Control Carbon And Control Life

Floor Speech

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Mr. LATTA. I appreciate the gentleman for yielding.

Ohio and Indiana are going to be especially hard hit under the cap-and-tax, cap-and-trade system. I think it's important to start off with what the President said last year, Under my plan of cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket. That will cost money. They will pass that money on to the consumers.

And I tell you, my friend, that's what scares me. As the gentleman from Utah was just saying, pointing out the amount of money that's going to be collected under the system is absolutely scary.

Ohio, Indiana. I would like to point a few of these out.

I represent in Ohio the 5th Congressional District, the largest manufacturing district in the State, also the largest agricultural district in the State of Ohio. And when we're talking about cap-and-trade, cap-and-tax back home, it has businesses and farmers scared. Why is that?

The Heritage Foundation, not too long ago, put together what they call this manufacturing vulnerability index. It takes how many manufacturing jobs that you have in your district and also with the type of energy mostly that your State uses--in our case, and also if you look at Indiana, Ohio is at 87.2 percent coal while Indiana is at 94.2 percent coal.

The problem with it, as you see, we have a very high vulnerability. When you take these numbers and go across--a lot of times when you were in school you wanted to be at the top, when you were playing sports you wanted to be at the top. This is one chart you don't want to be at the top of. The Ohio 5th Congressional District ranks number three in the most vulnerable districts in the State of Ohio when it comes under the cap-and-tax, cap-and-trade notion.

What's happening right now? We've been in a tough recession. Again, being the largest manufacturing district in the State of Ohio, we're suffering. And fortunately when the announcements were made from General Motors yesterday, we did not lose our General Motors plant, but just nearby in the 4th Congressional District, they are going to be closing. But a lot of my people work in those plants.

So what does this mean? One of my counties right now, which is right in the corner of Indiana, Michigan and Ohio, it's the highest unemployment rate in the State of Ohio. Williams County. Over 16 percent. You have hardworking men and women up there that want to go to a job every day; but because of this recession that we're in, they're not getting to a job.

What we gotta do is we've got to get these people back to work. But the thing is--that's already been mentioned by my friend in Georgia--it's going to be very difficult to retain, expand and create new jobs if we're in a situation where we're not going be able to compete around the world. How is that?

If you look at these numbers right here with Indiana and Ohio, if you tip this down to the 20th Congressional District that's going to be hit by cap-and-tax, 16 of those districts are from Ohio and Indiana. It's not very enviable when Indiana and Ohio split eight each in the vulnerability of our jobs into the future under cap-and-tax. And it's going to be very difficult for businesses to survive.

Every week when I get home, I try to be in my district at a plant or in a business. And not too long ago, I was in another factory--and these factories are all pretty much holding on to what they got. It might be that they're not able to go out there and keep people employed. So a lot of them are doing, you know, if we cut back and cut back the number of hours people are working, if management takes a cut, if they try to do anything in-house and not do any contracting out, what happens is they're trying to hold on to the jobs they got.

However, there are a lot of factories in my district that are working 5, 6 days a week. Now they've got people working four 10-hour-shift days. The problem with that is people aren't working overtime. They're not getting money to put in the bank. They're not getting more money out there because--in my district I have the largest washing machine plant in the world. In a good year, they're producing over 6 million washing machines. We can produce anything in northwest, north central Ohio when it comes on the automotive side. But, again, these companies are hurting.

You have got companies out there that supply the auto plants and if you're in tier 2 or tier 3, you're in trouble. They say, Well, it's going to be rationalized--I think the term was down the street--that we're going to have to rationalize what's going to happen to these. A good term for that is ``you're out of business.'' Where are these people going to go? We've got a domino effect that's going to be happening. But this domino effect is going to be happening more rapidly if these companies cannot afford power.

Again, in Ohio, 87.2 percent of our power is coal generated. Indiana, again, is 94.2. So we can't have that going on because when we're talking about these numbers, we're talking about a catastrophe in the making.

I just wanted to show this chart. Again, this is the top eight districts in the State of Ohio. They're going to be affected by cap-and-tax. I would like to show you the bottom eight.

Well, as we start down the list, that being as least affected with a manufacturing vulnerability index ranking of only 3.2 percent is Mr. Waxman's district. When you go down to Speaker Pelosi's district it only gets down to a 2.2. And, again, we're talking about Ohio and Indiana, districts in the 100 percent, the 98 percent range.

Out in California they're using a lot of nuclear; they're using a lot of natural gas. So these areas in the country aren't going to be hit.

People say, back home, Bob, who's asking for this? We're in a catastrophe
here in the Midwest. Who's asking for this?

If you look at a map, go from California to Oregon to Washington, you know these are very low vulnerability with these States. You go from the east coast, very low vulnerability. Not a lot of manufacturing, not a lot of coal.

So when you look at this, who's getting hit the hardest? The Midwest. Those States that are the industrial heartland of America, those men and women who get up every day, pack that lunch box and get to work are the ones that are going to be affected.

