NATURAL RESOURCES MANAGEMENT ACT--Continued
Floor Speech
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Mr. BARRASSO. Madam President, Republicans have kept our commitment the past 2 years to get Americans back to work. We provided much needed tax relief and regulatory relief for people all across the country. We reined in Washington, we unleashed job creators, and now we are producing more jobs than can be filled. So America is back in business. The economy is booming. Economic growth has accelerated.
In just 2 years, we have created 5 million jobs in this country--3 million jobs since we passed tax relief last year--and 600,000 of these new jobs are in manufacturing. Last month alone, we added a phenomenal 300,000 new jobs.
Here is more welcomed news. Americans are seeing bigger paychecks. Wages are up 3 percent--the highest jump in over a decade. Our unemployment rate is at a 50-year low. Clearly, our country is headed in the right direction. Pro-growth Republican policies have improved Americans' lives.
Democrats, on the other hand, want to take us in the opposite direction. Just last week, Democrats released their Green New Deal. It is a Big Government takeover of the economy, masked as an environmental policy. The proposal isn't green, and it is not new. It is not a green deal. It is a raw deal. If implemented, this plan would put millions of people out of work and it would cost our Nation tens of trillions of dollars.
The plan, to me, is really less about addressing climate change and more about putting government in control of every facet of our lives. Even if it were affordable--and it is not--the proposal is so far outside America's mainstream that it is scary. The proposal reads like an absurd socialist manifesto. They call for a ``national mobilization'' to ``transform every sector of our economy and society'' and to do it by the year 2030. In just 10 years, Washington would create a command-and-control economy to eliminate choice in how we live. Washington would tell us how to travel, what our houses should look like, and what food is on our grocery store shelves.
That is just a starting point. The plan includes a laundry list of government giveaways: guaranteed housing, college, food, healthcare, and a job. Even people who refuse to work, according to the one press, would be guaranteed a paycheck.
In its lunacy, the Green New Deal embodies Democrats' hard-left turn. Under the plan, the Nation's energy system would undergo a Big Government takeover. Through heavy-handed mandates, we would all be forced to meet all our power needs from costly zero-carbon and renewable sources--all of it. The Green New Deal eliminates energy sources that currently provide power to roughly three out of every five homes in America and to businesses as well. It mandates the use of expensive energy sources that realistically can't meet our country's needs.
It would mean the end of the internal combustion engine in cars, in boats, and in planes. The plan would force every driver in America to purchase an electric vehicle or rely on public transportation.
It would also mean the end of both airplanes and ships. American-made goods could no longer be exported around the world. There would be no way to send them. Americans living on islands, from Puerto Rico to Hawaii, would be stranded, and it would put a stop to Americans taking vacations abroad.
An extensive and expensive national high-speed rail system would have to replace air travel. That is what they are calling for--an expensive and extensive national high-speed rail system to replace air travel.
The State of California is currently attempting to build just one of these rail lines at a cost of $89 million for every planned mile of track--so $89 million for every planned mile of track.
So what happened today? What happened just a few hours ago in California? California Governor Gavin Newsom said he is ending the State's effort to build a high-speed rail line between San Francisco and Los Angeles. That is what the Green New Deal says they are going to do. Yet the Governor today says they are going to discontinue the plans.
Newsom said in his state of the State address today that it ``would cost too much and take too long.'' Well, that looks like the entire Democrats' Green New Deal. He says it ``would cost too much and take too long'' to build the line long championed by his predecessor, Jerry Brown. The latest estimates pin the cost at $77 billion and completion in 2033.
That is where we are today.
There is another victim of the Green New Deal. It is ice cream. Livestock would be banned. Say goodbye to dairy, beef, and family farms and ranches. American favorites like cheeseburgers and milkshakes would become a thing of the past. Millions of American workers will lose their jobs. Living this ``green dream'' is actually a nightmare.
Just the energy portion of this plan alone would cost at least $5.7 trillion, and it is feasibly impossible. The government handouts, healthcare, and other giveaways will cost tens of trillions more. This Green Deal will bankrupt the country.
The guaranteed-job program alone would cost an estimated hundreds of billions of dollars each and every year. Taxes will have to go through the roof, as will energy prices. This is just the tip of the iceberg. This green scheme would undermine our entire way of life.
The plan would impose a burdensome mandate on homeowners. Every building nationwide will have to be overhauled--every one. Home heating and electric costs will surge. One estimate said that the average energy bill would rise by as much as $3,800 per year per home.
In reality, the only thing green about the Green New Deal is the cash it will cost American families. This is simply a Washington power play posing as a clean energy plan.
These are some of the same socialist goals we have seen from the far left that they have been pushing for decades. It has failed everywhere it has been tried, from Venezuela to the former Soviet Union. The path to cleaner energy lies in supporting private innovation, not government regulation.
American energy-related carbon dioxide emissions have steadily fallen in recent years. The United States is currently on pace to reduce them by 17 percent below 2005 levels, and we are going to do it by the year 2025. So we have been doing it in the United States. We have been lowering emissions. We are leading the world in lowering our carbon emissions over the past decade. A Washington takeover of the energy sector is going to interfere with that progress.
Congress should support affordable baseline energy solutions that will actually reduce emissions and grow our economy. Cutting-edge technologies--including nuclear power, carbon capture, and carbon utilization--hold enormous promise. Nuclear power currently provides about 60 percent of America's emission-free energy. Some supporters of the Green New Deal have even talked about banning nuclear power.
Republicans support a commonsense approach to addressing climate change. We are interested in solutions, not socialism. We need to make American energy as clean as we can, as fast as we can, and we can do it without raising costs on the American public.
The Democrats' plan is a hard left turn that will drive our economy off a cliff. It is the first big step on that dark path to socialism. Simply put, the green deal is a raw deal for the American public.
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Mr. BARRASSO. Madam President, section 7003 of the legislation before us today, as modified by the Rubio amendment No. 182, addresses units in the Coastal Barrier Resources System, which Congress established through bipartisan legislation in 1982. Congress most recently updated maps as recommended by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service at the end of last year through the enactment of Public Law 115-358.
I yield to my distinguished colleague, the Senator from Delaware, ranking member of the Environment and Public Works Committee.
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