Terminating the National Emergency Declared with Respect to Energy

Floor Speech

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am here on the floor today to talk about President Trump's completely fake energy emergency, which is nothing more than a pretext to move money from the pockets of Americans to his big fossil fuel mega donors.

You may remember that he had a meeting with big fossil fuel donors and asked for a billion dollars in campaign money in return for giving them whatever they want. Well, I don't know that he got a billion, but he got hundreds of millions, and, sure enough, he is giving them everything they want.

But the side effect of the fossil fuel industry having ownership and control over the Trump administration and all of its policies and decisions is that people's electricity rates are going to go up. They are already going up, and they are going to go up more.

This graph shows how voters are feeling about electricity prices, and it says most voters are feeling some pain from electricity prices.

This is already. It is going to get worse. Already, 26 percent of Americans say it has a lot of impact on their lives; 31 percent say a decent amount of impact on their lives; another 30, a little bit. Only 9 percent say: None at all. It is cool. Electric prices are good with me.

So that is a pretty big hit.

Even among Republicans, 25 percent say it hits them a lot, 29 percent say it hits them a decent amount, and 32 percent say it hits them a little bit. Only 11 percent say: None at all. Electric prices are cool.

So electric prices are going up, and they are going up big time, and they are going up for deliberate reasons.

The one deliberate reason has to do with the AI, crypto, tech bros data centers problem.

As you know, the data center crypto people gave a lot of money to Donald Trump. They are big political donors. They are getting pretty much everything they want from this administration. In return, they are making the Trump family hugely rich in crypto billions. But in the meantime, they are driving people's electric prices up.

They are doing so this way. This is an interesting graph. This shows places where electric bills are going down. Blue means the prices are going down. And what is measured here is how far away you are from a data center.

So here is 0 to about 25 miles away from a data center. So if you live between 0 and 25 miles from a data center, if you are in the range of the electric utility that has to serve that data center when it drops in with its huge electric load, with its huge water demand, with all the traffic and pollution and everything else that it means, you see very, very little in the way of cost decreases.

In fact, if you compare it to places that are farther and farther away--this is about 225 miles away from a data center--you can see that the electric prices going down happens much more the farther away you are from a data center.

This shows the opposite. This shows the places where electric prices are soaring--the price increases. And it is the same deal. This is how far away you are from a data center. If you are from 0 to 25 miles away, compare that to this. The comparison between your electricity price increases, if you are near a data center, versus your electricity price decreases, if you are near a data center, couldn't be more clear.

This is me, with a gold marker, marking off the difference. That is not in the original graph, but it focuses your attention on how, when you are near a data center, you are less likely to have low electric prices. You can see how low it is compared to the further away you get.

But if you are near a data center--the nearer you are to a data center, the higher your electric prices go. And if you are really near one, if you are in this block here, within 25 miles, your electric prices are skyrocketing, and that is not a mistake. That is being done on purpose because the Trump administration won't make these big donors who are in crypto world and data center world bring their own clean energy or provide their own clean water, for that matter, to the grid.

So what they do is they arrive, they dump a huge amount of demand into the existing grid, and that means that new and more expensive units have to come online. As those new and more expensive units have to come online, the price goes up and up and up because in almost every grid, it is the most expensive unit running at any minute that sets the price for the entire grid in that minute.

So if you can drive up demand, you drive up these huge, inefficient, polluting, expensive, powerplants and the price goes through the roof. That is precisely why you are seeing this huge increase in costs when you are near a data center, and it is almost impossible to find a decrease in costs if you are near a data center.

So problem 1, energy emergency 1, caused by the Trump administration to pay off its big crypto donors is this: It is the data center bomb falling on regular electric utility ratepayers who suddenly watch their bills skyrocket.

Here is the other bomb. This is the plot in the Trump administration for the sake of their big fossil fuel donors to try to hamper and hinder and injure clean energy. They have the big lie, which is to say clean energy is more expensive; it is clean energy that is driving costs on the grid.

Oh my gosh, expensive clean energy--wrong. That just isn't true. That is a complete fabrication.

This graph shows the Texas grid. This is an illustration of how that plays out. Texas has a unique grid. It is unique to Texas. It doesn't interact with the other grids the way most of the grids do. They have interconnections, and they can interact with each other. Texas is isolated. That is why that big freeze in Texas shut down all the power and caused people to freeze. That took place because that grid was unified, and they couldn't call in power from elsewhere.

