Nomination of Sharon Y. Bowen to Be a Commissioner of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission

Floor Speech

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Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, 17 years ago the Senate voted on something called a sense-of-the-Senate resolution designed to protect American workers and their families from misguided policy with regard to CO2 regulations. Of course, CO2, or carbon dioxide, is a necessary element of life, and plant life depends on CO2 for photosynthesis, which helps make them green. To hear some of the psuedoscientists talk about CO2 here in Washington, you would think it was poison. Suffice it to say, 17 years later the Obama administration is trying to enact similar legislation that was rejected 17 years ago by the Senate in that sense-of-the-Senate resolution.

Back in 1997 Members of the Senate were concerned that the Clinton administration might sign a global climate change treaty that imposed higher costs on the United States while exempting developing countries such as China or India. These concerns turned out to be well-founded. The Clinton administration did indeed sign such a treaty known as the Kyoto Protocol in December of that year, but it never got around to having it ratified here in the Senate largely because of a unanimous resolution this Chamber passed several months earlier.

The sense-of-the-Senate resolution I alluded to a moment ago was voted on in July 1997, and it received 95 votes in favor and 0 votes opposed. Ninety-five Senators expressed their opposition to any climate change agreement that would result in serious harm to the economy of the United States. They also rejected any agreement that failed to include other countries, and that is for good reasons I will explain in a moment.

The message sent by these 95 Senators--a unanimous vote in the Senate--is pretty clear. It makes absolutely no sense for America to adopt job-killing carbon regulations while CO2 emissions from developing countries continue to skyrocket and are not subjected to the same restrictions.

Don't just take my word for it. Listen to what one of the most prominent supporters of the 1997 resolution, Secretary of State John Kerry--at the time he was the junior Senator of Massachusetts--had to say:

It's just common sense that if you are really going to do something to effect global climate change, and you are going to do it in a fair-minded way ..... we need to have an agreement that does not leave enormous components of the world's contributors and future contributors of this problem out of the solution.

In effect, what he was saying was: Why would America do this to itself and throw a wet blanket on job creation and economic growth when other countries were going to continue to produce CO2 unabated?

One of the cosponsors of this resolution was the late Democratic Senator Robert Byrd. The Presiding Officer knows Senator Byrd and his legacy very well. While explaining his opposition to the Kyoto-style climate deals, Senator Byrd said:

I don't think the Senate should support a treaty that requires only half of the world ..... to endure the economic costs of reducing emissions while developing countries are free to pollute the atmosphere, and in so doing, siphon off American industries.

Another cosponsor was Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, who was then the junior Senator from Nebraska. He described the likely consequences of Kyoto-style agreements in these terms:

As industries flee the United States and other industrialized countries, they would re-establish themselves in developing countries that have much weaker environmental standards than our own.

I have just one more point about the Kyoto Protocol, which was unanimously voted down, in essence, 17 years ago.

A year after that, in 1998, there was a then-unknown Illinois State senator who voted on legislation that denounced Kyoto and prohibited State regulation of greenhouse gases in Illinois. If you guessed it was Barack Obama, you would be right.

One of the State senators voting in favor of the bill, condemning Kyoto, and banning State regulations of greenhouse gases in Illinois was Barack Obama. President Obama voted for legislation that explicitly rejected the type of CO2 regulations that he is now trying to impose on the entire U.S. economy.

Yesterday I discussed some of the costs of those regulations, how enormous they would be, and how they would disproportionately fall on the poor and middle class in our country. The truth is most of the burden of higher energy costs would fall on retired people, seniors, and people on a fixed income.

In my State our electricity capacity is regularly strained due to the hot August summers. People in my State depend on their air conditioners for safety. The threat of limited access to electricity, or higher costs that people can't afford, literally threatens their health and safety, and certainly their welfare. Lost jobs, lost wages, higher utility rates, and tighter family budgets are the inevitable consequences of this proposed EPA rule that was announced late last week.

For that matter, the EPA has also proposed another rule on new powerplants that would impede technological innovation. Several of my Democratic colleagues expressed their deep concern about the additional EPA rule in a recent letter to the President. These seven Democrats noted that ``American technology providers would be incentivized to stop research and innovation in coal combustion, further delaying domestic development of pioneering new technologies that could be exported to improve plants around the world.''

Earlier today one of these Democrats who signed the letter, and happens to be the Presiding Officer at this time, said the Obama administration was ``working against us'' on CO2 regulations, and he described the EPA proposals as ``unreasonable and unacceptable.'' This is obviously not a partisan issue by any means.

Any regulation that is this costly is almost impossible to justify unless it was to have clear benefits that outweighed those costs. President Obama's EPA rule can't lay claim to having enormous benefits in spite of these huge costs.

Even if you agree with my friends about the long-term risks posed by rising CO2 emissions, and that this sort of regulation is justified, the projected growth of global emissions over the coming decades has almost nothing to do with America and almost everything to do with developing countries such as China and India.

