Lower Energy Costs Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. DOGGETT. Madam Chair, with this bill, our Republican colleagues offer their answer to our overheated planet, turn up the heat. And to those parents concerned about their children's future in what could become an uninhabitable planet, they say quite simply, ``shut up and get out of the way.''

This dirty bill will not bring our energy costs down, but it will drive our hospital bills and our doctor bills way up because it is a dirty deal.

Republican fossilized thinking threatens the health of millions of Americans and endangers the future of our planet.

Our country should be the world's leader in combating the climate crisis and growing the many new jobs that are necessary to develop the new technologies to combat the ravages of an overheated planet. But instead, the Republicans surrender the green technology leadership to China and other countries around the world.

Protecting American families from the climate crisis should be a bipartisan issue, but it has increasingly become one as most of our Republican colleagues ignore the dangers and remain beholden to polluters over people.

Last year, we made some modest progress under Democratic leadership. We offered incentives for both businesses and families to come together to slow carbon pollution, to go electric, to improve energy efficiency, and to develop additional renewable energy resources.

Instead of adding to that progress, which we need, Republicans today would drag our country back to the disastrous years of their hero, Donald Trump, who abandoned American leadership in favor of more and more pollution.

Only this month, the world's scientists have told us once again: ``There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all.'' Republicans want to slam that very window shut.

As the U.N. Secretary General declared: ``Humanity is on thin ice, and that ice is melting fast. Our world needs climate action on all fronts, everything, everywhere, all at once.''

This bill doesn't deserve its designation as H.R. 1. It is not even H.R. 0 because it drags us backward into a world in which our grandchildren will not be able to safely reside.

And even for those who won't listen to the scientists and the world leaders near unanimous view on this, all they need to do is just open their eyes. The extreme weather that we see, the intensified heat, the mega-droughts, the ice storms, the tornadoes and hurricanes, and heat, heat, and more heat in places that it has never occurred before, threatening food production and human health. All of this, along with the threat of tropical diseases appearing in places like Central Texas where they have never occurred before.

The climate crisis is already taking lives, and it will take many, many more the longer we are delayed by outrageous tactics like we see here today.

This sorry bill will never become law, but every day that Republicans dither, delay, and distract us; every day they feed the ignorance about the climate crisis, the nearer we come to a tipping point from which we can never recover.

I am voting ``no'' because, left unchecked, Republican half-baked ideas will burn up our planet.

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