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Floor Speech
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. MARKEY. Mr. President, I want to start tonight by addressing those on my side of the aisle.
My friends, I am taking the floor with a simple message to you: Don't give up. We cannot give up. We can't afford to give up. The American people are demanding we don't give up. They are demanding we get up, and we fight back.
We have to fight back against the attacks on our healthcare system, against the attacks on families across our country--especially the poorest--on reproductive rights. We can't give up on our neighbors seeking asylum or education through our country's lawful processes. We can't give up on affordable energy that keeps the lights on, bills low, and our air clean--wind, solar, all-electric vehicles, battery storage technologies; the future. We can't give up.
Republicans have taken a battering ram to the American healthcare system, a system that was already too expensive, too inaccessible, too complicated for too many Americans. And what have they done? They have passed legislation to slash $850 billion from Medicaid, $500 billion from Medicare, $300 billion from the Affordable Care Act, and they are slashing NIH research--research on Alzheimer's, cancer, diabetes. Alzheimer's--slashing the funding to find a cure for the diseases which run through every family in America, just slashing it. Slashing the Centers for Disease Control, slashing it. Just an absolute evisceration of the healthcare system in our country.
And what are we going to see? According to the Yale University, 51,000 additional deaths per year over the next 10 years. A half a million people dying because of those cuts in those programs. That is what the Republicans have done in their Big Beautiful Bill. People are going to die because of that.
And how have they done it? Well, Trump and his backers have done this by breaking the basic functions of democracy, violating institutional norms, and treating people's lives as expendable. He has done it through corruption, intimidation, illegal power grabs, and plain cruelty.
Already, the Republicans cut $2.5 billion from the National Institutes of Health, $11.4 billion from the Centers for Disease Control, and cut programming for mental health, environmental health, and reproductive health. People are about to receive notices that their insurance costs are going up. They are going to be skyrocketing. Hospitals and Planned Parenthood clinics are already closing. Americans aren't experiencing this one at a time because it is happening all at once across our country.
Republicans acted on Trump's Big Oil-funded vendetta against wind and solar energy by cutting incentives for the cleanest and the cheapest sources of electricity, all to pad the pockets of their fossil fuel friends: the oil, the gas, and the coal industry.
The companies that have created the climate crisis are the ones that have given hundreds of millions of dollars to Donald Trump for his election last year, and now they are collecting by promising to destroy wind and solar and all-electric vehicles and battery storage technologies--the competitors to the energy sources of the 20th century and the 19th century--destroying the future for young people, who are looking to a clean energy future in the 21st century.
Trump's ``One Big Ugly Bill'' eliminated the residential clean and efficient energy incentives; they ripped out the funding for heat pumps. They are pretty much pulling them out of the walls, pulling solar panels off of roofs--in other words, committing highway robbery on homeowners who want to lower their bills, breathe clean air, and ensure a livable future for their families.
The ``Big Ugly Bill'' is going to mean a lot of big, ugly healthcare and big, ugly, higher energy bills arriving in the mail by the millions for families all across our country.
Republicans are forcing us backwards. Republicans are looking at America in a rearview mirror, not straight ahead toward the future which we should have for every family--a cleaner, healthier, more fair, and more safe future for everyone. No, that is not where they want to take us.
Democrats must stop the bleeding and fight hard for something better. And that means us. As part of that fight, we should not agree to a government funding deal that makes Americans' lives harder and more expensive. We can say loud and clear that we want to reverse Medicaid and Affordable Care cuts; no cuts for research into cancer and Alzheimer's and diabetes; no attacks on affordable, renewable energy; no cuts to affordable housing; to save public broadcasting; to protect public weather services; to save the EPA from being destroyed.
The Republicans are turning the EPA into ``Every Polluter's Ally.'' It is an open door for the oil, gas, coal, and polluting industries all across our country over at the EPA right now. DOGE is just saying: Welcome. Tell us what other environmental protection you want us to take off of the books that have helped to increase life expectancy in our Nation.