Indeed, our emissions have gone down over recent history. Some of that has been due to the renaissance of natural gas, which burns cleaner. But the fact is that anything we would do would be confined to the United States and our economy and would have no impact whatsoever on developing countries such as China and India. Indeed, China--by a very wide margin--is already the planet's largest CO2 emitter. The U.S. Government estimates that China alone will account for nearly half of all growth in worldwide emissions between 2010 and 2040.

In short, nothing America does by itself or to itself will stop global emissions from rising. In fact, even if we could magically reduce our own emissions to zero over the next quarter century, worldwide emissions would still increase significantly without major reductions in China, India, and other developing countries.

Yet, despite all these costs to American workers and American families--literally a threat due to the lack of grid capacity in places such as Texas because of high-priced energy--President Obama is moving ahead with this massive new energy tax that is effectively, in the words of our colleague from Louisiana, all pain and no gain, and he is right.

To put this in context, I think it is important that anyone who happens to be listening understands a few points.

No. 1, regardless of what the President calls it, the proposed EPA rule is indeed a massive new national energy tax, one that will affect all workers, all consumers, and all families in America.

No. 2, the reason it is being enacted via the regulatory process is because Members of the Senate rejected it 4 years ago at a time when even our Democratic colleagues had a supermajority. In other words, they could have done it when they wanted to when the Senate controlled the White House and both Chambers of Congress, but they chose not to do it then.

No. 3, it fits with a broader and deeply disturbing matter. Time and time again, the President has used unelected bureaucrats to skirt the normal legislative progress and override the will of Congress and avoid any kind of electoral accountability.

The point is this: When the President, who is not going to stand for election again, gets the Environmental Protection Agency to issue regulations, those bureaucrats don't run for election. The American people--my constituents in Texas and the Presiding Officer's constituents in West Virginia--can't vote the rascals out of office, so there is no accountability in the system. That is what the President was bragging about when he said: I have a phone, and I have a pen. He was effectively saying he was going to do it alone, and that is what he is trying to do here.

The result has been a misguided explosion of burdensome and onerous regulations, and those have a cost to our economy. The last quarter--the last 3 months of the year--we learned that instead of the economy growing in a way that will create more jobs and reduce unemployment, the economy actually contracted. It shrank by a full percentage point. One of the reasons why the economy shrank is because of overly burdensome regulations where there is no cost-benefit analysis, much less any cost-benefit calculus whatsoever.

According to one estimate, between 2009 and 2013, Federal regulatory costs increased by nearly $500 billion--a truly astonishing figure. Not only have these regulations proven to be onerous and unwieldy, they have been implemented by agencies that are hopelessly incompetent at handling even basic responsibilities.

As my friend the junior Senator from Oklahoma said a few years ago:

It is absurd to allow an agency as incompetent as the EPA to exercise vast new powers when they can't manage less complex tasks. If the EPA can't train 250,000 contractors to manage lead paint rules ..... why should we expect them to regulate the energy-consuming processes used in every sector of the economy?

If this competence question of a huge bureaucracy sounds familiar, I think we are now learning that when the hubris overcomes the good judgment of leaders here in Washington and decides to take over one-sixth of the economy, which is our health care sector, you get ObamaCare and the disaster that has proven to be in terms of its implementation.

None of the essential promises that were made about how it would actually work have been kept. In other words, if you like what you have, you can keep it, the price would go down $2,500 for a family of four, and, yes, you can keep your doctor. None of those promises have proven to be true. Yet those were the promises upon which ObamaCare was passed. Now we see the administration make additional extravagant promises that can only be borne out of hubris based on what we have seen as the implementation of ObamaCare.

Not only have these regulations proved to be onerous, they are not going to work the way the administration predicts, except we are pretty sure it will kill jobs and reduce economic growth and further extend this lengthy recession which has been the slowest economic recovery in America since the Great Depression.

At a time of mass unemployment and historically low levels of labor force participation, America needs an energy policy that is projobs and proworker and profamily. This new EPA rule is the opposite of that. It would destroy jobs, it would hurt workers, and it would hurt consumers because it would raise the cost of living for middle-class families, including people on fixed incomes such as seniors. The fact that such a regulation is even being considered not in Congress but in the executive branch agencies such as the EPA, amid the weakest economic recovery since the Great Depression, illustrates once again how misguided this administration's priorities truly are.

I wish to clarify once again that the debate over President Obama's EPA rule is not about the science of climate change; it is a debate about whether massive regulations should be forced to pass a simple cost-benefit analysis. The EPA rule clearly fails that test.

For all of those reasons and plenty more, we will be continuing to urge President Obama, from this side of the aisle but in a bipartisan way, to put jobs and families ahead of politics and ideology.

I yield the floor and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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