American Energy and Conservation Act of 2016

Floor Speech

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Mr. MARKEY. Mr. President, we are going to vote on a very important piece of legislation later on this afternoon. This is a bill that is going to move revenues from 46 States to 4 States. This is no small thing. Let me just tell you a little bit about what this bill will do.

The revenue generated from oil and gas drilling on Federal lands offshore is one of the largest nontax revenue streams for the Federal Government. These oil and gas resources on public lands offshore belong to all of the American people. They are public resources that belong as much to someone living in Massachusetts, Kansas, or California as they do to someone in Louisiana or in Texas. These are resources that should help every American, not just a select few.

The revenue generated from these public resources goes to the Federal Treasury to help pay for Medicare, Medicaid, education, our Defense Department. It helps to pay for everything, including reducing our Federal deficit. However, in 2006, the four Gulf States--Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas--succeeded in passing a law that is going to direct an ever-increasing share of these offshore drilling revenues away from the Federal Treasury to just those four States. By redirecting this revenue, that 2006 law is going to take money that should benefit taxpayers in all 50 States and send it instead to just 4 States.

How much money are we talking about? In that 2006 law, over the next 60 years, it is projected to send $190 billion away from the Treasury, away from the 46 other States, other than the 4 that are Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. That is the problem. Those are the numbers from the Department of the Interior--$190 billion. Now the Gulf States are coming back for more. The legislation we will vote on today would divert an additional $5.4 billion over the next 40 years away from 46 States and to the 4 Gulf States. That is on top of the $190 billion, which they are already going to get.

If you come from one of these four States, you should absolutely vote for this bill today. You should put out a press release today touting your support for this legislation. If you can pass legislation to take an additional $5 billion directly from the pockets of the taxpayers in the other 46 States and send it to your States, that will be one of your greatest legislative victories of your career.

If you come from the other 46 States, there is no reason in the world that you should support this legislation to take even more money from your taxpayers and send it to Louisiana, Texas, Alabama, and Mississippi. That is all we are talking about--a massive wealth transfer from 46 States to those 4 States.

At a time when my friends on the other side of the aisle are saying we need to cut spending to crucial programs that help our seniors, help low-income Americans, and help students, we simply can't afford to divert $190 billion away from our national priorities and to the Gulf States. We certainly can't afford to divert $5 billion more as the legislation before us today would do.

The proponents of this legislation argue this revenue is needed to pay for past and future infrastructure demands and to ensure the resiliency of natural resources. The Gulf States have already been getting revenue from offshore drilling in waters near their States for decades, and now most of the fines--$20 billion from the BP oilspill-- are, rightly, going to the Gulf States that were affected by this catastrophe.

We should fund coastal restoration and climate resiliency as a big issue for all States, but this legislation is not about our eroding beaches and wetlands; it is about eroding our ability to pay for our national priorities.

This legislation would go even further by trying to bribe other cash- strapped States into allowing expanded drilling off the east coast and in other areas offshore. We haven't passed a single law to improve the safety of offshore drilling following the BP oilspill, but this legislation would try to incentivize new areas to drill in and to risk ultimately a spill off one of those States' coasts.

Fishing off the east coast produces roughly $1.75 billion in direct value for our States and more than $4 billion in total economic activity each year. Tourism on the east coast generates hundreds of billions of dollars in additional economic activity and supports an estimated 800,000. That is what we would be putting at risk on the east coast, as this bill would do. As we learned from the BP oilspill, offshore spills don't respect State boundaries. We would have no protections whatsoever.

Opiod Crisis

Mr. President, I would like to take the remainder of my time and talk about what I believe is the most important task facing this Congress in the lameduck session--providing funding to combat the opioid crisis that has spread all across our country.

Last year, Senator McConnell of Kentucky and I called on the Surgeon

General of the United States to issue a Surgeon General's report and a call to action on prescription opioid and heroin abuse. We both believed the Federal Government needed to document and outline a national effort to address this opioid crisis.

Today, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy released a new report, ``Facing Addiction in America,'' and I thank him and his staff for their efforts. This report should serve as a call to all Americans to change the way we address substance misuse and substance use disorders in America.

