Helping Families Save Their Homes Act Of 2009 - Continued

Floor Speech

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Mr. BARRASSO. Mr. President, a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed highlighted a dangerous game that is being played right now by this administration and by the Environmental Protection Agency, and it is a game that is being played with the American public about which I have great concerns. The piece in the Wall Street Journal was entitled ``Reckless Endangerment: The Obama EPA plays 'Dirty Harry' on cap and trade.'' The article refers to the Russian roulette style of negotiating that is going on right now by cap and tax advocates who want to pass the President's energy tax in this Congress.

The administration and the majority of the leadership in the House and the Senate have created a regulatory ticking timebomb. It is called the Environmental Protection Agency's endangerment finding. Well, they want to use this ticking timebomb as a threat to get the President's energy tax passed. They are putting this regulatory timebomb on the kitchen table of Americans all across the country. The message to Americans: Your tax money or your livelihood. This is not an idle threat. If allowed to proceed, the irresponsible use of the Clean Air Act will require the EPA to regulate any building, any structure, any facility, any installation that emits above a certain amount of carbon dioxide. The result would be thousands of lost jobs, with no environmental benefit to be seen from it. Hospitals, schools, farms, commercial buildings, and nursing homes will be required to obtain preconstruction permits for their activities.

Further, when you talk to the legal scholars, they will tell you that the statutory language is mandatory and does not leave any room for the EPA to exercise discretion or to create any exceptions. That is the problem. The only jobs this option will create are in law firms, as the litigation bonanza begins. EPA is going to be sued by environmental groups wanting to eliminate exempted sectors. The EPA will also be sued by industries that are not exempted. How is the EPA going to respond to all these legal challenges? I asked EPA Administrator Jackson. She says she can target what she taxes. She claims she is only going to target cars and trucks. Well, that really is setting a precedent of choosing winners and losers. We don't know what standards will be applied to make those decisions. We do not know what role politics will play in the decisions. Jackson's statement also ignores the regulatory cascade that the endangerment finding in the motor vehicle emission standards will trigger. Litigators and courts will drive much of this job-killing regulation.

We now have a nominee to head up the EPA's Air Office--Mrs. Regina McCarthy. We have an Administrator of the EPA and a climate and energy czar who is supposed to coordinate climate change policy for the administration. Well, Carol Browner, the climate and energy czar, has not been confirmed by Congress--not by this Congress--at all. We do not know who is developing this roadmap for how to hijack the Clean Air Act to regulate climate change. What jobs and what industries will be kept? What industries will be penalized? Who will be held accountable for making the decisions? The American people--the people at home in Wyoming whom I talk to--are demanding answers to these questions.

The economic consequences will be devastating. By the EPA's own estimate, the typical preconstruction permit in 2007 cost each applicant $125,000. And how much time do they have to put into this work? Well, on average, 866 hours just to fill out the paperwork. If you are a small business, a farm, or a private nursing home, you have no background in this area. It takes a lot of time and effort, so you need to hire lawyers and you need to hire experts. That costs thousands of dollars that are nowhere in your budget. You are taking time out of the day to figure out all this redtape. While you are spending that time and that money, you are not running your business.

This is going to create such a fog of uncertainty--uncertainty with investors, uncertainty with small businesses. It is going to make it that much harder for small businesses to borrow money, to get a business loan. Nobody is going to know how much this is going to cost their business. If you take a look at our economic situation, with lending in this country having slowed down significantly, this is hardly the right move now for our country and for our economy.

According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, there are 1.2 million schools, hospitals, nursing homes, farms, small businesses, and other commercial entities that are not currently covered under these preconstruction permits, and they are going to be vulnerable to the new controls, to new monitoring, to new paperwork, and to new litigation. If even 1 percent of these 1.2 million have to get preconstruction permits, well, that would mean 12,000 new preconstruction permits this year. By the EPA's own analysis, if permitting is increased by just 2,000 to 3,000, that would impose what they call significant new costs and an administrative burden on permitting authorities. How much of a burden? How much cost? Those permitting authorities are the EPA and the 43 States that participate in the program.
The EPA said that the burden ``could overwhelm permitting authorities.''

The net result of all of this is going to be thousands of jobs lost. According to the Heritage Foundation, the job losses are estimated to reach 800,000. Well, if Carol Browner, Administrator Jackson, or Mrs. McCarthy cannot tell us how they will protect American jobs from court challenges, if they can't tell us by what legal authority--legal authority--they can pick the winners and losers, if they cannot provide economic certainty to lenders and small businesses, if they do not know how they will process all the thousands of new preconstruction permits, then they should take this option--this option they have proposed, this option that kills jobs--and they should take it off the table.

I have tried to get answers to these questions from the nominee who will most directly oversee this process--Mrs. McCarthy. I placed a hold on her nomination because these are questions that still need to be answered. I am committed to working with her in a constructive way to get answers to the questions because I believe we do need to chart a new course, a course that makes America's energy as clean as we can, as fast as we can, without hurting small businesses and without raising energy prices on American families.

We should start by not taking any clean energy source off the table. That means fossil fuels fitting with new carbon capture technology. That means exploring for oil and natural gas in an environmentally friendly way, using new technologies. That means promoting carbon-neutral nuclear energy. That means funding renewable energies--wind and solar, geothermal, and hydropower. We need it all. An all-of-the-above energy approach is the key to solving our energy problem for this Nation. I look forward to working with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to achieve this goal for America.

Mr. President, I yield floor.

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