Electricity Security and Affordability Act

Floor Speech

Mr. KELLY of Pennsylvania. Mr. Chairman, I am a cosponsor of the Electricity Security and Affordability Act. We have heard a lot of rhetoric on the floor about what is going on, but I want you to understand something. In Pennsylvania, over 40 percent of the electricity is generated by coal-fired power plants.

If you go back to the election, during his candidacy the President said very clearly that if you want to continue to produce electricity using coal-powered power plants, you can, but we will bankrupt you. The only thing he didn't add to that was ``period.''

That is the war on coal. That is where we are going.

When we talk about these things, and we talk about the numbers of people in our society right now, not just the middle- and the lower middle-income, but the low-income people, what are we affecting? Everything that they put in their mouth, everything they put on their backs, everything that they do to heat and light their homes.

The sum total of the cost of anything is everything that goes into it.

The cost of energy and using coal to get there just makes sense. Coal has done so much for this country for so many years. I am not just talking about a few people. If you do not believe this is affecting people, please come back to western Pennsylvania. Walk with me. Go into these little towns where there no longer is a coal mine open. Not only that--their towns are shut down.

Now isn't that a marvelous thing to accomplish and champion and say we are doing the right thing for America? We are going to drive your energy costs up and make it impossible for you to heat and light your homes. We are going to change the cost of everything you use to raise your children. It affects the cost of everything. The sum total is made up of energy costs also.

What we will do is we will raise the bar so high that it will no longer be possible for these people to operate at a profitable level and then we will back off and say, My goodness, they just couldn't meet the standard.

We ask, What does the standard have to be? Just a little bit better than it is now.

We say, How would we begin to measure it? Well, we haven't determined that yet. We have set standards for you, but we don't have any way of doing it. We can't get to the point where we can measure the metrics on it.

I would just ask you for one thing: I want you to think about those thousands and millions of people who have forever relied on coal and the electricity that we can supply and the energy we can supply at a unit that is low enough that they can continue to live a normal life. That is all we are asking.

This bill is common sense, which is so devoid in this House.

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