This graph does two things. It takes a look at 1 month, August back in 2018, and it looks at what power costs at different levels of demand on the grid. So in 2018, if you had 40 units of gigawatts of demand, then you were paying about 20 cents per megawatt hour. It stayed about the same until demand got bigger. If you get up to 50 megawatts, 60 megawatts, then it starts to spike here, and it hits $75 per megawatt hour once it approaches 70 gigawatts of load.

So what is important here is the comparison. In 2018, these were the prices in August for that increment of load during August. This, the yellow graph, is 2024, 6 years later. What happened to the Texas grid between 2018 and 2024? What happened to the Texas grid between 2018 and 2024 is that huge amounts of clean energy came onto the grid. In fact, last year, 95 percent of the new power coming on the U.S. grid was clean energy. It was solar, it was wind, and it was battery--95 percent.

Between 2018 and 2024, you see this move in the Texas grid. And look at what happens. Pick, let's say, 60 megawatts of load at a given moment in August of 2024. You paid 20 bucks per megawatt hour for the exact same circumstance. Six years earlier, you would have paid 35, maybe 40 bucks--20 bucks, twice as much, basically.

The reason the cost went down from 2018 to 2024 was new, inexpensive, clean energy coming on the grid.

Why is it inexpensive? It is inexpensive because wind is free. It is inexpensive because solar is free. Once you have built the infrastructure to capture the solar rays, once you have built the infrastructure to capture the wind flowing by, God made those resources free.

For a fossil fuel plant, you still have to build it, but once you have built it, you have to bring in the fossil fuel, pipe in the fossil fuel, burn the fossil fuel. It is expensive. And so almost always, the unit that is setting the price on the grid for electricity is a fossil fuel unit because they are the most expensive ones. So they set the price for the whole grid.

You can see the difference. Let's go to--let's call this 68 megawatts of load, just comparing these two points. Back in 2018, that would have been a $75 per-megawatt-hour cost--75 bucks, and yet here, it is $25. It is a third the cost on the Texas grid because all that clean energy came on. And you have to get way out here before the price spikes when those polluting, expensive, fossil fuel plants have to come on at 80- plus megawatts of load to even begin to match the prices from 6 years earlier.

Clean wind and solar power save consumers money. So when the Trump administration says it is going to inhibit, hinder, injure clean energy development, that is backing this back out of the grid. Now it starts to look more like 2018. If you are buying electricity at this level of grid load, you are paying three times as much--three times as much.

And this is deliberate. You don't think the Trump people don't understand this? They know perfectly well.

And here is the deal. The extra two-thirds of your cost here that comes out of your pocket if you are in Texas is because the clean energy isn't there lowering the cost. That comes out of your pocket.

Where does it go? Where does it go? I will tell you where it goes. It goes to the fossil fuel units that had to get called up to meet that amount of load. The most expensive units on the grid have to be called up to meet that load, and they drive the price up.

If you are a fossil fuel billionaire and you own a bunch of polluting powerplants, sometimes, particularly with clean energy around, they are sitting idle. They are not being called up. They are too expensive to be called up because clean energy is in there beating them. So if you own those plants, you want to go and talk to the Trump administration and say: Hey, knock that clean energy out of the grid. I want my polluting, expensive plant to run again because that is money in my pocket.

And if you are selling that plant to fossil fuel, you go to the Trump administration and you say: Hey, clobber those clean energy guys. I gave you good money. Clobber those clean energy guys and now I get to sell all that fossil fuel to burn to run those expensive plants.

So the people that make a bundle out of knocking down clean energy are the fossil fuel people who cut that deal for hundreds of millions of dollars to Trump's campaign in return for him clobbering their rivals by making it difficult to develop clean energy projects. And what they don't want you to know is that this is on purpose and this is for fossil fuel.

They don't want you to know how this works. They don't want you to know about how the most expensive units get called up as demand grows-- that when you take out the clean energy, even more expensive units get called up; that those are the polluting fossil fuel units that tend to set the price.

It is a massive transfer of money from the pockets of ratepayers, whose electric utility rates go up, to the fossil fuel industry in return for all the political money they gave Donald Trump. That is the deal. It is a huge transfer of wealth from ratepayers to big fossil fuel donors.

