Biden's Assault on American Energy

Floor Speech

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Mr. BARR. Madam Speaker, I thank my friend from Pennsylvania for his leadership and leading tonight's Special Order.

As a member of both the HEAT Team and a member of the House Financial Services Committee, I want to address another dimension of the Biden administration's war on American energy.

Specifically it is the Biden administration's weaponization of financial regulation to implement through the back door of unilateral executive action what it cannot do through the democratic process and what it cannot do through the Congress and through the legislative process, because, frankly, the Biden administration knows that the American people oppose their radical agenda that would decrease the reliability and affordability of electricity, industrial power, and the manner in which we conduct daily life.

That is, specifically, that the Biden administration intends to use financial regulators to bully banks, investors, and other financial firms, to divert capital away from what they view as politically unfashionable energy producers.

This is coming in multiple different forms. The Secretary of the Treasury has set up a czar within the Department of the Treasury to look at this from a holistic perspective to discriminate against American companies and American workers.

In bank regulation, there is a concept called redlining, and it used to be that it was illegal for banks and other financial firms to discriminate against the American people. Well, now the Biden administration is legalizing redlining. They are redlining against their own people because they are engaged in an industry, a great American industry that, for decades, has powered the American economy. Now they want to discriminate against those American heroes who have literally powered this country for decades.

What form does this take? Number one, it is taking the form of bank regulation, where the bank regulators are bullying credit providers and saying: You ought to rethink who you are lending money to because we don't think you should be lending money because of the reputational risk.

For example, ``Bank A, you better stop loaning money to that Kentucky coal mining operator. We want to get rid of all those coal mining jobs in eastern Kentucky,'' in my home State.

So, instead of going after the coal mining operator directly, they are going to the bank and saying: Choke off that coal mining company.

To heck with the fact that those mining jobs are important to put food on the table for those people in eastern Kentucky and in western Kentucky. They are weaponizing bank regulation.

That is precisely why, Madam Speaker, I introduced a bill to fix this called the Fair Access to Banking Act. This would basically codify the Fair Access to Financial Services Rule that the Office of the Comptroller promulgated in the previous administration. It would basically provide a guidance to banks that they must provide access to capital and credit based on assessment of the borrower's actual risk, rather than making broad-based decisions impacting entire industries.

This is guided by the fundamental principle of nondiscrimination and ensures that banks can't pick winners and losers in the marketplace.

That bill is pending in the Financial Services Committee, and we can't get any kind of consideration by this majority because this majority doesn't want fair access to banking. They are endorsing the Biden administration policy of discriminating against the American people.

Then there is the issue of ESG investing and mandating ESG, so-called environmental and social governance. This is through the back door of securities regulations at the Securities and Exchange Commission, but this is not the mission of the SEC.

The statutory mission of the SEC is to protect investors; to maintain fair, orderly, and efficient markets; and to facilitate capital formation. Its mission is not to reduce carbon emissions or solve climate change or try to change the weather.

I acknowledge that there is some investor demand in the market for ESG funds. I also see some utility in standardization of ESG disclosures to eliminate some of the inconsistencies in the way public companies are rated because, let's face it, even if you are interested in sustainable investing, you do not know what you are investing in because these ESG funds are frauds, in many cases.

But more than 90 percent of all S&P 500 companies already voluntarily publish ESG information on an annual basis, and this regulatory approach from the Gensler SEC would not provide new material information to investors. Instead, it would inundate investors with voluminous, confusing, and nonmaterial information that would hurt the very investors that Democrats claim they want to help or, in the words of the late Justice Thurgood Marshall, in TSC Industries v. Northway, bury the shareholders in an avalanche of trivial information, a result that is hardly conducive to informed decisionmaking. We need to avoid burdening investors with an avalanche of trivial information.

The Gensler SEC would also weaponize disclosure requirements to name and shame politically incorrect companies; pick winners and losers in the marketplace; and discriminate against energy firms that produce jobs, affordable and reliable energy, and returns to investors.

The SEC proposal would also compromise investor returns by elevating nonpecuniary factors above and ahead of financial performance. Fees for ESG funds are 43 percent higher than non-ESG funds and many low-ranked ESG stocks. They outperform the market overall.

We must not harm American savers by subordinating investor returns to promote nonpecuniary policy objectives like social justice, diversity quotas, and lower carbon emissions.

Finally, the Gensler SEC, the Biden Securities and Exchange Commission, would increase compliance costs for public companies, discourage private companies from going public, and encourage public companies to go private, resulting in fewer investment choices for everyday investors. This is why the Gensler SEC is even proposing to hoist these requirements on private companies. The SEC, by wading into social and environmental policy debates like climate change, through a top-down, government-directed, one-size-fits-all mandatory ESG disclosure regulation, untethered to the longstanding investor-driven materiality standard, will politicize the agency and reduce its credibility by hurting investors, elevating nonpecuniary factors above financial returns.

Here is the bottom line. Not only is the Biden administration waging a frontal assault on heroic American energy companies that provide the American people with affordable, reliable energy, particularly low- income and blue collar families who can't afford the skyrocketing costs of Biden's energy bill, but in addition to that, this backdoor approach to financial regulation, discriminating against Americans in these industries, will compromise investor returns, elevating and prioritizing the woke environmental priorities of the select coastal elites over middle-income Americans in the energy sector who provide affordable energy for the American people, compromising Main Street investment returns.

Those moms and dads who are trying to put their kids through college, those folks who are trying to save in their 401(k)'s and their IRAs just to have a secure retirement, those middle-class Americans are going to be the ones who suffer because of the politicization and the weaponization of securities regulation.

This is exactly why we must oppose this dangerous agenda that will compromise American energy dominance, American energy independence, and investor returns.

Madam Speaker, I thank my friend from Pennsylvania for his leadership on this issue. I thank the HEAT Team for bringing some light to this. I wanted to provide a little bit of a different dimension to this important debate, and that is how the Biden administration is weaponizing financial regulation.

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