And as the gentleman mentioned from Georgia, what's going to happen?

Well, if we can't manufacture cheaply in the United States and compete against the rest of the world--and the rest of the world today is China, India and that area--what are they going to be doing about it? There is some talk around here and at the White House, We're going to go over and talk to the Chinese and say we would like you to cap your emissions. That's what all of this is about, capping carbon emissions. There is not one person in this Chamber that would say that they want to have pollution. But we have to manufacture in a way that can be done that we can compete. When you're looking at these numbers, it's going to hurt the Midwest.

But what happened when the Chinese were questioned about the whole notion of what are we going to do about cap-and-tax, especially when it comes to China? China's philosophy is this--and it was a quote that was in the Washington Times not too long ago. Their minister said this: You don't understand the problem. We only produce it. You consume it. If you hadn't consumed it, we wouldn't have produced it. So you pay any of the tax that might come from this.

They don't want to get involved in it. They are not going to get involved in it. So what we're putting around the legs of the manufacturing in the United States is a ball and chain. We're saying, Okay, we're going to throw you in a hundred feet of water and you better start swimming somehow. That's what this Congress is advocating, and it can't be done because America cannot compete under those standards.

We have got to be on an equal playing field with the rest of the world. If we don't have that, we're going to be in a situation where American jobs are going to be lost to overseas.

I said about my district, I have some of the highest unemployment in the State of Ohio. Again, high manufacturing, and we cannot afford to be in a situation where we have this type of situation where we're going to be hurting the heartland of America under this policy. And as I mentioned, we've got businesses out there hanging on by their fingertips and all we've got to do is put this chain around them and they're not going to be able to survive into the future.

A lot of things are being advocated when you're talking about carbon capture and sequestration. That technology, in a lot of cases, is not even available and it's untested. And we're telling businesses we're going to have to be doing some of this into the future. Impossible.

Businesses out there, they're going to say, How are we going to do this? Some of the businesses out there that are owned by multinationals across Ohio and the Midwest--you know, I've had some companies tell me, We don't have to be in Ohio. We don't have to be in the United States. We can go over to our Pacific Rim countries and produce the product and bring it back to the United States probably at a cheaper rate than you can do it right here in the United States. And they're saying that, but they want to stay here; but if we do this, if this cap-and-tax gets passed, America is going to suffer, America is going to lose jobs.

And when you look at some of these numbers that the Heritage Foundation has brought forward, they're looking at by the year 2035, it's reducing the aggregate gross domestic product by $9.6 trillion. Destroy 1.1 million jobs per year on average with the peak years seeing unemployment rise by over 2.479 million jobs.

Again, as has been mentioned by my friend in Georgia, increasing the average American cost of living by 2035, $4,300. Where are Americans going to come up with this money?

If you are getting cut back on your hours right now at your plant, you're not going to have additional dollars, and then we're going to have the Federal Government mandating these things. There are not going to be any Federal dollars.

Raising electricity rates by 90 percent. Again, when you look at this vulnerability, you look at the Midwest. You look at the companies that are out there that have to have that base load capacity every day to turn those machines on to keep America running. They are not going to be able to do it. Pass this bill and that's what you're going to get.

We're going to see gasoline prices rise by 74 percent. Right now, you're looking at gas increasing. It was really nice for a while there this past year when we were looking at about $1.63 gasoline in northwest Ohio. Well, the other day when I got gas before I came back to Washington, it was $2.52. And people were saying to me at those gas pumps, When is it going to stop?

I say, if you pass this bill, you're going to watch gasoline prices skyrocket. Eighty percent of everything that is brought into Ohio in goods is brought in by truck. So, again, those prices are going to go up.

Agricultural prices are going to go up because the fuel that's needed to make the fertilizer, the fuel for the tractors to make sure that you can harvest, all of these things are going to go up. The drying of the grain. All prices are going up. Again, when these numbers that they're talking about how can you come up with $4,300, when you look at your electricity, your gasoline--you go right down the line--the food you put on the table, these prices are going to go up.

Raise residential national gas prices by 55 percent. And then increase the inflation-adjusted Federal debt by 26 percent or $29,150 additional Federal debt per person again after adjusting for inflation.

We can't afford this. We cannot afford this, and we can't have this happen.

But my friends let me tell you, there's not one person that's not for clean energy, and here the Americans want something, and the Republican Party has come up in this House with a strategy.

And last week during the break, several of us were in Pittsburgh and Indiana and California stressing the need to make sure that we have this nuclear being stressed. There's a nuclear power plant in California that supplies 10 percent of that State's needs, and the last time we've even been able to site a new plant in this country was 1977.

So we can do it in this country by just having what we've got, by making sure we use our clean coal technology, to use nuclear. Get out there, get the oil, the natural gas, we use the hydro, the geothermal, and then of course on all the others. We have the wind, the solar, the ethanol, the biodiesel. We can do it, but we've got to have an all-of-the-above policy, but we cannot go with this cap-and-tax because, again, it's a jobs killer for America, and I thank the gentleman for yielding.

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