Providing for Congressional Disapproval Under Chapter 8 of Title United States Code, of the Rule Submitted By the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management Relating to ``Protection of Marine Archaeological

Floor Speech

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Ms. LUMMIS. Mr. President, I rise to speak in support of President Trump's energy dominance agenda and to oppose my colleagues who want to keep America literally in the Dark Ages when it comes to producing energy. This, the greatest energy-producing country, is being asked to take a step back.

Our energy is cleaner. We produce it cleaner. We transport it cleaner. And yet the Biden agenda had us deferring to other countries that produce energy dirtier, transport it to countries that are paying for it so the Russians, for example, can spend money to fight a war that we are on the other side of.

These are matters that President Trump is addressing and has committed to the American people, pursuant to his Executive order on January 20 of this year--the first day he took office--to make it a priority. As we all know, during President Trump's campaign, he chose to make exporting energy dominance and energy independence a hallmark of his campaign.

He did it because he knows about the connection between energy independence and bringing down inflation. When you go to the grocery store, we see products all over the shelves that have been brought there by trucks--trucks that are paying a lot for gasoline and diesel fuel.

You see frozen food refrigerators lining the aisles that are plugged into electricity that comes from oil, gas, coal, wind, and solar. And the more expensive it is, the more expensive the products are that we buy in those stores.

The same is true in any retail store around this country. Over the last 4 years, the Biden administration worked overtime to stick it to the energy industry at every turn while my colleagues here cheered them on and helped them. On day one, President Biden placed a moratorium on public land energy development that never truly went away until January 20, 2025, when President Trump was sworn into office and signed an Executive order.

Wyoming and the West have fallen victim to the previous administration's regulatory regime designed specifically to kill the industry. Then, once he kills it, he goes overseas and asks countries like Saudi Arabia and Venezuela to fill in the difference. These are countries that cannot produce energy as cleanly as we can and do, and yet he would rather get the energy from them to placate the radical environmental community in this country--that very same community that knows that we can do it cleaner here.

During the Biden administration, the BLM declined to offer up lands for oil and gas leasing. And when they did, they ignored the spirit of the law and offered the fewest acres possible.

In September 2023, the BLM collected a measly and insulting $27,000 from an oil and gas lease sale in Wyoming. Compare that to the September 2021 lease sale that netted over $1.3 million.

The people of Wyoming are elated that President Trump, on day one, committed to fixing the sins of the previous administration by declaring a national energy emergency.

You know, I was in Seoul, South Korea, last spring. And one day, we had clear air. The next day, it was so dirty that you couldn't see, Mr. President, from where I am standing to where you are sitting. And I said: What went wrong over 24 hours? And they told me the wind shifted and was coming in from China. China's dirty air was blowing in because China is producing dirty energy.

And yet we would rather defer to them when we know we can produce it cleaner. In my State of Wyoming, the Dry Fork energy plant is the cleanest coal-producing energy ever produced anywhere. In fact, it is so clean that when they began emitting from that plant, they didn't want to tell the U.S. EPA how clean they could do it for fear that the EPA would apply that same standard to all of America's legacy coal plants--none of which could afford to retrofit to the modern technology of Gillette's coal-fired powerplant.

In Wyoming, we have abundant oil, gas, uranium, coal, and more. Under the order, Wyoming's public lands can return to Congress the intended goal of multiple use, which includes responsible resource extraction. If you go back to FLPMA, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, which passed in the 1970s, it mandates multiple use of public lands-- not single use, not preservation or conservation alone, not oil and gas alone, not recreation alone. It is all of these multiple uses.

Energy production is the backbone of my State and many other Western States. We are proud to power the Nation and to support a President who supports us.

With the rise of artificial intelligence and a thriving data center industry, our Nation will need all the energy it can get. I was out in California during October and went to AI companies--large, medium, and small--and they all told me the same thing: that the bottleneck for America in being the world leader in AI is energy.

We are going to need way more energy than we have needed in the past, and in order to make artificial intelligence work for us and to be dominant in this technology, we need more energy, not less. And we know we can do it cleaner than other countries.

If my colleagues succeed in passing their resolution that is under consideration, we are setting the stage for failure. We are setting up our economy and future generations for failure. Voting to approve the resolution is a vote for an unstable energy supply, higher energy costs, and more.

I urge my colleagues to vote no against the resolution that is brought by my colleague Senator Heinrich from New Mexico. I urge my colleagues to stand with President Trump and to oppose this resolution.

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