Armstrong Calls for Unleasing American Production

Statement

Today, Congressman Kelly Armstrong (R-ND) spoke on the House Floor in support of H.R. 6858, the American Energy Independence from Russia Act.

Video of his remarks can be found here and a transcript can be found below.

"My hometown of Dickinson North Dakota is in the southern part of the Bakken oil patch. It is where we unleashed this revolutionary technology of shale hydraulic fracturing, horizontal drilling, and producing natural gas. But you know what else? Eighteen miles away from my childhood hometown is an ethanol plant. Seven miles to the west is a biodiesel plant. Fourteen miles south is the largest wind farm in North Dakota, Brady one and Brady two.

About eighty miles to the northeast we are figuring out how to strip rare earth metals out of lignite coal so we can be less dependent on Russia and China. In all of those issues, the people who work and live in my communities grow all the cereal grains and the byproducts from the ethanol plant are fed as feedstock to our cattle industry.

I don't need lectures from anyone on all of the above energy, particularly when the last version of all of the above energy is solely wind, solar, rainbows, unicorns. And here's the dirty little secret. The world's going to burn more carbon in two years whether we shut down domestic production or not. And this naive and idealistic viewpoint that if we shut down American industry, American ingenuity, then the rest of the world will follow along, is fundamental differential to the fact we're watching it play out in real time. Our strategic adversaries and indeed our enemies will fill this space. That is the fact because the world needs these products and they're going to continue to utilize these products.

But at least welcome this. We're going to do nothing to reduce global carbon emissions because the atmosphere doesn't recognize country borders. So, I urge my colleagues to defeat the previous question and allow this to go back and let us do what we were doing so well until the last year. Developing American energy, allowing it to be utilized away from our adversaries. But I can tell you one last thing and then I'll close. In the last year, we haven't had a federal lease sale in North Dakota. Congressional Democrats have tried to ban the transport of liquefied natural gas by rail. So, let's be honest about how we got here so we can get there in the future. And with that I yield back.

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