Mr. President, I rise now for the 296th time to direct our attention to what is coming at us through fossil fuel emissions causing our natural systems to be significantly disturbed.
We are not yet all the way through the first week of the second Trump administration, and already Trump has made his priorities clear: Looters and polluters reign, and their feeding frenzy comes at the expense of the American people. I expect the looting and polluting have only just begun.
So we have made a new chart that will surely see the Senate floor again. When President Trump needed cash for his campaign, he knew just whom to ask. He convened Big Oil CEOs at Mar-a-Lago. He requested that they pony up $1 billion for his campaign. And he promised them he would immediately reverse dozens of President Biden’s environmental rules and policies and stop new ones from being enacted. Giving him $1 billion, he said, would be a ‘‘deal’’ because of the taxation and regulation they would avoid thanks to him.
Well, he is right about that being a superdeal for polluters. The industry benefits from more than $700 billion a year in subsidy in the United States alone—$1 billion to Trump to protect $700 billion to the industry. That is a pretty good return on investment for fossil fuel.
Well, Trump won and the billionaires who funded Trump’s campaign want their payback. Payback began this week with a big score for the leaders and polluters. On his first day, President Trump signed Executive orders to lay the groundwork for weakening vehicle emission standards, raising costs for families—raising costs for families—an average of $6,000 to $8,000, while also harming public health from the added emissions, and weakening our American automobile industry’s global competitiveness, a major gift to Big Oil at the expense of regular Americans and consumers.
Review EPA’s 2009 finding that the greenhouse gases are a danger, even though that finding has been upheld by the Supreme Court. The winners? The polluters driving climate change: dramatically reduce or eliminate the social cost of carbon to protect the fossil fuel free-to-pollute business model, made subsidized fossil fuel winners over domestic clean energy losers.
Do you remember when Republicans used to say government shouldn’t pick winners and losers—until it is the fossil fuel industry. Withdrew from the Paris climate agreement, helping fossil fuel undermine global efforts to reduce their greenhouse gas pollution; stopping offshore wind development, a clean energy competitor to his fossil fuel funders, at the expense of American consumers, workers, and our own domestic manufacturing base. Rhode Island, by the way, is home to the Nation’s first offshore wind farm and a growing number of good union jobs in the industry.
Would President Trump say to the country that, on his first day in office, it was time to repay his Big Oil donors? Well, that wouldn’t have gone over well so he had to pretend all these donor handouts would benefit the public.
His first day Executive order on energy begins by stating: America is blessed with an abundance of energy and natural resources that have historically powered our Nation’s economic prosperity.
In recent years, burdensome and ideologically motivated regulations have impeded the development of these resources, limited the generation of reliable and affordable electricity, reduced job creation, and inflicted high energy costs upon our citizens. These high energy costs devastate consumers by driving up the cost of transportation, heating, utilities, farming, and manufacturing, while weakening our national security.
Virtually none of that is true. So let’s look at the claims one by one.
First, yes, he got this right. America is, indeed, blessed with energy abundance. Where it is particularly abundant is in wind power. We have the third greatest offshore wind power potential of any country in the world. We have the fourth greatest onshore wind potential anywhere in the world. Indeed, wind resources in the Great Plains States alone could supply the United States with 16 times our electricity demand. That is energy abundance.
Then, as this map from our national labs shows, we have amazing solar energy resource potential, particularly in the Southwest and through the Southeast.
Now, Trump defines energy as ‘‘crude oil, natural gas, lease condensates, natural gas liquids, refined petroleum products, uranium, coal, biofuels, geothermal heat, the kinetic movement of flowing water, and critical minerals.’’ Notice anything missing? That is literally every possible iteration of fossil fuel, plus nuclear, geothermal, and hydro; everything except wind and solar, which produced more electricity than coal last year and could power the entire country.
Trump next claims regulations have impeded the development of energy resources. And by that, as we just heard, he means fossil fuels. Well, as he would say, ‘‘wrong.’’ Under President Biden—and, actually, regrettably, from a climate point of view—the United States produced more oil than ever before in the Biden years, indeed, setting monthly records for oil production. So that wasn’t true either.
Well, it is foolish to abandon those enormous wind and solar assets—not good for our country or our economy, good only for their fossil fuel competition. And there is an additional big economic danger if we stick with oil because the United States is a high-cost oil producer.
The average cost to produce a barrel of U.S. crude ranges from $50 to $70. In Saudi Arabia, the marginal cost of production is around $10 a barrel—$50 to $70 for us, $10 for the Saudis. That means our industry will always be vulnerable to cheaper foreign producers. And by the way, it has happened before.
In 2015, the Saudis decided they didn’t like America producing so much, so they turned on their spigots, causing a big hit to American oil and gas companies. Once they had tanked American production, they reduced their own back to normal levels and the price of gasoline spiked for our consumers. They can do that again anytime they want.
