Terminating the National Emergency Declared with Respect to Energy
Floor Speech
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Mr. MARKEY. Mr. President, I thank my great friend from the State of Virginia. I thank him for his leadership on this. I thank him for bringing out this very important subject because the American people are being robbed by the fossil fuel industry in broad daylight, and the Trump administration is driving the getaway car.
As the Senator from Virginia just said, in the United States, in 2024, 94 percent of all new electrical generating capacity installed is wind and solar and battery technologies--94 percent. What I am hearing on FOX News and what I hear from the--not ``all of the above'' but-- ``oil above all'' crowd is: Oh, my God, it is terrible what is happening in our country. Look at the war that is being declared upon oil and gas and coal.
Saying that wind and solar and batteries are a war against oil and gas and coal is like saying that the cell phone was a war against the black rotary dial phone. It is not a war. It is the entrepreneurial, innovative spirit in our country that is coming up with new technologies and new ways to solve the problem.
Just like, by the way, the black rotary dial industry, they didn't like it. They didn't like it at all. They had a monopoly, but there is a way to get around it. There was a way to have, out in the marketplace, new ways of generating communications technologies, and now there are new ways of generating electricity--new ways. They hate it. The incumbents hate it. They hate it because they had a bottleneck. It could only be they. It could only be oil, gas, coal. Then, all of a sudden, a new generation of young people arrived, and they say: No. Climate change is threatening this planet, and there are new, innovative ways that we can move.
So what is at the bottom of all of this? The oil, gas, and coal industries are scared--they are petrified--in the same way as the black rotary dial phone industry, in the same way that the horse-and-buggy manufacturer was scared.
There is an automobile now. Oh, no, what am I going to do?
How about getting in the transportation business rather than the horse-and-buggy industry? How about becoming, maybe, an auto dealer in Ohio? How about moving on, rather than being a horse-and-buggy company?
No. No. We are stopping that. We are stopping that. There are not going to be any roads. We are not going to build any roads for automobiles. That would be terrible.
So that is what we have. Right now, we have a war against innovation, a war against nonpolluting sources of electricity; a war against a generation of young Americans who are saying the planet is dangerously warming, and there are no emergency rooms for planets--$300 billion worth of damage in two storms, Hurricane Milton and Hurricane Helene; $250 billion worth of damage in the fires of LA. That is $550 billion worth of damage in just three incidents, and that is just the tip of the iceberg of what is coming.
So what the young generation is saying is, Can we please install wind and solar and batteries and all-electric vehicles? Can we be smart? Can we think ahead? Can we have a generational response?
And what is happening is the oil, gas, and coal industries are just calling in their chips. They are just saying that they want to kill everything--kill innovation.
By the way, I was the chairman of the Telecommunications Committee in the 1990s, when we were still in that old era. Believe me. Those old companies love their monopolies. There are three wires that go into people's homes: the cable wire, the telephone wire, and the electricity wire. So now we are on the third wire, the electricity wire. Are we going to make that competitive, too, or not? And they are petrified.
Just today--this is unbelievable--the Trump administration announced that he wants to lay off 65 percent of the Environmental Protection Agency's staff. Those are our frontline fighters who ensure our water is safe, that our air is clean, and that our land is not polluted with toxins and chemicals. They want to turn the EPA into every polluter's ally. That is their goal. That is what they want to have. That is not what the younger generation wants in our country.
The EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin also told the White House that he wants to get rid of the EPA's authority to regulate dangerous greenhouse gases based on the threat they pose to public health or welfare. It is known as the endangerment finding. Do greenhouse gas emissions cause warming that endangers the coastlines? that endanger cities like LA? that lead to $300 billion storms just ravaging through States?
Do you know that the Supreme Court decided 5 to 4? In April of 2007, the Supreme Court said: You must determine whether or not there is an endangerment, EPA; and, EPA, if you make that determination that it is an endangerment, you then have to do something about it.
