Affordable Energy

Floor Speech

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Mr. GRIFFITH of Virginia. I would ask the gentleman if he doesn't agree with me that we would be much better off as a Nation if we focused on a way to have affordable energy, clean coal technology, and not just have a war on coal, and thus create those jobs that you were speaking of. Would you not agree with that?

Mr. HUDSON. Absolutely.

Mr. GRIFFITH of Virginia. I would say it is interesting that the President has taken this action to have a war on coal when his Department of Energy has been investing in some clean coal technology, maybe not as much as some of us would like, but some clean coal technology which right now appears to be on the cusp of

actually yielding benefits. They are working right now in Alabama on a plant to test out a chemical looping formula. That chemical looping formula would produce coal ash and pure carbon dioxide. There's no carbon capture, it's just right there. There's no SO

X, there's no NO

X, there's no mercury, and there are a lot of jobs. While it is a little more expensive than conventional plants using coal to produce energy, if this technology works, which the administration has already invested in, we could have both clean coal, affordable energy, jobs, and still protect the environment.

One of the problems that I have, Mr. Speaker, is that so often people say you can't have one and have the other. I believe the United States should be the leader in making sure that we develop and have available not only for companies in the United States but the entire world clean coal technology, because if we don't look at this as a global problem, if we just say we're going to shut coal down in the United States, what we do is we send our jobs to places like India and China and Russia and Kazakhstan, and the list goes on and on. And they don't have the regulations that we even had in the year 2000 on the burning of coal. And all that stuff goes into the atmosphere. And guess where it goes? According to a NASA study, it takes 10 days to get from the middle of the Gobi Desert to the eastern shore of my beloved Commonwealth of Virginia.

So ladies and gentlemen, when we talk about this, it's not a matter of choosing the environment versus coal; it's a matter of choosing America first and making sure that we make America's coal affordable, usable, and clean. And we can do it.

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Mr. GRIFFITH of Virginia. Let me say briefly that one of the interesting things I note is that when we were talking about this at the Energy and Commerce Committee, Lisa Jackson was in there and we talked about regulating greenhouse gases and how that was going to make the cost of energy go up and people wouldn't be able to heat their homes in my district, and she said we have programs for that. But in the President's budget request this year, he cut the LIHEAP program, which is the assistance to folks who are having trouble making their heat bills and paying those bills.

So while on the one hand the administration is going

to make our electric bills go through the roof, on the other hand they want us to cut the assistance program that would help the poorest of the poor. That doesn't make any sense. I don't understand it, because they're really going to hurt American families.

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Mr. GRIFFITH of Virginia. Let me follow up on that, if I might, real quick. In one of my counties, when you take away the money that comes from Richmond and take away the money that comes from Washington for education, 70 percent of the tax dollars in that particular county are derived from the coal and natural gas severance tax. You eliminate coal, they don't know how they're going to be able to fund their schools. So we're not just talking about big business. We're talking about the schools and the classrooms and the students.

Mrs. ROBY. So it's a war on education as well.

Mr. GRIFFITH of Virginia. Well, it's a war on everything that we hold dear when you get right down to it. Because the truth of the matter is, when you're the number one nation in the world, everybody else wants to be where you are. Right now we're the number one nation in the world, but this administration wants to throw away what has helped us get there, and that is an affordable, reliable energy plan.

And we can't just throw it all out and expect to still have the standard of living that we have. That means we won't have the money for education, we won't have the money for roads, we won't have the money for so many things that people think of today as just automatically being there. But the money has to come from somewhere, and it just can't come out of thin air. I'm sorry, Mr. President, money doesn't grow on trees.

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Mr. GRIFFITH of Virginia. That is one of the problems that we see in my district. I have a lot of counties that are really hurting. And it's not because we couldn't have jobs, it's because Washington is getting in the way. Every month we're having layoffs in some coal plant here or some coal plant there, or a company that makes things for the coal plant--or the railroad that hauls the coal, or the trucking company that helps move the coal. So while they've remained internally optimistic, it's really hard when that layoff slip comes to your house and you know that you're no longer going to be able to have that job.

That's why this war on coal affects each and every one of us, but it affects folks in my district maybe a little bit more because we're on the front lines and we're getting those layoff notices now. I have people that I know who are casualties in the President's war on coal, and I'd like to hear from them at #AffordableEnergy. And I hand it back off to you, Madam Chair.

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