As a nation, we must approach and treat addiction like the disease it is. The physical toll addiction takes on Americans makes this a health imperative. The costs of addiction to society make this an economic imperative, and the human duty to provide care and hope for those suffering from addiction makes this a moral imperative punctuation. In order to get help for all of the families who are suffering from opioid addiction, the Federal Government needs to invest in funding treatment and recovery programs now. So far, I am sad to report that Congress has failed in this task.

When I am home in Massachusetts, I hear enormous frustration from people who don't feel adequate resources are being brought to bear on this epidemic of prescription drug, heroin, and fentanyl addiction.
Countless individuals and families suffering with addiction cannot find a bed for detox. Then, when they are at their most vulnerable, they cannot find a place, a provider, or a behavioral support team for long- term treatment and recovery.

To our everlasting credit, this past May, my colleague Senator Jeanne Shaheen introduced legislation to infuse a one-time payment of $600 million in emergency funding to combat this crisis. We were denied.

Then, again in July, I and others argued on the Senate floor for the need to invest $1.1 billion into opioid treatment and recovery programs over 2 years. Again, we were denied. We passed the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, or CARA, but a vision without funding is just a hallucination. We will not save lives and stop this scourge of addiction with just words and promises.

I stand here again today to call on my colleagues and both parties to come together and pass legislation that includes immediate, massive funding to combat this ever-worsening opioid crisis. Nearly 30,000 people in the United States died from an opioid overdose in 2014. Over the last few years Massachusetts, which is mirrored in numbers across the rest of the country, has seen a dramatic increase in the number of deaths related to opioids.

In 2014, 1,400 people were estimated to have died in the State of Massachusetts from an opioid addiction.

Last year the number went up to 1,700 people who were estimated to have died from an opioid addiction.

In 2016, it is estimated that that number is going to go up to 2,000 people who will die this year from opioid overdoses, heroin, fentanyl, carfentanil. Here is the interesting number. Just from last year to this year, the number of deaths that are estimated to be related to fentanyl has risen to 1,500. Out of those 2,000 people, it is estimated that 1,500 people in Massachusetts alone will die from opioid overdoses. That is a dramatic rise to 75 percent of all opioid deaths in our State in 1 year. That is up from 57 percent of the deaths last year that would be related to fentanyl in the blood system of those who had toxicology exams after they died from an opioid overdose.

Let's take those numbers and project them. If 2,000 people die in Massachusetts this year--and Massachusetts is 2 percent of the population of the United States of America--and all you did was multiply that number by 50 to get the entire country, that would mean that 100,000 people will die this year from an opioid overdose in America--100,000.

This problem is not as huge in the rest of the country as it is in Massachusetts and several other States, but we are a preview of coming attractions. We have to make sure we put in place the programs that are going to help these families deal with this issue.

Let's put that number in context for the entire country. We have 41,000 women who die each year from breast cancer. If we don't stop this, we are on pace to having as many as 100,000 people die from opioid overdoses every single year, which is the same as having two Vietnam wars worth of people dying in our country every single year. We need to declare war on this epidemic. We need to put the treatment and prevention programs in place. Thus far we have not provided the resources to the States, cities, towns, families, and community health care centers to be able to deal with this issue.

Right now in America there are more than 2.5 million people who are dependent upon opioids, but only a very small percentage of them will get the treatment they need and deserve. Our country should be providing for those families.

I believe history is going to judge this Congress on the question of how well we responded to this epidemic, on whether or not we heard the cries of these families across the country to provide them with the treatment they need. This is an epidemic that began because the pharmaceutical industry sold a bill of goods to the Food and Drug Administration and the American people that these prescription drugs were not, in fact, addictive.

Physicians across our country turned a blind eye, and, in fact, rejected mandatory training so they could correctly prescribe opioids.

Now it is 20 years later, and this prescription drug epidemic that morphed into a heroin epidemic has now morphed into a fentanyl epidemic, and fentanyl is infinitely more dangerous than heroin and prescription drugs.

We have a moral responsibility here on the floor to provide massive new funding in any legislation we pass over the next 3 weeks that leaves this Chamber. We cannot, on a bipartisan basis, ignore the magnitude of this challenge. Otherwise, we are going to come back here next year and the year after and the year after, and we are ultimately going to see millions of people die from this epidemic, and history will wonder why we did not do enough to deal with it. It is the job of this Congress to begin to provide the massive funding that the States, cities, towns, and families need to deal with this issue.

I thank the Presiding Officer for my time on the floor, and I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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