Beyond our fights for programs that help working families, we should not agree to a government funding deal that doesn't stop the lawlessness of the Trump administration. The Trump administration must spend what Congress allocates. If Republicans won't say that out loud-- that Donald Trump should follow the laws passed by this legislative body--what good are the funding laws that the House and Senate passed that are signed by the President? What is the whole point of having a House and Senate if Donald Trump and Russell Vought over at OMB say: We don't have to pay any attention.
OMB is not written into the U.S. Constitution. There was no revolution to make sure that Russell Vought at OMB gets to decide which programs get funded. When people were going down Mass Avenue in Massachusetts--from Arlington, to Lexington, to Concord--they were saying: No taxation without representation. We want a House. We want a Senate. We are going to have a revolution. We don't want a King. We want controls. We want safeguards.
If we can pass a bill that funds programs that better the lives of Americans in every State but Republicans refuse to commit that they won't then cut that same funding with a partisan vote later because Trump tells them to, what good are our funding laws? What was the whole point of bipartisanship in the first place?
Even if Republicans say that they will keep the promise of that funding, how can we believe them? How can we buy their promises when they have broken them before, over and over again? As recently as this month, they broke their promise.
Republicans are the ones who started the government shutdown on January 22, the day of the first Executive orders to cut funding across the government. We started this administration with Trump unilaterally and illegally withholding bipartisan-passed funding from whole Departments, like USAID, to targeting individual recipients, such as Harvard University in Massachusetts--cutting the funding at Harvard for cancer, for Alzheimer's, for diabetes, for Parkinson's, for the diseases for which they were looking to find a cure for families.
Republicans then unilaterally passed a continuing resolution last March because they and Trump refused to negotiate with Democrats. Republicans unilaterally passed a reconciliation bill to fund only their priorities, including lavish tax breaks for the wealthy and huge increases to the Defense Department budget, while gutting Medicaid and food assistance and Medicare and kicking 10 million Americans off of healthcare--10 million Americans are going to lose their healthcare--halting funding to clean up our air; causing energy bills to spike by attacking affordable, renewable energy.
Republicans also raised the debt limit in that bill because they didn't want to negotiate with Democrats over that.
Republicans unilaterally passed, in the dark of night, cuts to public broadcasting and global health just a couple of weeks ago, even though Congress had previously passed that funding on a bipartisan basis.
Democrats and Republicans vote for it, it goes down to the White House, and the President signs it. And the President says: Oh, not binding on me. I can now do whatever I want.
So everything that is taught to kids in the sixth grade about how our bills become law--that is just going into a shredder. That is just Etch A Sketched right out of history.
The President wants to be a King.
And that is where it all started 250 years ago, right along Massachusetts Avenue in Massachusetts: The redcoats are coming. King George wants to be controlling us without any representation from the people who are in the Colonies.
That is what we fought for--right here. The whole revolution was fought to build this building so that there was representation. Republicans just don't care about that.
Just this month, Trump's budget czar Russell Vought said he wanted the appropriations process to be less bipartisan--less bipartisan.
Remember when Trump said he didn't know anything about Project 2025? Remember when he said that? They asked him in September of 2024: What about Project 2025?
Don't know anything about it, says Trump.
In October: What about Project 2025?
Don't know anything about it, he said.
Well, Russell Vought is now the head of OMB. He wrote Project 2025. Trump gave the job to Russell Vought to then implement Project 2025.
Would you all agree that the President had a very high prevarication coefficient as he was talking about his knowledge of Project 2025? Do you all agree he knew exactly what he was doing; he was just lying to the American people? I think so.
The White House and Vought are saying they will use their own pocket rescissions--just another term for illegal impoundment of taxpayer money--to enact DOGE cuts in anything that Congress passes.
So I will quote Mark Twain to my Democratic colleagues. ``There is nothing to be learned from the second kick of a mule'' to your behind.
Maya Angelou put it more nicely: When someone tells you who they are the first time, you should believe them.