That is what is ticking them off. No one will tell you.
In a footnote, in his dissent, Justice Scalia said: I am voting no.
Justice Scalia said: What is next--the regulation of flatulence from cows? Where are they going with all this craziness?
Do you know where we are going? Do you know where we went? We went to 94 percent of all new electrical generation capacity in the United States, in 2024. It is wind, solar, and battery technologies. That is where we went because there was an endangerment because you knew what was happening.
By the way, even the IRA that was passed just in 2022 has already unleashed $400 billion of public and private investment. It has created 400,000 new jobs--400,000 new jobs--in the clean energy sector. Oil and gas and coal are petrified. They are the black rotary dial phone of 2025. They can see what is happening. It is change. It is a brandnew era. It is almost as though, somehow or other, they have found enough allies here to lock us into the past--to lock us into the 19th century, to lock us into the 20th century.
Kids don't want to go backward. They don't want to look at the world in the rearview mirror. They want to look ahead to a brighter, better, safer, cleaner future, and that is what is going on. It is threatening the business model of all of these people.
So I directly questioned Lee Zeldin on this exact issue in his hearing before the Environment and Public Works Committee because I knew he wouldn't have the courage or the ability to stand up to the demands of Trump's Big Oil and Big Gas and Big Coal donors because, if these donors tell Zeldin to wipe any policy meant to protect public health and the planet off the books, it seems he is ready to take out an eraser and to hop to it, regardless of the science, regardless of the law, regardless of the well-being of the American people in the long run, especially young people. The Green New Deal generation, they want change. They want action. They want to move the same way we moved from a black rotary dial phone to this. It only took 20 years. It would have seemed impossible to a black rotary dial phone manufacturer, but it happened because you trusted young people to do the work.
What else is Trump doing for his fossil fuel friends? He is taking their money while he costs you your money.
Trump's billionaire oil and gas donors promised him $1 billion last April in a meeting if Trump would take all of the clean energy incentives off of the books--$1 billion. This is all pay-to-play. They raised the money for him, and he delivered a sham energy emergency Executive order that is already forcing working families to pay more in order to line the pockets of those big oil, big gas, big coal donors.
This emergency is a lie. The United States is already the world's largest oil and gas producer. It is the largest exporter of LNG in the world. It is a lie. It is a lie. It is a lie.
Everything Donald Trump says about an energy emergency is a lie to the American people because he has to lie to cover up the fact that oil and gas production is up. But they are so greedy, they want this body and the EPA to kill wind and solar, battery storage technologies, all- electric vehicles. That is how greedy they are. It is not enough that they have their largest production capacity in history, because this is really an excuse for Trump and Musk to rig the rules for Big Oil so they can produce the dirty energy while they easily seize Americans' lands and pollute the air and water.
They want to go on public land now to drill for oil and gas, even though we don't need it. We don't need it.
There is a revolution that if we just let it unfold, it would be 94 percent next year, 94 percent the next year. What they are afraid of is 10 years from now, when everyone says, oh, I love this new world we are living in, the nonpolluting, nongreenhouse gas world of renewable energy.
The real emergency, the real crisis is the climate crisis itself, which continues to turbocharge extreme weather. It is costing lives, billions in damages, sky-high energy bills, insurance rates out of control in all these States that are having these superstorms and fires. Yet Trump is dismantling programs that reduce energy prices, lower heating bills, keep our air and water clean, and create jobs while trying to ram through the dirty energy projects that will do just the opposite.
And what does he want to do? He wants to take out a chain saw. That is what he wants to do. He is taking out his chain saw.
He wants to call this waste, fraud, and corruption, a revolution that creates this incredible economic--
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Mr. MARKEY.--to chop all of those programs down at the knees. We are going to fight it every single step of the way.
I thank Senator Kaine, and I thank Senator Heinrich for giving us this time on the floor to be able to explain to the American people what is going on.
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