Environmental Standards

Floor Speech

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Mr. CASSIDY. Madam President, every Senator, when she or he goes home, speaks to families feeling the crushing burden of inflation, in large part driven by fuel prices--it is certainly true when I go home to Louisiana--and they hope for a better job; one, they would like a better job, but, two, they need the extra money in order to keep up with the inflation.

There is a connection with their personal economic concerns, Putin's war in Ukraine, and China doing their best to take American jobs by ignoring environmental standards, using slave labor, giving subsidies to the businesses, making it almost impossible for American businesses to work here and compete with products made in China.

As one example of just how successful China has been, in the early 2000s, China was about 19th and 20th in manufacturing and carbon emissions.

Since then, since the early 2000s, China has become No. 1 worldwide, both in the amount of manufacturing but also in the amount of their carbon emissions.

Indeed, the increase in carbon emissions for China is more than the combined decrease of the United States, the EU, and the United Kingdom in that same period of time.

We have been doing our best to improve our environmental standards for the benefit of the whole world, and China has exploited that, using their lack of enforcement of standards to attract our jobs to their country, and yet our global greenhouse gas emissions are worse off.

Now, as I mentioned, the inflation, the hope for a better job, which is not realized, Putin's war, using energy as a national security tool, and China's concerted strategy are all interwoven. There is a nexus, and that nexus is between energy and the climate, the economy of a family and of a nation, and national security.

So if we are going to improve the financial situation for that family in Louisiana, a working family in Nevada, or any of our States and do something about our national security concerns, then we must do something about energy, and that is related to emissions.

The most effective way of doing this is looking at how China addresses their emissions and how the United States does.

Now, when I speak of emissions, I speak of the fact that we now use natural gas instead of coal, and natural gas burns much more cleanly than coal, and so, therefore, we have cleaner air in the United States than we did even 20 years ago.

But China uses coal for about 60 percent of their energy feedstock. And so to understand China as a competitor, let's look at their economic, geopolitical, and national security strategies against us, and we are going to look at it through the prism of carbon emissions because if we think about national security without thinking about energy and the associated emissions, if we don't think about them all at the same time, we are wasting our time, just wasting our time. So, again, examining as a nexus.

There is a petrochemical plant in Louisiana that has invested heavily in lowering their emissions. We pay a little extra for the products they produce, but we accept that extra cost so that we have this cleaner environment.

Just as an example, the plastic that is on the back of my phone, that plastic is made from natural gas usually, and the process of making that has rigorous environmental standards to make sure that we protect those who live around the plant. China does not do that. They do not enforce those standards, nor, as I mentioned earlier, do they use natural gas. They are much more likely to use coal, and they preferentially build their powerplants on the Pacific coast of China. So the emissions go into the atmosphere, and they blow across the Pacific, and they land in the United States. Much of the problems of the west coast of the United States with SOX and NOX are from plants that originate their emissions in China.

And did I say it lowers their cost of production by not enforcing those? By lowering the cost of production, you attract American jobs away from the United States of America over there. And did I say it strengthens their economy? And by strengthening their economy, they have more money to invest in their military and more money to pursue their geopolitical strategy, which is to undermine the influence of the United States of America.

By not applying our emission standards to China, giving them a free pass, we are allowing them to implement their strategy.

Now, by the way, I am not against international trade. We can look at the treaties we have with Canada and with Mexico or with Central American countries, and we can see that there are certain labor and environmental standards that are embedded in those. And it is an even playing field, of sorts. So if we have a clean air standard here in the United States, there is something like that in Mexico and something like that in Canada. If we have labor standards here, we have something like that in Honduras and something like that in Guatemala. So we are still competing, but the playing field is more even.

Now, there are other benefits of trading in the Western Hemisphere.

About 40 percent of the goods that Mexico produces are reimported from the United States. There is an exchange that goes back so that the revenue that is produced in trade disproportionately comes from Mexico back to the United States. So while that number is 40 percent with Mexico, it is only 4 percent with China. And it is not like we are sending all this money to China. We had about a $355 billion trade deficit with them last year. And I am not talking about the deficit; I am just saying that only 4 percent of that revenue comes back to the United States in order to reinvest in the American economy.

So I am all for trade, but I want to have something which is more mutually beneficial and one in which there is a level playing field and one in which the disregard for environmental standards is not used as a strategy to strip jobs away from Americans in order to improve an economy of a competitor that uses that money to improve their military standing and uses that money to undermine our influence and, by the way, to attempt to expand their geopolitical viewpoint.

Now, I will say once more, I love capitalism. It has the ability to elevate people out of poverty. Three generations ago, my family left Ireland and came to the United States because they didn't have enough to eat, and because this is the greatest capitalist country in the world, my family did quite well because of the system of government we have here. I am not arguing against that.

But what we cannot tolerate is the arbitrage of rules that are put in place by developed countries to protect not just our own citizens but the global environment from the ill effects of certain types of activities, say, in this case, burning energy.

If we are going to equalize the playing field, if you will, to lawfully and peacefully defeat a strategy which has explicit goals to take jobs from the United States of America and to eclipse us as a world power, we need to think strategically as to how to defeat this strategy.

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