So Republicans are already plotting to eliminate the Department of Education through another partisan vote to steal taxpayer money for their own purposes. And I don't want to urge them to do the right thing because I have no confidence and no evidence that they will do the right thing, regardless of our request that they remember the bipartisan spirit that has always defined the appropriations process. To quote the great comedian Oscar Levant, they ``will double cross that bridge when'' they come to it. That is who they are. They are double- crossers. We can all see what happened in that rescission process, and we know they are planning more double-crossing coming right down the line.
Republicans are asking us not to believe our own eyes that have seen them cut funding to our States and to programs that save lives in our country. They are asking us not to believe our own ears that have heard them say they are going to cut and they are going to withhold funding for our special needs students, for cancer research, for farmers.
Republicans and Trump do not care about working with Democrats. When they say ``bipartisan process,'' what they really mean is ``We are going to do whatever we want to do. We are the Republicans; we are in charge of the whole country. We don't need to talk to anybody.''
Democrats don't have many tools, being in the minority, but an important one is doing everything we can to slow down this Trump march to increased costs, lost healthcare, and ultimately an economic catastrophe. So I have continued to vote against all Trump nominees because their only job is to execute Trump's illegal and unconstitutional agenda. I am voting no.
Those who have gotten bipartisan support have acted in their jobs just as partisan as the rest of them. Anyone who has stood up for independence and the rule of law--they have been fired by Trump. Just show that you have independence. Just show that you are going to stand up for the Constitution. Just raise a question. They fire you in the Trump administration. And what have Republicans done about it? Nothing. More nominations for more unqualified candidates.
I wasn't aware that Donald Trump placed one of his tariffs on courage, because we appear to be experiencing a Congress-wide shortage. And that is what is troubling, I think, to the American people because that is what is going to cause the problems that are about to be seen across our Nation.
The Trump administration thinks Congress is irrelevant, and unfortunately Republicans don't appear to have any interest in disabusing them of that notion. Just look at the Department of Energy. This month, the Department of Energy announced openly that it is ignoring the appropriations law on funding for wind and solar and all- electric vehicles--or, as young people call it, the future.
Only today, the Government Accountability Office said that the Department of Energy broke the law by failing to distribute funding for the Renew America's Schools Program, as directed by Congress.
We have to ask ourselves: How is passing another appropriations law going to address that lawlessness? It is like the definition of insanity--doing the exact same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
And it is just not about budgets. It is not just about dollars and cents. It is about common sense. That is what we are going to have to bring to this process because Trump and his henchmen have been on a deregulatory blitz.
The latest and perhaps the most egregious is the Environmental Protection Agency Administrator's--Lee Zeldin--announcement this week that the Trump administration is repealing the finding that climate change endangers our lives and health and safety. That is like a doctor repealing the finding that smoking causes lung cancer--but that is the head of the EPA under Donald Trump working for the oil, gas, and coal industry--or a firefighter repealing the finding that a lit match can burn down a house. That is the head of the EPA for Donald Trump. He says there is no such thing as climate change that needs any kind of action by the American people for the next generation of Americans--to protect them.
All I can say is, you can try to censor information, you can try to silence scientists--and they are firing them, the biologists and the chemists at the EPA, by the hundreds. They are just firing all these people who were summa cum laude in college, all the kids that sat in the first row in your high school class, all those biologists and chemists. They are firing them all. They don't want to hear about climate change. They don't want to hear about the science.
So you can try to bury the facts, you can try to bury the reality, but you can't change that. You can't change it.
The endangerment finding is backed by science. The endangerment finding is backed by law. It has withstood every single attempt to challenge it so far.
You are saying: What is the endangerment finding? Well, in Massachusetts v. EPA, in a Supreme Court decision in 2007, the Supreme Court ruled that the EPA had to determine: Do greenhouse gases in large amounts endanger the lives and well-being and welfare of citizens in the United States? And the EPA made that finding under Barack Obama, using science, saying: Yes, there is an endangerment.
That is the law we have operated under for 15 years. That is why we have cleaner cars. That is why utilities don't send up as much pollution up into the air--because of that finding. That is why we have lowered the temperature, lowered the thermostat in the United States and across the planet. We have just reduced the temperature.
