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Mr. BISHOP of Utah. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate that opportunity and the opportunity of being here. As somebody who is old, I remember the good old days when we still had vinyl albums. If I wanted to buy a song, I had to buy the entire stupid record. Today, my kids tell me they have these neat things called ``iPods'' in which, if they want a song, all they have to do is download a song. They get to pick exactly what they want to.
I'm in one of those situations where I go in a supermarket and I realize I can stand in that aisle and I have literally hundreds of cereals from which to choose. Or if I want to watch a movie, Netflix has thousands of options for me to choose from. There are millions of songs I could download. There are even 34 types of Eggo waffles. Our entire life is run with options and choices by American people.
In fact, the only segment of our life in which the concept of options seems to have dissipated is with the government, because the government is still here to pick winners and losers and decide how I will or will not live my lifestyle. The government is still here to try to go back to those halcyon days of the Carter administration where the government told you where to put your thermostat, how fast to drive and on which days you could or could not get gasoline for your car. It is a lifestyle that happens to be there.
We are dealing with a situation which may be, in essence, one of the biggest lifestyle changers we have ever had in this world with cap-and-trade, because we are talking about carbon policy. As was written in 2007, controlling carbon is a bureaucrat's dream. If you can control carbon, you can control life.
One of the fears I have right now is that we are moving into an area in which, instead of giving Americans options on how to live and how to produce and how to go forward with their lives, we are starting to tell them how to live their lives, because the government is the one that is going to be picking winners and losers.
We are going to be talking about energy. We are going to be talking about cap-and-trade tonight, the implications of cap-and-trade and the tax policies of cap-and-trade, with the idea that what we should be trying to do, as a government, is giving people choices and options to let them choose how they live rather than having the government be the one to pick out who is going to win, who is going to lose and how we will proceed.
I've been joined by several of my friends here tonight. I appreciate their service to this Nation as a Member of Congress. I'd like to turn some time over to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Broun) who is on the floor right now, even though his committee is still meeting in a markup. But I'd like him to have the opportunity of taking as much time as he wishes to consume so he can get back to his other work, which is trying to keep the Science Committee on the right track in their particular markup.
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Mr. BISHOP of Utah. Well, I appreciate the gentleman from Georgia being able to join us in the middle of his committee markup, and I appreciate him being here and talking about simply some of the major problems that would take place with this overall system that may be here. It's one of the reality checks that we have to deal with is why, indeed, are we going to do this kind of an approach.
I happen to think that one of the reasons why we're marching down this path right now, so rapidly marching down this path, is simply because the government promised to do something, and the something that they decided to do is a cap-and-trade or cap-and-tax policy, which simply means to put government pressure on the business community to try and lower their amount of CO2 emissions by putting, insisting they put economic pressure on them so that right now, to try and get those caps exceeded, they have to buy some kind of credit, and then put the economic pressure on them to change over to a new way of doing business.
Both of those costs, both the cost of buying the cap-and-trade process right now as well as the change, will be passed on to the consumer. So the consumer basically gets hit both ways, two times, once going and once coming in this process at the same time; because the consumer basically has, all of our life is surrounded in some way by a fossil fuel economy, and the consumer, therefore, has to have a life change at the same time the business is having a life change.
Now, I don't care how you want to try and spin this, as a new way of living or whatever it is, this is going to be the opportunity to change lifestyles based on bureaucratic decisions. And it will be, as the gentleman from Georgia just said, a concept of a tax on people. For the rich amongst us, this new tax is going to be an annoyance. For poor people, where 50 percent of their income has to go to energy choices, this tax is going to be the difference between being able to have a luxury like Hamburger Helper that night. This is not going to be fairly distributed throughout society.
In fact, you'll notice, I think the gentleman from Ohio is here to talk to us in just a moment, and his area is going to be even more severely hit than some of the other parts of this country.
And what it will be, though, is a windfall profit tax for the government. As the gentleman from Georgia said, this 400-plus billion dollars we're talking about does not go into improving our lifestyle or does not go into coming up with alternative energy sources. It goes to the government, pure and simple.
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Mr. BISHOP of Utah. I appreciate the comments of the gentleman from Georgia as well. I want to concur in the last part of what he did say very clearly that this is going to be a tax, it's going to be a windfall for money for the government, not necessarily to go back into this issue but for the government.
The Washington Post simply said that the proposals will require a wholesale transformation in the Nation's economy and society. One of our former colleagues who is now in the Senate, he said, cap-and-trade is the most significant proposal of our time. Friends of the Earth published way back in 2007, The concept of a climate change response must have at its heart a redistribution of wealth and resources. Alan Greenspan said cap-and-trade systems, or carbon taxes, are likely to be popular only until real people lose real jobs as their consequence.
There is no effective way to meaningfully reduce emissions without negatively impacting a large part of our economy.
Now, there's a couple of reality checks that I want to deal with today. And I'm joined by two of my good colleagues, one, the gentleman from Ohio, and also the gentleman from Louisiana, who are going to talk about some of the problems that we presently have; and especially the gentleman from Ohio because his area is going to be hit perhaps as hard as anyone in this unfair distribution of income. It's going to be a byproduct of this approach.
With that, Mr. Speaker, I will be glad to yield as much time as he may consume to the gentleman from Ohio who can tell us what's going to be happening in his backyard.
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Mr. BISHOP of Utah. I appreciate the gentleman from Ohio for talking about some of the realities that happen to be there. I hate to say this, but sometimes we need to make a reality check on this entire issue of what the goal is. When we are told the goal is to have an 80 percent reduction in CO2 by the year 2050, what does that really mean for us?
