Lower Energy Costs Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. WESTERMAN. Mr. Chair, I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. Chair, this amendment says that the sense of Congress is that the royalty rates should be 12\1/2\ percent, which was the royalty rate before the very misleading and misnamed bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, was passed by my colleagues on the left.

We all know that it wasn't an Inflation Reduction Act, and they publicly call it their climate bill. President Biden has called it the climate bill.

The increase in the royalty rates was simply another way to attack our energy resources here in America. The Democrats know that. The Biden administration knows that. The officials in the Biden administration know that.

In a bill that they call the Inflation Reduction Act, they actually increased inflation by passing a law to say we are going to raise the costs of energy off of Federal lands. It didn't take the market to do it. It was done by the law passed by my colleagues across the aisle.

If you don't believe what I am saying, take the word of the Biden administration. Earlier this month, the Biden administration confirmed this fact in a leaked Bureau of Ocean Energy Management memo on Cook Inlet Lease Sale 258. This is in response to BOEM trying to do an 18\3/ 4\ percent rate, trying to put the highest rate they could on this sale. The memo reads: ``A 16-2/3 percent royalty may be more likely to facilitate expeditious and orderly development of OCS resources and potentially offer greater energy security.''

The Biden administration knows this. They know that the lower the royalty rate, the more likely we will have energy security and the more likely we will develop our resources.

They choose to use the highest rate possible to do everything they can to attack American energy, to attack American jobs. It is putting Russia and OPEC over the American people because we are still going to use energy. We are not using less energy. We are just using it from different sources.

Laws like this that were passed on a partisan basis last Congress, that were signed into law by the Biden administration, simply put these bad actors over the American people.

It is time we lower energy costs, pass the Lower Energy Costs Act, and pass it with this great amendment by my friend from Tennessee. I support the amendment.

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Mr. WESTERMAN. Mr. Chair, I thank the gentleman for yielding. I thank the ranking member and appreciate bipartisan support on this very important amendment.

I think this is a sign that we are making progress. This is a sign that America is coming together to stand up against the Chinese Communist Party. We need to stand up not only against them but we need to continue standing up against Russia, against OPEC.

That is what H.R. 1 does. It is a bold step in the right direction, and this is a small part of it. I commend the gentleman from Tennessee for crafting this amendment and for getting it made in order.

I support the amendment for a very good reason: We simply cannot let the Chinese Communist Party continue to dominate and take control of not only mineral supply chains but energy supply chains as they are trying to make a move in that area as well, where they are cozying up with the Saudis. They are working with Russia to buy the oil and gas that we have banned from there.

Their objective is dominance. They have made great strides in the minerals area, and they are working very hard to do that in energy.

The way we push back against China and the CCP is we produce our energy and minerals here, and we, for sure, don't let China come to America and own any kind of lease on Federal lands or private lands. We produce it ourselves. We send it to our allies.

There was a delegation recently in Germany, and the message they brought back from Germany was gas equals peace. They want us to send them our gas, and we have ample supplies of it.

We just need the pipelines. We need the ports. We need the LNG facilities. We need the vessels to send gas to Europe that is much cleaner than the gas they are getting from Russia. It will help bring peace in Europe if they can get more of our energy here.

Mr. Chair, I again commend the gentleman, and I support the amendment.

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Mr. WESTERMAN. Mr. Chair, I thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania for bringing this amendment that makes very clear a stark reality that we don't need the China Communist Party. America does not need the CCP.

They need us to buy the goods they are producing. They need us to buy the minerals that they are mining out of mines they have developed with child slave labor in Africa. They need us to buy the stuff they are producing with slave labor in China.

But we don't need them, and we sure don't need their money here.

I appreciate the ranking member realizing that. I appreciate that the people are speaking. The House of Representatives is the voice of the people, and I believe this is how America feels.

But we need to go further. We need to put actions to our words. We need to show the CCP that America is strong, that we have our own resources, that we can develop these resources better than they can develop them. We can put these resources out on the world market.

Instead of being dependent on others, we can be the ones exporting our goods, growing wealth and jobs here and being a deterrent to the spread of communism, the spread of dictatorships, and all of those things that we as Americans deplore.

At the end of the day, this is about freedom and about promoting those values that our country was founded on.

Mr. Chairman, again, I support this amendment. I appreciate the gentleman bringing it.

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Mr. WESTERMAN. Mr. Chair, again, I thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania for yielding. I do rise in support of this amendment.

H.R. 1 would allow non-Federal entities to provide money to certain Federal agencies to improve permitting efficiency. This good-governance amendment, offered by my friend from Pennsylvania, would require the Secretaries who accept this money to report on where it came from and how much was provided.

I think there is some confusion about the intent of what is in H.R. 1 about speeding up permitting. Mr. Chair, before I came to Congress, I did engineering work for over two decades. I am a professional engineer, so I worked on a lot of projects where permits were required. Fortunately, we were working with State permitting agencies, and we would hear the same argument from the State permitting agencies: We don't have enough resources and enough people to do these permits. It is going to take longer.

A lot of States have programs where they allow the entity trying to attain the permit to pay money to the agency so their employees can work overtime. It is really a way to increase the resources and get more out of the resources. It is not degrading the environmental protections at all. It is just moving the process forward at a faster rate.

That is what the intent of H.R. 1 is: to move permitting at a faster clip so we can build all kinds of energy; so we can build solar farms and windmills and high-voltage transmission lines; so we can build pipelines; so we can extract minerals and resources here in America. We can process those and we can manufacture things from them.

This is important to making our country a leader in the world by overcoming the position we are in with China on minerals and the position we are in with Russia and OPEC.

Mr. Chair, I support the underlying principle in the bill, and I support the good-governance amendment by my friend from Pennsylvania.

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Mr. WESTERMAN. Mr. Chair, I rise in support of this amendment. As we know, this bill is about permitting streamlining, including for domestic mineral projects.

The underlying bill allows for mining projects that have received funding under the Defense Production Act to be placed on the existing FAST-41 permitting dashboard.

My colleague's amendment states that mineral projects that contribute to certain technologies, such as electric vehicles, cannot be placed over and above other mined projects.

This amendment also supports responsible deployment of funds under the Defense Production Act.

Mineral production is vital to our national security, and H.R. 1 creates multiple opportunities to streamline the process for mineral development.

Mr. Chair, I recognize at this time the Natural Resources Committee staff who worked tirelessly to advance H.R. 1, the Lower Energy Costs Act.

I thank Ashley Nichols, Rebecca Konolige, Rob MacGregor, Tom Connally, Chris Marklund, Rebekah Hoshiko, Madeline Bryant, Kiel Weaver, Aniela Butler, Murray Miller, Sophia Varnasidis, Will King, Nancy Peele, and Vivian Moeglein.

I also thank the Members of the Republican Conference and their staff for all the work that they have put into this legislation. This has really been a team effort to get this bill to the floor in a record amount of time to address an issue that is very prevalent in our country: to lower energy costs, to make America energy independent, to increase our national security, to break supply chains on China, and to make America be the leader of the world in the future.

H.R. 1 is the first step to that, and we should be proud to have put it on the floor.

Mr. Chair, I urge my colleagues to support this amendment and to support the underlying bill.

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