Well, the endangerment finding gave the EPA the power to regulate planet-warming greenhouse gases as air pollution under the Clean Air Act because climate change threatens our welfare, and that authority came from the Supreme Court of the United States.
Driven by the devastation that climate change wreaked on its citizens, Massachusetts sued the EPA for not regulating the gases that contribute to climate change, and Massachusetts won. The Supreme Court agreed that the EPA was obligated to safeguard people from the actual and imminent threat that greenhouse gases pose to people everywhere, and that is known as the endangerment finding.
Nearly two decades later, that danger has only gotten worse, more intense, more acute, and more personal for everyone in our country and around the world, and we have to be the leaders, not the laggards.
You can't preach temperance from a barstool. You can't tell the rest of the world to do something if you are not doing it. You can't tell someone not to drink a beer or have a cigar in their hand if you have a cigar in your hand and a beer in the other hand. No one is going to follow you.
That is where Donald Trump has taken us now on climate change. That is where Lee Zeldin has taken us on climate change. He has given away the moral authority, the technological leadership that should be the United States of America.
And I breathed--I breathed--that dirty air from wildfire smoke. I have seen horrible floods steal the livelihoods of Massachusetts farmers and warming waters wreck the fishing grounds off of our coast of Massachusetts. I have grieved with those who lost lives in hurricanes, those who were forced from their family homes thanks to rising tides.
Look at those families and tell me that this isn't dangerous. Look at those young people who worry about their future and see every year hotter than the last. Every year is warmer than the preceding one, and that is because the oil, gas, and coal industry continues to send more and more of these greenhouse gases up into the atmosphere. Look at the families paying skyrocketing electric and home insurance bills, wondering how they are going to keep their kids safe in a crisis and keep food on the table. Tell me their welfare isn't hurt by the climate crisis.
This endangerment finding keeps us safe. It says that there is danger and something must be done about it because you can't fix what you won't face. There is danger from sending all of those pollutants up into the atmosphere. Then, like the ceiling here, it is captured, and then the heat is held in, and the planet gets warmer and warmer, and the fires become hotter and hotter, and the floods gets bigger and bigger, and the storms get more and more violent because we keep the heat in because of the greenhouse effect of all of those pollutants.
This administration just continues to bury its head in the sand and will bury Americans along with it. We are going to lose a lot of lives.
Now, we have discovered a second endangerment finding. Lee Zeldin and Donald Trump are a clear and present danger to the welfare of our Nation today.
I think it is pretty clear to young people that they have made their own endangerment finding. They know Donald Trump is a danger to them. They know Lee Zeldin at the EPA is a danger to them.
How did they justify this decision in the White House when all of the science in the world is against them? The Trump administration found five crank, faux scientists and gave them a platform for lies and misinformation. These known climate deniers argued that our seas aren't rising more quickly and that extreme heat caused by global warming can't affect our crops.
Putting these five climate deniers in charge of a climate-science report is like putting a vaccine denier in charge of the national health Agency. Wait. Wait. I am sorry. They did that as well. They did that as well. A vaccine denier is running the Department of Health and Human Services. It is unbelievable.
In an era where science should be venerated, in fact, it is just being disregarded across all of Trump's Agencies.
This report put out by the Department of Energy ignored the overwhelming scientific consensus and ongoing body of evidence that climate change puts us in danger, evidence that we are already bearing witness to. You don't need to be a climate scientist to see that storms are becoming more furious and more deadly.
Just this month, we saw extreme weather take the lives of loved ones in Texas in that flooding and in New Mexico, and those floods were supercharged by climate change. That climate change was driven by the greed of the fossil fuel industry, the oil, gas, and coal industries.
This sham Department of Energy report is an attack on common sense, and it is an attack on public safety.
Trump and Zeldin are arguing that American transportation emissions don't contribute to global climate change. EPA's own data shows that if our transportation sector was a country, it would be the fourth largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world.