In my own State of Utah, we have a yearly output of approximately 66 million tons of CO2 per year and a population of 2.6 million. Now, if you simply do the math, to reach that goal that everyone says we have to reach, we would have to go down to 2.2-tons of CO2 emitted every year in the State of Utah. The last time that happened, I hate to admit this, but Brigham Young hadn't even arrived. If you want to do the kind of math that it takes to reach that goal in the United States, the Pilgrims weren't here yet on Plymouth Rock.
One of the things that we have to reconcile is that, look, there are 6.2 billion people in the world. Two billion of those people have never flipped on a switch because they have never had electricity. To reach the kind of goals that we're talking about here, we have to insist that those 2 billion people
never have to experience things like lights and flat screen TVs and computers that we all take for granted and live with; that they don't have to have adequate food free of bugs because, I'm sorry, the fertilizer is fossil fuels; and they don't have to have clothes which are made of fossil fuels. My pen is a fossil fuel. Everything in the emergency room except for the steel is a fossil fuel. We make composites for aircraft to make them lighter and more efficient right now. You get on plane; you are riding on gas. All those things are there, and we have this schizophrenic idea that we want to get rid of fossil fuels, at the same time it is our lifestyle, without recognizing what it is.
Back in the 1970s, we had a specific term in there and that's when we came up with the idea that these are alternative fuels. What we really should be saying is they are supplemental fuels, because I hate to say this, but one-sixth of one percent of the energy we use today comes from wind and solar. If you try to do a PowerPoint presentation of a pie chart, all you get is a little thin line because it can't get smaller than that little thin line.
And after 30 years and $20 billion of the United States Government trying to expand wind and solar, we are still at one-sixth of one percent. The President wants to double that, which I applaud him for. Actually, the last 3 years of the Bush administration, we doubled the amount of wind and solar power we were using, but all that does is take us from one-sixth of 1 percent down to one-third of 1 percent. So that line is only a little bit wider.
Now, if you have a coal or a gas-fired power plant that puts out 1,000 megawatts of power, it takes about 40 acres of ground to do that, 40 acres. To accomplish that same power output with wind, you would take 500 windmills that would require 30,000 acres to accomplish that. The Denver Post had this wonderful article about this great solar plant in an area in Denver that was putting out 8.2 million megawatts. To accomplish what that one coal-fired plant would put out, you would have to have 250 of those miracle plants covering 20,000 acres.
In my home State we have a new geotherm plant, which is great, puts out 14 million megawatts of power. We take 10- to 20,000 every year just to keep up with the grid.
So what we have to do as we're talking about all these issues is come up with some kind of realism that the bottom line is the wind does not always blow and the sun doesn't always shine, and we have yet to come up with a way of capturing wind and solar power, let alone the capacity for moving those. We have a reality check before we go marching down this path of where we're going.
I want the gentleman from Louisiana who is here, who has been involved in these issues, has signed one of the early bills that deals with one of the potential solutions to this, especially to talk about some other options out there because what we, once again, need to do is we have to be able to give the American people choices and options, not have the Federal Government telling them what to do.
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Mr. BISHOP of Utah. I appreciate very much the gentleman from Louisiana joining us and talking about other kinds of options that are out there for the American people. The reality has always been that reliable and affordable energy has been the great liberator of mankind. It has improved our lifestyle. It has allowed those who are poor to escape that kind of poverty.
One of the things we cannot do is allow us to restrain ourselves so that that does not happen. As we said before, if you're rich, all this stuff could be an annoyance. If you're poor, it's a life-and-death decision, and as one wag simply said, never underestimate the ability of Congress to offer nonsolutions to problems that may or may not exist. We may be looking at that right now, but I appreciate especially the fact that there are other options out there that need to be explored because this is not the only answer and the only solution.
With that, I'd like to yield to our good friend from Indiana who has spoken often on these particular topics and these issues, in fact, is organizing an effort to explore other options that America needs and recently took those conversations on the road to actually hear from Americans.
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Mr. BISHOP of Utah. I appreciate the gentleman from Indiana giving us what I think is not necessarily bright news, but good news to realize that the cap-and-tax approach or the cap-and-trade policy is not the only one that's out there. There are other options.
The gentleman from Louisiana and I have joined with Senator Vitter on what is called the No Cost Stimulus Bill that solves this problem in a different approach. The Republican Study Committee and the Western Caucus have joined with H.R. 2300, which solves this problem with an alternative approach that provides American energy and American jobs without the harmful side effects.
I just went this afternoon to the National Center for Policy Analysis. They presented 10--they call it 10 cool global warming policies--but 10 specific ideas or concepts, many of them that we have incorporated in some of those other bills that would help our situation without having to impose a tax that hurts the poorest of our people.
Now I am pleased to yield to my good friend from Texas, someone who is, I think, the most fascinating speaker I have a chance to listen to, the last few minutes that we have on this particular issue at this time tonight to try and summarize once again that where we're going, hopefully we can avoid the pitfalls, and there are other options than what we have simply seen placed before us so far.
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Mr. BISHOP of Utah. I appreciate the gentleman from Texas. It is one of those things that we live in a new iPod generation in which in all our lives we are given options and choices. In this particular area, it is not the time for the government to now establish who wins, who loses, what is our only path.
We still have to provide our people with options so that they can live and expand their lives the way they deem best. That's the important part here.
I want to emphasize there are options out there on the table that the Republican Party is presenting. Those options need to be heard and explored because they lead us to a proper goal and an easier pattern.