to cut greenhouse gas emissions. To suggest the United States doesn't need to do any more, that is just not the case. We need to do a lot more, and that is what the Clean Power Plan is designed to do.
I reserve the balance of my time.
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Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
In closing, I just want to comment on two issues that keep coming up on the Republican side. One is this notion, which I think the GOP Whip SCALISE talked about, of the President's war on coal. Nothing could be further from the truth.
I agree that the transition away from coal is contributing to job losses in the coal industry, but setting aside these rules will not alter this trend. There are too many other changes occurring in the power sector that are impacting these workers.
Technologies--including distributed generation, smart grid, energy storage, energy efficiency, microgrids, and combined heat and power systems--are maturing and being incorporated at a faster pace. In some areas, they call into question the old grid model that was dominated by large, centralized generation.
Concern for these displaced energy workers should be motivating us to do something to help these people and their communities to transition to other good-paying jobs in new industries. Setting aside this rule is not going to replace the job security that they had in the past.
Instead of wasting time trying to hold back progress and ignore climate change, we should be working together to address this challenge. This rule moves us forward, and it represents our Nation's commitment to addressing a serious global problem that we helped to create.
I constantly hear this about job losses. The fact is that job losses are occurring regardless of anything that the Clean Power Plan would do. Instead of saying job losses, the Republicans should be thinking about ways of trying to help these workers.
The other thing I would mention is I kept hearing from the other side this whole notion that electricity rates, prices, and bills are going to go up.
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Mr. PALLONE. I would like to just read some sections from the letter. The letter is from Public Citizen and a number of other consumers groups.
They say in the letter that ``the Clean Power Plan will benefit consumers. Climate change poses a severe threat to American consumers and in particular to vulnerable populations ..... The Clean Power Plan should lower consumer electricity bills. The Clean Power Plan is likely to lower consumer costs, not raise them, because it will spur improvements in energy efficiency. Although electricity prices may rise modestly under the Plan, consumers will use less electricity. This should result in lower bills overall. The EPA projects that the rule will lower consumer bills by 7.0 to 7.7 percent by 2030. A Public Citizen analysis of the proposed rule found that the EPA's projection of bill reductions was conservative because it overestimated the cost of efficiency programs and underestimated how much progress the states can make on efficiency. These points remain valid with respect to the final rule, for which the EPA's analysis is similar. Consumers costs are likely to decline by more than the agency projects.''
Again, we keep hearing from the other side of the aisle, oh, electricity bills are going to go up. They are not. They are going to go down. We keep hearing we are going to lose jobs. Well, a lot of those jobs are going to be lost anyway because of the change in the types of generation of electricity. We should be thinking of ways to try to deal with that rather than saying that somehow we are going to stop it, because we are not going to be able to.
I also want to say that I heard the national security argument. We had, in the Energy and Commerce Committee, a minority hearing a couple of months ago at Annapolis. One of the reasons we went there is we know that our military is seriously concerned about the impacts of climate change and sea level rise. When we were there, the superintendent of the Naval Academy was talking about hundreds of millions of dollars that were being spent just at Annapolis to deal with sea level rise at the academy and went on to talk about the impact of climate change on naval operations and so many other things.
Again, I don't want to emphasize the impact on our national security, but it is there. To suggest that somehow there is no impact is simply not true. Climate change is very much in the minds of the admirals and the generals at the Pentagon. They are very worried about the impact and what it is going to mean in terms of our national security and what we have to do to address those concerns over the next few years.
The main thing I wanted to stress, Mr. Speaker, if I could, is that this rule that the Republicans are trying to get rid of provides States with a lot of flexibility to find the best path forward to meet their emission reduction goals. In fact, many States are already implementing policies that are consistent with these regulations.
The fact of the matter is that the EPA spent several years talking to States, talking to stakeholders, and talking to consumers. They have not put together some kind of straightjacket here that says that the States have to implement these reductions in carbon emissions in a certain way. They are giving States a tremendous amount of flexibility. They had a lot of public hearings. They had millions of people who commented on the rule.
Somehow, when you listen to my colleagues here today, they suggest that this rule came out of nowhere without considering all of the economic impacts, without considering the costs. None of that is true. In fact, there were a lot of discussions about the costs and about the economic impact.
The bottom line is that there is every reason to believe that this rule will improve the public health, will improve the lives of Americans in terms of the negative impact that air pollution has on their health, and, in the long run, will improve the economy and lower costs for the consumer.
I yield back the balance of my time.
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