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Floor Speech

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Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, last week, the Senate voted to confirm Chris Wright as President Trump's Secretary of Energy.

The United States has been blessed with incredible natural resources, and it is something, frankly, that it seems like President Biden sought to deny the American people the benefits of that endowment with vast natural resources. And President Trump is going to reverse those policies and make sure we take full advantage of it for many reasons.

I was proud to support Secretary Wright's nomination, and I can't think of a better candidate to oversee the implementation of one of President Trump's key campaign promises: to unleash American energy in a new golden age of prosperity.

Under 4 years of the Biden administration, Americans suffered from burdensome energy prices resulting from his backward approach to energy policy. We know that inflation was part of what was driving those high energy prices, but also the refusal to take advantage of what God has given us in terms of natural resources. From day one, President Biden prioritized the view of climate radicals, while the interests of Texas families and our national security were apparently an afterthought.

His first action was to revoke the permits for the construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline, a project that would have allowed us to transport crude oil from Canada to refineries in the Midwestern United States. Because the pipeline was not built on a timely basis, it didn't mean the crude didn't come. It meant it was put into railroad cars and shipped in a way that was, frankly, not as safe and, certainly, not as efficient as a pipeline would be.

And, in 2022, President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, and while this law did nothing to reduce inflation, it did create massive subsidies for electric vehicles, most of which average working American families can't afford to buy. But it is the car of choice for many high-income coastal elites.

But it wasn't enough to just subsidize electric vehicles. In 2024, the Biden administration went further in finalizing a rule requiring-- requiring--two-thirds of new cars on the market to be electric or hybrid by 2032. The Biden administration made clear that their end game was to end gas-powered cars.

Now, most Americans who buy a car keep it for an average of about 10 years, and President Biden basically wanted to force them into buying something that was not their preference but was going to be subsidized by hard-working families--again, a vehicle that many of them could not themselves afford. It is hard to see this as anything but an affront to those hard-working families back home in Texas or Alabama or anywhere else in the country.

It is not just the cost that we are talking about here. President Biden's press for fast adoption of electric vehicles was a gift to our greatest strategic adversary. That is because China controls the supply chains for a majority of the critical minerals required to produce EV batteries. Seventy-five percent of lithium-ion batteries, 70 percent of cathode, and 85 percent of anode production capacity required for EV batteries, as well as 50 percent of the processing facilities for lithium, cobalt, and graphite, are all located in China.

On the other hand, the United States produces virtually none of these critical minerals and certainly does not process them, which is admittedly a very difficult and sometimes dirty process. But in China, they process 90 percent of the world's critical minerals, and, frankly, they don't care too much about the consequences.

But President Biden's insistence on this rapid transition from gas- powered vehicles to electric vehicles put our national security concerns and working families in the backseat to Xi Jinping and the climate radicals. But he didn't stop with electric vehicles.

Last January, President Biden issued a pause on all American exports of liquified natural gas in order to conduct a study on the environmental impact. Well, I can tell him what a study has shown--what experience has shown is that natural gas has driven down the number of carbon emissions that previously occurred because of the broad use of coal. So natural gas is really a much cleaner source of energy.

Of course, this pause on exports had major repercussions in Texas, which is one of the leaders of the LNG industry.

A 2023 study from the National Association of Manufacturers found that liquefied natural gas contributes $43.8 billion to our GDP. It supports more than 200,000 jobs and generates $11 billion in Federal, State, and local tax revenue. In Texas alone, the oil and gas industry specifically supported more than 178,000 direct and indirect jobs in 2023 and purchased nearly $100 billion of U.S. goods and services.

But President Biden's pause on exports was not the only time the Biden administration chose to pick a fight with Texas over energy.

Last fall, the DC Circuit Court issued a ruling that revoked a permit for the LNG export terminal at the Port of Brownsville. This export terminal and related projects had already been approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Just one of the projects affected by this ruling would have created 6,000 jobs and more than $18 billion of investments in South Texas.

But the DC Circuit sent them back to the drawing board, insisting that they needed to ``adequately consider the environmental justice impact'' of these developments.

These were for projects that had already been approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Of course, we already know that liquefied natural gas is one of the cleanest sources of energy, and of all the places in the world to source LNG, the United States of America has the highest standards. But environmental considerations aside, this war on American energy exports is in direct conflict with our national security priorities.

Prior to the pause on LNG, the United States was supplying energy to our European allies. This, of course, allowed them to rely far less on Russian energy sources to keep the lights on and keep their houses warm. By turning off our LNG spigot, President Biden sent a gift to Vladimir Putin in the form of another source of revenue. Of course, it is the revenue that comes from the sale of energy in Russia that Putin uses to fund his war machine, which has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Russians and Ukrainians.

President Biden's energy agenda put Texas workers and their families and our national security last, choosing instead to bend a knee to foreign adversaries and to radical climate activists.

But, thankfully, that is not where the story ends. President Trump and Secretary Wright are now at the helm, and President Trump has lost no time in righting the ship to put American consumers and our national security first. President Trump is already off to the races to unleash a golden age of energy dominance in a number of important ways.

On the first day of his Presidency, he reversed President Biden's disastrous LNG pause. This will allow our allies access to the oil and natural gas that come from Texas projects in the Gulf of America rather than relying on our adversaries.

Furthermore, it is not just Texans and our European allies that can benefit from President Trump and Secretary Wright's agenda; by reforming the permitting process, we can make sure everyone within the United States has access to our abundant domestic energy supplies. And it will bring prices down, as President Trump has said is important in his fight against 40-year high inflation under the previous administration.

Unfortunately, some of our New England States--notably States like Maine and Massachusetts--are still reliant on foreign fuel, and that is because of the lack of pipelines that would take the LNG and transport it up into that part of the United States.

Due to stringent shipping requirements from the Jones Act, it is more costly to transport natural gas from the Gulf of America to New England than it is for these States to import fuel from foreign countries. The Jones Act was intended to protect U.S. shipping, but in this case, it has the unintended effect of decreasing our energy independence. I have no doubt that commonsense permitting reforms can right this wrong.

I look forward to working with President Trump and his administration to unleash American energy through an ``all of the above'' approach so that Texas and the Gulf of America can once again supply the Nation and the world with reliable, affordable energy.

The Biden administration's energy policy has lined the pockets of America's adversaries to appease climate radicals while hard-working Americans were stuck with the check. But President Trump has promised a golden, new age, and I look forward to making Texas and America the center of that.

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