They argue that sea levels aren't rising, that warming temperatures can't kill. That climate denial is going to cost lives. They are just denying science. They are denying reality. They are denying what everyone sees 3 nights out of 7 on their television sets as the lead story--these wild storms and wildfires that affect all parts of our country. They are saying that warming temperatures can't kill. Well, again, climate denial costs lives.
This is Trump's America, where EPA stands for ``Every Polluter's Ally.'' It is just a revolving door. Come on in, tell us which environmental regulations are making you less profitable, and we will give you permission to ignore those environmental laws and send more pollution up into the air--more cancers, more asthma, more disease in children and pregnant women. We will just give you a permission slip to go and do it.
Your health is sacrificed for their wealth.
Trump and Zeldin and their whole cabal of polluters should be ashamed, and they should be held accountable.
From day one, Trump has had it out for any technology that might save money for working Americans, usually for reasons that range from the personal, like his problems with water-efficient toilets, to the personally enriching for Donald Trump.
Look at wind power. Trump's crusade against wind power dates to 2006, when he bought an 1,800-acre estate in Scotland near a planned wind farm that he warned would be ``really ugly.'' You know he just wants better views for the golf courses, for which he is willing to violate our ethics laws.
Now look at his fossil fuel donors. In April of 2024, Trump demanded $1 billion in campaign donations from the fossil fuel industry, at Mar- a-Lago. Give me $1 billion, he said, and I will take care of those environmental problems for you. And the fossil fuel industry has been cashing it in for favors ever since.
In the first 2 weeks alone in the Trump administration, Trump's top 15 fossil fuel billionaire donors--otherwise known as the ``oilgarchy''--increased their wealth by a collective $2.4 billion.
In the ``Big Ugly Bill,'' mom-and-pop taxpayers were forced to give $18 billion in handouts to Big Oil and Big Gas. That is the One Big Beautiful Bill that the Republicans brag about. Do they brag about the $18 billion they gave to the oil, gas, and coal industry? You are not going to hear that when you hear the litany of the things they were concerned about. That is on top of the $35 billion the fossil fuel industry already gets in tax breaks and has gotten for decades and decades and decades.
Do you know what drives them crazy? When we give tax breaks for wind and solar, all-electric vehicles, battery storage technologies. That is what drives them crazy--when the competition can finally get up and compete.
That is what Donald Trump is doing in return for the funding from the oil, gas, and coal industry. He is just unleveling the playing field so that the fossil fuel industry, as they were in the 19th and 20th centuries, can dominate in the 21st century, regardless of the environmental impacts and the health impacts on the American people.
The result of Trump's showboating on trade, besides higher costs for American families--Trump said the European Union would buy $750 billion of energy resources from the United States over the next 3 years. You heard him say that just last week. This is more than pay to play; it is pay to slay our chance at a livable future--our clean air, our clean water, our affordable energy bills.
The One Big Beautiful Bill's attacks on clean and cheap energy just absolutely are ahistorical. In the ``One Big Ugly Bill,'' Republicans took aim at the cheapest form of energy out there: renewable energy. It is cheaper than oil and gas and coal, and they hate that now. It is a young person's vision for the future.
Their legislation essentially puts a new tax on cheap, clean power-- raising costs for ratepayers everywhere as projects to install new generation slow to a crawl, which is deeply ironic given that nearly 80 percent of clean energy investments from the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 that they sought to destroy have gone to Republican districts, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs in red districts across this country. Think about that. Trump is actively working to destroy economic growth and jobs in the very places that got him elected.
More demand, less supply. More costs, less relief. Bills going up by more than $100 a year per family. We are already seeing energy costs start to spike, rising nearly three times higher this year than during Biden's term and rising three times as fast as general inflation.
This is a predictor of coming atrocities due to the Big Beautiful Bill. Electricity rates are spiking across our country. People are seeing it in their bills on their kitchen tables. Energy is getting more expensive more quickly for every family across our country, and that is all thanks to the Republicans' ``Big Ugly Bill.''