It is basic business and economic sense not to put all your eggs in an industry where you are the high-cost producer. We have a competitive advantage in wind and solar with those massive resources and continent-straddling range that spans multiple time zones, allowing wind and solar energy to be sent wherever the wind isn’t then blowing or wherever the Sun isn’t then shining.
We have massive clean energy opportunities. Trump claims that existing energy policies have reduced job creation. Again, wrong. Oil patch jobs have been reduced, not by regulations but by automation.
Where the country has seen a job boom is in the low-carbon energy sectors with more than 400,000 jobs created since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act. Low-carbon energy now employs more people than fossil energy. It is where the jobs are—not that Big Oil cares about that for 1 minute.
Trump claims that renewable energy is driving up energy costs for Americans. Wrong again. Solar and wind have, for some time, been the least expensive forms of energy that there are. Wind is the bottom blue line, solar panels are the bottom yellow line. They have been the cheapest since 2015 or, if you go back further, 2013. We have had a solid decade of wind and solar being the least expensive forms of energy for the American public.
But Big Oil doesn’t care. They just want to sell their dirty product. What does actually drive up energy costs for Americans? The greed of Big Oil.
After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, OPEC, the international cartel, jacked up prices and U.S. oil producers rode along to epic profits off of those events. You just have to look at their sworn financial statements filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission about what profits they earned. They earned the biggest profits in the history of the world. In a nutshell, they gouged.
Electricity bills also rose when the price of natural gas spiked after that Russian invasion. Climate change means Americans are spending more to cool their homes because it is hotter than it has ever been. If you are living in Phoenix or Houston or Tampa, you are likely running your air-conditioner nonstop for months on end, and that is on your electricity bill. That is just going to get worse as Trump’s looters and polluters have their way.
Climate change-fueled wildfires are forcing utilities in the West to spend billions burying transmission and distribution lines to avoid sparking more fires. That increases electric bills—another climate cost to consumers. And, obviously, Trump’s decision to let his big LNG donors export more LNG will drive up natural gas prices here at home.
When there is less at home because more is going overseas, prices go up. That is supply and demand 101. Here, again, under Trump, fossil fuel wins, American families lose and Big Oil doesn’t care. The wind and Sun and flowing water and the Earth’s heat are all free fuels.
Fossil fuels put us at the mercy of foreign petrodictators and predatory cartels. Just from a national security perspective, why not choose the free fuels that no outside actor controls?
And then, of course, come the costs of climate change itself burdening American families with climateflation, from grocery staples to insurance prices, to shipping costs, all rising as the result of climate change, disrupting agriculture, weather, and transit—even all the gas price-gouging by the industry thrown in.
That is just the climateflation. Then comes the danger to our entire economy. For a look into coming attractions, check out what is happening out in Los Angeles, where raging Santa Ana winds turbocharged wildfires tearing through American families’ homes much because of climate change.
Climate change is perhaps the biggest systemic financial risk to our economy and, thus, to families’ personal finances. And where is this coming true first? In the insurance markets. Insurance markets are the leading edge of our time of consequences. The L.A. fires, with insured losses in the tens of billions of dollars and total economic losses likely in the hundreds of billions, on top of last fall’s hurricanes— which resulted in hundreds of billions in economic losses in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia—are a dangerous blow to tottering insurance markets.
In recent years, millions of Americans had insurance policies canceled due to rising climate risk. Millions more saw skyrocketing premiums, particularly in Florida, that forced families in some cases to drop coverage, leaving their families’ most important financial assets—their homes—exposed. Insurers are pulling out of some markets altogether. Insurers are going bankrupt. Insurers are flooding mailboxes with price hikes and notices of cancelation and nonrenewals, and that all hits property values.
So the concern here is cascading failures—cascading failures from the insurance market, to the mortgage market, to a property values collapse, and that ends in economy-wide catastrophe. Along the way, home ownership will move further out of reach for the middle class as homes are burdened with more risk and expense. Property owners will have homes that they aren’t able to sell because they can’t be insured, so a buyer can’t get a mortgage to afford the house. There is a lot of pain before the collapse.
We have been through a long period of climate lies, and now, unfortunately, we are entering the period of climate consequences. To stave off the worst consequences, we must eliminate the carbon pollution that is the root of it all.
President Trump’s Executive orders do exactly the opposite, exposing us to grave economic dangers, and for the worst of reasons: to reward wealthy special interests who donated to his campaign.
The American people need to watch their wallets. When President Trump says he is fighting for you, think twice. He is actually fighting for the Big Oil donors—the fossil fuel billionaires— who got him elected. The looters and the polluters are looking to get ever richer, and they will loot working families, pollute Mother Nature, and damage our families’ futures to do it.
So we fight on. I yield the floor.
