Terminating the National Emergency Declared with Respect to Energy

Floor Speech

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Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I wanted to come down here and talk a little bit about energy with my colleagues in the Senate today, and part of the reason why is that as you know, Mr. President, and others know, the President of the United States has declared an energy emergency, and he did it on the day he was inaugurated here in the Capitol, on a day when he had lots of comments about the fact that God had saved him so that he would be there to be inaugurated--that this was going to be the greatest moment in American history, and that we had an energy emergency because there was an insufficient production of oil and fossil fuels.

As anybody who reads the newspaper in America knows--and there may not be anybody left who has access to a paper, but I encourage you to do it; it is a lot better than what you are reading on Twitter these days--the United States has actually produced more oil than we ever have produced in our history. In fact, last year, with the Biden administration, we produced more oil than any country in the history of humanity.

The same is true for natural gas. The same is true for LNG exports. The United States produces more oil than any other country in the world. We produce more natural gas than any other country in the world. We are the leading exporter of liquefied natural gas, which, by the way, has been incredibly important recently because we have allowed our allies in Europe to get off the Russian oil that they were on and replace that with liquefied natural gas produced by American citizens, exported by American citizens, to break the back of Putin's ability to restrain Europe's participation in the war, because we were able to replace half their energy. I am so glad that we were able to do that.

And we are also the world's leading producer of renewable energy, as well, and we have seen a huge amount of growth in solar, a huge amount of growth in wind, and I like to think of Colorado as the place that started an awful lot of that.

We are both a producer of fossil fuels and a producer of renewables. We know it takes everything to drive this economy, but we want to do all of this in a way that is cognizant of the very real climate issues that our globe faces and that our country faces.

The good news for the United States is there is no country in the world that is better positioned to lead the transition of our energy economy in this world than the United States of America. We are the wealthiest country in the world. We have the biggest and most abundant supply of fossil fuels and nonfossil fuels. We are less corrupt than almost any country on the face of the planet, and especially less corrupt than economies that are dominated by petrochemicals and by oil and gas around the world. We are the innovators in the world. We have a commitment to the rule of law. All of that puts us in this incredible position to lead.

I believe, 30 years from now or so, we are going to be in a place where we are able to say, not just to the American people but to the world, that we are at net zero from a carbon point of view and that we were able to get there through American technology and through American leadership and American ingenuity and American exports; that we took a strategic approach; that we had a plan that made sense; and that we captured, along the way, every--every--molecule that we could find of fugitive methane from oil and gas and from agriculture and from landfills; that we said yes to wind and solar; that we said yes to nuclear and yes to geothermal; that we said yes to investing in emerging technologies, like hydrogen, like carbon capture, and like the carbon dioxide removal bill that I have with my friend Lisa Murkowski from Alaska, which just goes to show you that you can have a bipartisan approach; that we can move to a position of real leadership that can help us create an economy again that America, when it grows, it grows for everybody, not just the people at the very top--because we have got good energy jobs that are concerned with the production of oil and gas and the production of all those other forms of energy.

By the way, just on that point--and I will be brief here because I know my colleague from Massachusetts wants to speak. On that subject, this Senate is about to get rid of the commonsense methane regulations that were passed in the last administration that are based on the work--that fee based on the work--that we had done in Colorado, working with industry, as the last administration did to create certainty, to create predictability, to send a message to the world that we want American gas to be the cleanest gas of any gas in the world.

And having us capture that fugitive methane is a hugely important part of that. We are saying no to that now. We are saying yes to the air pollution that is going to result. We are saying yes to the climate pollution that will result.

I say to my colleague from Massachusetts while she is here, I take no pleasure--and the President knows this--from the fact that Donald Trump is our President. I regret that he is our President, but he is our President. And one of the ways that he got to be our President is that he was elected twice.

And, in fact, more people voted for him this time than voted for him last time. I regret that. I am sorry for that, and I think there are lots of reasons for that.

But I think one of the reasons for that is that there is a mythology out there that the Democratic Party believes that we are going to turn fossil fuels off yesterday; or that we are going to turn fossil fuels off next week; or that we don't respect the men and women who work in our energy fields or in our energy processing across the country.

If there are Democrats who feel that way, I disagree with them, because the worst thing we could do at this moment when we have the energy abundance that we have, when we have the economic freedom we have, when we have the lack of corruption that we have--the worst thing we could do is elect a climate denier to be President whose most creative approach to energy was Sarah Palin's shopworn ``drill, baby, drill,'' which is what he announced under the dome of the United States Capitol the day he was inaugurated President and said--completely untruthfully--that we were in an energy crisis, when what we have is an energy abundance and no excuse--no excuse--for not leading the rest of the world in making sure that this transition on net-zero carbon is accomplished and that we do it in a way that protects our economy; that we do it in a way that protects our national security; that we do it in a way that recognizes the contribution that people have made for generations in Northwest Colorado and all over our economy to be able to drive this economy forward.

And to the extent that the failure is a failure of the Democratic Party to make clear our position, I want to own that failure and that responsibility. It is not Donald Trump's fault that he was elected. He ran; he won. We own some of the fact that he got elected. And I think on this issue, we have not communicated clearly to the American people what we believe.

And as a result of that, once again, our children and grandchildren have a climate denier in the White House, even though a majority of the American people believe that climate change is real and that we should be doing something about it.

And those of us who are advocates on this, on this side, have to be very clear--much clearer, he said poorly and unclearly--but let me say again--have to be much clearer about what we stand for, which is for a transition that makes sense and that science commands and for the respect of people that are working in the energy industry no matter what part of the industry they are working in.

And the fact that Donald Trump--even when oil is at $73 a barrel at his inauguration and we are producing more than we have ever produced in the history of mankind for the United States--thinks we are in an energy emergency or he claims that we are surprises me not at all.

Since he said he was going to drive prices down, the price of eggs are so high today as we meet here, you need a mortgage practically to buy a dozen eggs in the United States of America.

We can do better than that, and we can do better than his ``drill, baby, drill'' energy policy.

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