But that is not all. The ``Big Ugly Bill'' will increase emissions equivalent to putting 72 million new cars on the road and eliminates pollution-reduction programs, leading to approximately hundreds of additional premature deaths in our country every single year. This means more asthma, more heart attacks, more families losing loved ones--all because Republicans want to give billionaire polluters another bonus.
Kill the new industries, Trump says, Big Oil says. Kill those new industries. And they did.
Undermining clean energy means all of us breathe dirtier air, costing Americans in expensive trips to the emergency room for asthma attacks, lost schooldays, lost workdays. Asthma is already responsible for nearly 1.8 million emergency department visits, over 94,000 hospitalizations, more than 3,500 deaths annually. And what the Republicans have done in cooperation with Donald Trump is it is supercharging--it is supercharging--asthma visits to emergency rooms in our country.
Cutting clean energy is making all of those health benefits go away, and the economic burden of asthma is staggering. Let me give you the numbers. It costs our healthcare system approximately $50 billion each year, almost $3 billion in lost school and work days, and $29 billion from mortality. The cumulative impact of breathing dirty air from living near a highway or a powerplant means your risk of lung cancer skyrockets. Nearly $24 billion was spent on lung cancer in 2020, and it costs each patient $200,000, on average. But wait, there is more.
At the same time that the bill slashes Medicaid and slashes the Affordable Care Act as it pays out to dirty, expensive energy that pollutes your lungs, it also cuts billions in historic investments from the Inflation Reduction Act, in environmental justice, and air pollution reduction programs, even at schools.
This included the $20 billion climate bank that I secured with Chris Van Hollen in the Inflation Reduction Act, which is projected to spur more than $250 billion in public and private sector investment to create jobs, lower Americans' energy costs, strengthen our energy independence, combat the climate crisis, deploy solar, deploy charging stations for electric vehicles. That was the climate bank, which I was able to create with Chris Van Hollen. They want to eliminate that. They have taken it to court. It was working too successfully. Anything that is working to deploy clean energy technologies, they hate.
Republicans also targeted clean car regulations that saved drivers money at the pump. Instead of the dawn of the clean energy future, Republicans are sunsetting incentives that would spur clean domestic manufacturing for industries.
This bill is on track to destroy more than 840,000 American jobs by 2030 in the clean energy sector. This is the largest job-destroying bill to ever pass Congress--killed 840,000 new jobs. Never before has Congress done anything like this, deliberately, intentionally killing all of those jobs. And that means fewer manufacturing, solar installation, home efficiency contracts all across our country.
States with the largest job losses: Texas, Florida, Indiana, Georgia. They voted to destroy the jobs in their own States. They were going to be the center of this revolution. That is where the manufacturing plants were. But the oil, gas, and coal industry, they said to Donald Trump: Kill it. And each of them received, as it is said in ``The Godfather,'' part 1--they each got an offer they couldn't refuse. So as a result, they voted to kill all of that job creation.
This isn't a red State or blue State issue; this is creating a national economic crisis. The States with the highest spikes in energy prices: South Carolina, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Their prices are spiking right now and have been and are going to continue to spike because of this bill.
This administration has made their tradeoff clear: your future for their profit. That is Trump's ``Art of the Deal.'' You give up your future, and we get to make billions. So this is absolutely something that young people in our country, the next generation, they are going to be devastated by these decisions. And it is going to unfold next year, 5 years from now, 10 years from now, 20 years from now.
They are going to be looking back, saying: What did that generation think? How could that Congress kill wind and solar and all electric vehicles? Because the Republican bill is going to make the United States a laggard, not a leader, in innovation. Already China is investing four times more than the United States in renewable energy. Instead of catching up and overtaking China, this bill will cede more jobs and progress to China.
In fact, in 2024, China installed 357,000 megawatts of wind and solar. That is roughly the amount of wind and solar that the United States has installed in our country's entire history. China did it last year. You would think we want to take them on. You would think that is a challenge for the United States in our innovation, our entrepreneurial spirit. And instead, Donald Trump said to the Republicans: Let's just surrender. Let's give up. Let's not compete in the energy sectors of the future. Let's let the Chinese sell the electric vehicles to the world. Let's let them sell the solar panels, the batteries, the wind technologies to the world. We are not going to do it.
