Statements On Introduced Bills And Joint Resolutions

Floor Speech

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By Ms. CANTWELL (for herself and Ms. Collins):

S. 2877. A bill to direct the Secretary of the Treasury to establish a program to regulate the entry of fossil carbon into commerce in the United States to promote clean energy jobs and economic growth and avoid dangerous interference with the climate of the Earth, and for other purposes; to the Committee on Finance.

Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, I send to the desk legislation on my behalf and Senator Collins', the Senator from Maine, dealing with putting a market signal on carbon so we can get off of carbon and move forward on a green energy economy that will create millions of jobs in America.

I know we are still on health care so I am not going to take a lot of time right now to talk about this because we in the next several weeks and months ahead are going to have a lot of time to talk about this issue. But I do want to say for my colleagues, as we are introducing this legislation:

The American people have been on a roller coaster ride with energy prices. I know the Presiding Officer knows this because she comes from the Northeast and knows what home heating oil costs have done to her State and surrounding States. I know my colleague from Maine knows this as well. That is part of her motivation in joining me in this cause, I am sure. The American public cannot sustain having oil prices wreak havoc on our economy for the next 30 years.

We know from economists that sometime in the next 5 to 30 years we will be at peak oil, and once we are at peak oil, the cost to the U.S. economy will be even more extravagant. The American people want to know what we are going to do to transition off of that and do so in a respectable way. What they are not so interested in is a proposal that would have Wall Street come up with a funding source by doing speculative trading to continue the games that have been played for the last year or 2 years on various commodities that drove the economy into the ditch.

I find it interesting that today in the newspapers coming from Copenhagen, now they have decided that up to 90 percent of all market activity in the European trading markets was related to fraudulent activity. That tells us that trading markets already existing on carbon futures have had great deals of problems with manipulation. I don't think we need to repeat that. What we want to do instead is say, we are going to make sure that consumers get a check back to help them with their energy bills. We want to say we are going to protect them from the skyrocketing prices of energy, but we are going to transition off of fossil fuels and onto new sources of energy, of biofuels, of alternatives such as wind and solar, of things such as plug-in electric vehicles, of an electricity grid that can be more efficient and a smart two-way communications system.

In the end, our economy is going to be better. We are going to create more jobs. We are going to make sure that consumers are not held hostage by future huge energy spikes. If we do that, we are going to leave to the next generation a better situation. We will leave the planet Earth in better shape. But most importantly, we are going to take the U.S. economy, struggling to move ahead, and we are going to create thousands of jobs in the short term and millions of jobs in the next several years. That is good news, to think that the United States could become a leader in energy technology, that we are not going to be as dependent upon the Chinese for battery technology of the future as we are right now on Middle East oil.

I introduce this legislation with the most respect for my colleagues, Senators BOXER and KERRY, LIEBERMAN and MCCAIN, many of my colleagues have been involved in this issue for many decades, but to work across the aisle. If health care shows us anything, we have to cut down the amount of time it takes to move these important pieces of legislation by working together in an effort to show that we do understand the needs of the American public. We have to drive down their costs, not just on health care but on fuel as well. We have to give them economic opportunity for the future. Sending this market signal is the best way to create jobs and help protect consumers for the future.

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