Energy

Floor Speech

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Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, the Federal Government's own analysts of the energy sector are predicting that this winter American families could face home heating bills that are 54 percent higher than last year--54 percent higher than just last year. On average, the price for our households running on natural gas is expected to jump 30 percent. For homes that use propane, a different assessment says the forecast looks like ``propane-market Armageddon.''

As the head of one aid organization put it, ``After the beating that people have taken in the pandemic, it's like: What's next?'' What is next? Well, astonishingly, what is next is yet another reckless taxing- and-spending spree from Washington Democrats, including more inflationary spending to push costs even higher and more anti-domestic- energy taxes and regulations that would only compound these problems.

That includes new, crushing taxes aimed at domestic natural gas production. They want to reprise the Obama administration's War on Coal. But this time the target is also--in addition to coal, the target is also the natural gas that provides electricity for our communities and heats families' homes. And then there are the new mandates and new penalties that are essentially designed to make 49 States' electrical grids move more in the direction of California's--paying higher costs for less reliable power.

Now, unfortunately, this has been the Biden administration's playbook going back to the very beginning. Remember, killing the Keystone XL Pipeline and thousands of American jobs was a day one--a day one-- priority. Then it was the ban on new development of domestic energy reserves and the hasty mission to rejoin the toothless Paris climate accords, where virtually nobody--nobody--but America seems to be remotely interested in achieving their nonbinding ``commitments.''

So for all the leftwing's apparent urgency to pass radical climate policy, they seem not to care much about tackling the biggest sources of the world's carbon emissions. The so-called international community that had scraped together the failed Paris deal could only get the world's most prolific polluter, that is, China, to agree--now, listen to this--to curb its increase in emissions 9 years from now. That is all they got out of China: an agreement to curb their emissions 9 years from now.

That is what this administration calls a good deal? America signs up for self-inflicted pain today, and China maybe--maybe--thinks about beginning to follow suit in another decade.

So, listen, China continues to produce more than one-fourth--one- fourth--of the world's carbon output, roughly 2\1/2\ times as much as the United States.

Instead of fighting back against our adversaries, Democrats' reckless taxing-and-spending spree would just hand-deliver them one big gift right after another, like the big new tax hikes on American businesses that would leave our industries paying higher tax rates than businesses in communist China; like doubling down on the anti-energy policies that already have the Biden administration going hat in hand to Russia and OPEC and begging them to up their own production for us.

As our colleague Senator Barrasso pointed out yesterday, before the Biden administration took over, America was enjoying energy independence for the first time in seven decades. Before the Biden administration took over, America was enjoying energy independence for the first time in seven decades, but now, we are heading the other way. America has doubled our oil purchases from Russia on President Biden's watch. We are twice as dependent on Russian oil today as we were before this administration took power. And President Biden green-lighted Putin's new gas pipeline that will give Moscow even more leverage over the European continent.

So Democrats want our Nation on a path toward less energy independence and higher costs for working families. Their reckless taxing-and-spending spree would make it all dramatically worse.

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