Executive Calendar

Floor Speech

If we want to tackle rising fuel costs, let's do something that will actually protect American consumers and actually promote our energy independence. Let's reinstate the fossil fuel ban that was lifted in 2015.

Listen to what has happened here in our Nation since 2015, when every Republican on this Senate floor--when they controlled the Senate--voted to lift the ban on the exportation of oil from the United States. That ban had been in place for 50 years to keep American oil here.

Well, here's what the Republicans did in the House and Senate back in 2015: they lifted the ban.

Oil companies from the United States now send our oil overseas. And get this: In 2020, we exported more than 8.5 million barrels of petroleum every single day out of the United States to other countries. And, in 2020, pursuant to Republican Senators in 2015, we, in 2020, for the first time in more than 50 years, exported more barrels of petroleum every single day--exported--than imported.

Is that energy independence?

I don't think so.

And why do we do it?

I will tell you why we do it. It is for the oil companies. That is why we do it.

The Republicans don't want to do anything on climate change--oil companies. The oil companies want to export American oil, drill for it here in the United States, because they can make more money selling that oil into the international marketplace. Of course, that is what the Republicans are going to vote for back in 2015.

And here's what happened: we got up to 2021, and we now are net exporters of petroleum in our country.

So the bill that is being proposed would actually do nothing to help consumers at the pump. The one thing that we could do is reimpose the ban on the exportation of these 8.5 million barrels of oil a day. Keep it here. It is lower priced. It is drilled for in the United States. Our economy would get the benefit of that lower priced oil and people would be going up to the pump, paying a lot less per gallon of gasoline than they are doing right now.

But you are not going to hear anything from the Republican Party that takes on the oil industry and their international market using American oil to make more money because people in the rest of the world will pay more for it. But that leaves less American oil here for drivers, as they are pulling in to the pump every single day.

So this is just the greed of the domestic oil industry so that they can have unlimited international energy markets so that, ultimately-- and this is the beauty of it--they make more money overseas and they get to tip American consumers upside down at the pumps as they have got their fingers on this nozzle and watching this price of gasoline go up even as they are looking at it. It is a beautiful world for the oil industry to have the cooperation of the Republican Party on this agenda.

And so all I can say is that this proposal is just the opposite of what we should be talking about. The Republicans should be reexamining their own conscience about what they did in 2015, instead of shedding crocodile tears today as though Joe Biden did this. This net export of petroleum products is a Republican idea driven by the Republicans who sit here on the Senate floor.

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