Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2016

Floor Speech

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Mr. Chairman, over the past 6 years, the policy of the current administration has been to wage a war on coal that has crippled the coal industry and left areas like Virginia's Ninth District economically devastated, and I believe it has put our access to reliable, affordable electricity in jeopardy.

The onslaught of harmful, burdensome, and unreasonable regulations on coal-fired power plants is continuing in the President's Clean Power Plan. States must come up with a plan for CO

2 in 13 months after the final rule is released, which is supposed to be that summer. That State plan is then to begin by 2020 and completed by 2030.

There are a number of clean coal technologies currently in development, but according to the testimony from the Department of Energy, these new technologies are not likely to be ready for prime time until 2025. That is 9 years after the States have to come up with a plan and 5 years after the States have to begin implementing that plan and halfway through the time to come into compliance.

This is not right. If we are to avoid rolling brownouts, coal will have to continued to be used; but, if we don't take action, it will be illegal to use coal.

While I fight and will continue to fight more for more reasonable regulations, we must take action to ensure that we can still use coal, should the next administration also be unreasonable and anticoal.

Mr. Chairman, to bend the curve of development and bring the new coal technologies to market, we must spend some money. My amendment will simply add $50 million for fossil energy research and development from energy efficiency and renewable energy for the purpose of aiding the development of these new clean coal technologies so we can continue to have reliable, affordable energy.

The very least we can do is to make sure that coal-fired power plants have access to these new technologies in a timely fashion so that they can meet these extremely burdensome regulations.

Mr. Chairman, I appreciate that the underlying bill provides a 6 percent increase in fossil fuel energy research. However, when districts like mine are seeing mine after mine shut down and power plants shut down because of numerous regulations on coal, it is clear that more needs to be done.

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The bottom line is that we are losing thousands of jobs in the central Appalachian region, and according to the Bristol Herald Courier in a recent article, 1,000 jobs have been lost in the last year alone in the coal fields. That is one concern.

We are shutting down this month several coal-powered power plants in my district, and we are going to have serious problems if we don't do something. If we are going to continue down this path, we have to help the industry. We have to help make sure that we are burning the coal in a clean manner, and this is the way to do it.

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