What they are hoping is that you won't know this. They are hoping you will blame it on the electric utility that sends you the bill. They are hoping that you won't notice that behind that soaring electric utility bill is manipulation of the grid to knock out clean energy, to drive up prices.

And if that is not bad enough, what you then find out is that the climate consequences of all that fossil fuel pollution start coming home to roost, as well.

We did some work on this in the Budget Committee. I will use three quick slides.

These are places where nonrenewal rates for homeowners insurance are increasing. What is the nonrenewal rate, you may ask, for homeowners insurance? That is how often the insurance company says to you, their longtime customers: Hey, thanks for being my longtime customer, but you are fired now. I don't want your property. I can't insure it. There is too much climate risk.

If you looked at where it is really spiking, where did you get? Florida--Florida, because they have huge risks from flooding, sea level rise, hurricanes, and storms. Their whole insurance market is melting down. Where else? Out West, where wildfires are making properties uninsurable.

I tell you what, if you know somebody in Florida, ask them about their home insurance. Just do that for me. If you know somebody who lives in Florida, ask them about their home insurance. You will hear an earful from them.

It is not just getting shot down; it is also that insurance rates are going up. Again, look where--along these coastal areas, along these wildfire-prone areas.

What the Trump administration is doing to reward its big fossil fuel megadonors isn't just to transfer money from your pockets to the big donors through electric utility rates. It is not just to transfer money from your pockets to their big crypto donors by letting them irresponsibly dump their demand on the grid. They are also breaking down the home insurance market so that not only are the insurers saying to people, ``I can't insurance you any longer; your climate risk is too great,'' but they are also saying, ``Wow, if I am going to insure you, we have to really raise our rates.''

These are premium increases--100 percent, 200 percent, 300 percent-- that you can find in these areas. In Florida, the average homeowners insurance is $14,000. If you go to Miami-Dade, it is $21,000 for homeowners insurance. If you go to Louisiana here, it is $11,000.

You have got people who try to buy a home in these places. They get the deal together, and they get the mortgage together. They show the Realtor that they can make the nut on the mortgage. Then they try to get insurance to close the deal, and they can't get insurance, and the deal falls apart. There are young families who can't buy homes because of the skyrocketing prices or because the insurers won't insure them because it is too dangerous. And guess what that does. Where does that land? That lands in home values declining.

This is not just me saying this. The chief economist for Freddie Mac--the huge mortgage company--predicts that climate risk makes homeowners insurance unavailable.

When you can't get homeowners insurance, what can you also not get on your property? You can't get a mortgage. If you are a Palm Beach billionaire who is swapping mansions with other billionaires, great, you can pay cash. But for regular families who have bought their homes with a mortgage, when they need to sell them, they need to find somebody who can buy them with a mortgage 9 times out of 10, maybe 99 times out of 100. So when you can't get a mortgage, what happens to that piece of property? When the property is uninsurable and unmortgageable, its value goes down.

That is why the chief economist for Freddie Mac, the mortgage company, predicted the cascade from climate risk to uninsurability, to no mortgages, to what he called a coastal property values crash that could lead to a recession like in 2008.

I remember 2008. It was ugly. I do not want to go there again.

But here you see places in which home values are predicted to change--along the coast here, where there is all the coastal risk; and here, where there is big wildfire risk. And guess what. If you look at the graph, it goes from no change--that is the tan; that is most of it--all the way to--how about that one? You can't read it; so I will tell you what it says: minus 100 percent--a total wipeout of your home's value because it is uninsurable and unmortgageable.

That is the future we are looking at. This is the energy emergency. This is the real energy emergency, and it is an energy emergency that is caused by fossil fuel pollution. The immediate circumstance also comes through the electric utility bills, as you put less and less clean energy into the grid and make more and more expensive fossil fuels, set the price, and at the same time, you are selling out to the crypto guys. You let them come in and irresponsibly dump their demand on your grid, and supply and demand show that prices spike.

So if you want to know what the real emergency is, the real emergency is that the Trump administration has sold out to the crypto industry; it has sold out to the fossil fuel industry. It denies climate change; it pretends it is a hoax. Literally, the President has said that in, like, words. And that climate change problem is destroying home insurance markets, mortgage markets, and property values. And it has already begun.

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