And by the way, he did the same thing with the biotech sector. When you slash the NIH budget, China is saying: Thank you. We didn't like the fact that the United States was ahead of us. We don't know what we deserved to get this gift from Trump, but thank you for giving us the clean energy and biotech future for the 21st century--and asking for nothing in return. That is what Trump just did. That is what the Republicans are doing out here.
Between January and May of 2025 alone, China added 198,000 megawatts of solar and 46,000 megawatts of wind. China now has more than 1 million megawatts of solar energy on the grid. China also produces 80 percent of the solar panels. Do you want to compete with the Chinese? No, says Trump. I don't want to compete. I don't like solar. I don't like wind. I don't like batteries. I don't like all-electric vehicles. I don't want to compete. America, we are 5 percent of the world. Let's just control the 5 percent of the world that is the population of the United States. Let the Chinese have the other 95 percent of the world for the clean energy future for the 21st century. That is the decision the President made, and Republicans went along with it just this month.
By contrast, the United States had approximately 1,200 gigawatts of utility-scale power on our grid. The United States added only 50,000 megawatts of solar and 4,000 megawatts of wind throughout the entirety of 2024--not too shabby but only a fraction of what China was able to accomplish. China sold over 11 million electric vehicles in 2024. China continues to be the world's EV manufacturing hub and is responsible for more than 70 percent of global production of electric vehicles.
The United States remains a net importer of electric cars, with imports increasing by nearly 40 percent in 2024. How are we going to catch up if Republicans would rather hamstring the industry? We are not close to winning this race. The Republicans won't let us even get to the starting line.
In fact, they don't even know where the ball game is. They are still driving around trying to find out where this game is. It is as though they don't understand that China is targeting our key industries: biotech, clean energy. And instead of responding with a plan--and we can beat China with a plan. You can't beat them without a plan. And what they did, the Republicans, in unison with Donald Trump, with JD Vance breaking the tie, the Vice President of the United States came here to cast the vote that said: We are giving up on biotech. We are giving up on clean tech. We are just going to let the Chinese have it. Just absolutely insane, economically.
So since the start of the Trump administration through April 2025, the Trump administration has already cost America more than 62,000 clean energy jobs, over $14 billion in private sector clean energy projects, and these vanishing projects were winners for the grid, for your wallets, for our economy.
In 2024, 94 percent of all new electricity generation added was from wind and solar and batteries. That is 50,000 megawatts of solar, 4,000 megawatts of wind, 11,000 megawatts of battery.
So think of it this way: If you are the oil, gas, and coal industry, you are looking at 2024, and you are seeing 94 percent of all new electricity being wind and solar and batteries. It is driving them crazy because this year would be 94 percent and next year would be 94 percent and the year after and the year after. And natural gas would, slowly but surely, just recede, recede into the rearview mirror of American history. And the coal industry would join them.
So they hate it. They had to kill it. They had to kill the revolution that they said was never going to be competitive. And when it became competitive, they said: Now, we are going to kill it. Utility-scale solar, onshore wind are the cheapest energy technologies to operate and quickest to build even without subsidies. Solar panels today cost 1 percent of what they cost 30 years ago.
Can I say that? Solar right now costs only 1 percent what it did 30 years ago, and these cheap, clean megawatts of power are powering our economy in red and blue States, and compare these with the fuels of the past.
Last year, only 2,500 megawatts of natural gas were added and zero from coal. That is a losing streak if I ever saw one. Trump and Republicans like to characterize Democrats' interest in addressing climate change as quasi-religious.
Well, here is the real gospel. Clean energy is not polarizing; it is popular in the polls. Seventy percent of registered voters support the IRA, with over 70 percent of voters saying the United States needs to use more renewable energy than it does today. That is not religion; that is stimulus in solar panels.
