Executive Calendar

Floor Speech

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Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, I rise to voice my opposition to the nomination of Andrew Wheeler to be Deputy Administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency.

The Senators standing up this afternoon to fight this nomination are not just opposing Mr. Wheeler. We are trying to shine a light on the fact that this administration has one of the worst environmental records in history. And you don't have to take my word for it because this unprecedented assault on our Nation's bedrock environmental laws has drawn strong criticism from former Democrat and Republican Environmental Protection Agency Administrators.

The American public overwhelmingly supports the laws and regulations that protect our air and water. And my constituents don't buy the false trade-off between protecting the environment and jobs. To them they come hand in hand. The facts on the ground have proven that these are red herring arguments.

There are so many examples of how this administration's disdain for science has led them to try to undo decades of progress on the environment. I want to focus on three issues that are particularly damaging and serve as an indication of why Mr. Wheeler's nomination and record are so troubling.

First is the example of Mr. Wheeler lobbying on behalf of fossil fuel interests. My concern is that Mr. Wheeler would have a prominent role in reviewing the air pollution rules that govern coal plants, rules that he got paid millions of dollars to help attack.

A number of press reports have exposed how one of Mr. Wheeler's biggest lobbying clients, Murray Energy, was a driving force behind Secretary Perry's ill-considered resilience proposal. That proposal ignored the Energy Department's own staff report and was an attempt to try to say that coal was the only reliable source of energy for the electricity grid, which would have forced citizens to pay more on their utility bills. They said that is a wrong conclusion. And it was a transparent attempt to try to prop up one of the administration's favorite energy sources, which really would have made everything more expensive for consumers and certainly would have changed the focus of what we need to do to decarbonize our energy system.

But the biggest problem here was how the proposal would have hit consumers, as I said, with billions of dollars in added costs. Bailing out old coal plants wasn't just bad policy; it was a breathtaking raid on consumer pocketbooks. The regional grid manager found that the Secretary's proposal would nearly double the cost of wholesale energy in the Nation's largest electricity market.

Fortunately, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission unanimously rejected this proposal. But if Mr. Wheeler comes to EPA as the No. 2, what other misguided proposals like this are they going to propose or try to fight, even though the science within the own agencies says they are wrongheaded? How much time will we have to waste exposing these bad ideas? We should instead be making investments in policy and infrastructure that will help us be more competitive in the future.

I am also troubled by the administration's backward view on how the United States can achieve so-called energy dominance by focusing more on coal. In my assessment, the days of this strategy are numbered.

Selling away our cheap natural gas to foreign buyers. Or eking a little more life out of our grandfathered coal plants. Or drilling, as the administration has proposed, in every part of the United States and off our shores, is not the way to be competitive for the future. I am concerned that Mr. Wheeler holds and will support these backward views.

When he was criticizing the Paris Climate Agreement, he called it a ``sweetheart deal'' for China because it gave them a manufacturing edge, but he really got it backwards.

That is because China itself has been investing in renewable energy. By 2040, it will have invested over $6 trillion in clean energy technologies, according to the International Energy Agency. China also adopted a 5-year solar energy plan calling for 105 gigawatts of solar capacity by 2020. They have proposed an aggressive stance moving forward, and I want to make sure that U.S. companies who have great technology get a fair crack at making investments there and particularly in the area of energy efficiency, which is already accounting for about a $2.2 trillion investment in 2016.

So we know that we can move forward on a cleaner energy economy, and we want to know that we have the leadership that are going to support this critical transition. I am perhaps most troubled that, during his confirmation hearing, Mr. Wheeler refused to acknowledge the indisputable reality that humans are the cause of dangerous accumulation of greenhouse gases.

The fact that greenhouse gases are going to warm our planet and cause acidity in our oceans is something my State knows well.

In Washington, climate change has serious consequences for human health and our economy. Climate change has resulted in extreme weather patterns, putting lives and property in danger. It has impacted water quality, and it has caused other impacts to our salmon and shellfish industries, big parts of our seafood economy. Climate change has created drought conditions, has jeopardized our farm economy, and it is even changing the chemistry of Puget Sound.

Mr. President, responding to climate change is more than just an environmental issue. It is an economic imperative.

Senator Collins and I requested from the Government Accountability Office an analysis about the full costs of climate change.

That is because, after seeing how it impacted us with fires, how it impacted our shellfish industry, how it impacted so much of our coastline, we wanted to know how much climate is costing taxpayers. Well, the GAO report said it will cost taxpayers more than $1 trillion in the next 10 to 15 years.

So I know that Mr. Wheeler thinks this may not be part of his day job, but rolling back strong environmental laws that help us move forward will put us further and further behind and cost us billions of dollars more than we need to be paying.

We need to uphold these critical environmental standards and laws that protect our clean air and clean water so that we can make progress, so that we can diversify our economy, and so that we can make the right investments.

I believe Mr. Wheeler is the wrong choice for this position. I think he is the wrong person to help us meet those standards.

We need a Deputy Administrator who isn't there trying to just jam coal down the throats of American consumers and businesses, but rather advocating for the next generation of Americans, who will need to be able to compete and compete in a cost-effective way.

I urge my colleagues to join me in voting no on Andrew Wheeler to be the Deputy Administrator at EPA.

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