That is why Republicans are using every trick up their sleeve to rig the game while eliminating programs and incentives that lower energy costs and reduce pollution. An energy demand that is increasing, driven by power-hungry AI data centers and natural gas exports out of our country, Republicans are choosing to strangle America's supply of cheap solar and wind.
And thanks to Republicans and their ``Big Ugly Bill,'' wind deployment is expected to drop from 200,000 megawatts and solar by 150,000 megawatts by the year 2035 compared to prior estimates before they passed their bill.
It is absolutely unbelievable the stuff that was working and cheapest and cleanest, they are destroying. The stuff that is dirtiest and more expensive, they are giving tax breaks to. It is the opposite of what the rest of the world wants. And China knows they are going to be selling the solar panels, the all-electric vehicles, the batteries, the wind to the rest of the world, 95 percent of the population. And we are pulling out of that competition.
This is economics 101. High demand plus low supply means higher energy prices for everyone, forcing families to pay at least $130 more per month on energy bills in 5 years and $170 more per month in 10 years.
It goes even beyond the ``Big Ugly Bill.'' We are living in their big ugly world. Earlier this month, the Department of the Interior released a memo stating that all decisions related to wind and solar energy projects on Federal lands now require the Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum's personal signoff. Who is Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum? He was a fossil fuel guy. Now, you have to go to the fossil fuel guy to get permission to deploy wind and solar.
A few weeks later, the Trump administration came out with new messages, new measures to further sabotage wind, and the staff at the Department of Energy are now full-time coal lobbyists.
Can I say that again? The staff at the Department of Energy are full- time coal lobbyists who have been brought in. Coal, yes, the dirtiest source out there, both a major contributor to the climate crisis and to the public health threat for communities nearby. That is who is running the Department of Energy.
Just like Trump, coal is outdated, costly, dangerous. Perhaps it is no surprise that he is in a weird love affair with coal. It is just weird that he loves this technology from 100 years ago. He just can't move to the future.
Coal has shrunk from nearly half the country's electricity generation in 2008 to only 15 percent at the start of this year, a trend driven primarily by competition from cheaper fossil gas and renewables. Building new solar, even solar plus storage, is now cheaper than running existing coal plants in the United States. It is already winning.
From today's Twitter post of coal captioned, ``She is the moment''--a type of coal, mind you, that has not been mined in the United States for more than 80 years--to spreading misinformation that coal is critical to modern technology, some of the coal love affair has just been plain weird.
But more concerningly, they are actively spending your ratepayer dollars to keep retiring coal plants online.
With Trump's sham energy emergency Executive order, he has enabled the Department of Energy to use emergency authority to keep coal online, forcing working families to pay more in order to line the pockets of those Big Oil billionaires.
That is not an energy emergency. This is a Trump energy tax on the American public. It is a deliberate strategy to make sure working families stay dependent on a damaging fuel source that makes a handful of billionaires richer by the day while everyone else pays the price in higher bills and a deterioration of their health.
The truth is that Trump's gutting of cheap and reliable wind and solar has created a reliability risk to our grid, in addition to the rapid proliferation of massive, load-sucking data centers.
AI is incredibly energy intensive. One ChatGPT search uses ten times the amount of power needed for a Google search. It took the energy consumption of 28,000 households to train ChatGPT4. Data centers are expected to demand 130 gigawatts of electricity load by the end of this decade, equivalent to the electricity used by about 100 million U.S. homes.
This will require adding 10 to 20 additional gigawatts per year to the electricity grid. Data centers are expected to demand--
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Mr. MARKEY. I thank you, Madam President, and I will conclude, and I will be back because this subject is just too important.
We are now in a climate crisis. It is only going to worsen. NOAA is predicting higher than normal hurricanes coming our way. They are going to be supercharged.
The planet is running a fever, and there are no emergency rooms for planets. We have to engage in preventive care. The Republicans have removed that care, and so we have to have this debate, this discussion.
And I thank my colleagues, but especially my Democratic colleagues. We have to continue to fight. We have to continue to stand. We have to continue to ensure that the American people know that we are in this battle for the clean energy future for the next generations of young Americans who are out there depending upon us to lead that fight for them.
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