Calculating Your Share Of "Cap and Trade"

Floor Speech

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Mr. GINGREY of Georgia. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Missouri for yielding time to me and for bringing to this body this important hour.

I was watching our colleagues on the other side of the aisle, the Democrat majority. I think they were mostly freshmen who had the previous hour, and they were praising, of course, the American Clean Energy Act and Security Act of 2009, and they were talking about all of the great and wonderful things that it does.

Certainly, there are some good things in the bill. I'm not going to stand here, Mr. Speaker, and completely criticize every aspect of it. Our freshmen colleagues--our Democrat colleagues--spoke very eloquently, but they never talked about the whole picture. I don't know where they were. They obviously were not Members of this body in the 110th Congress when we Republicans stayed here a year ago in August rather than going home for our vacations, or for our August recess, or for our codels. The Speaker and others rushed out of here to head out to foreign places, leaving Americans high and dry with $4 a gallon regular gasoline at the time. That's when the real commitment came on our side of the aisle to say it's unconscionable to leave this body and to do nothing for the American people and to say, oh, well, we'll take care of it in 5 weeks when we get back in early September. That's exactly what the Democrat majority did a little less than a year ago.

When I heard my freshmen colleagues on the other side of the aisle talking about how wonderful this new cap-and-trade energy bill is, I think one of them even described it as the foundation for new prosperity from sea to shining sea. Well, let me just tell you, Mr. Speaker: the folks in the 11th District of Georgia, in northwest Georgia--in fact, in the entire State of Georgia, in fact in the entire Southeast--don't think this is a foundation for new prosperity from sea to shining sea. It might be wonderful for northern New Mexico. It might be good for upstate New York. It may be good for some parts of Virginia. It may even be good, I guess--although I can't imagine how--in some parts of Michigan, which are the areas that these freshmen represent on the Democratic side of the aisle.

I want to tell you that it is not good in the Southeast. I think my colleagues have already pointed out that what the Democratic majority has done with this American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 has crammed down the throats of the American people not a comprehensive, all-of-the-above approach. It is not going to be a foundation for new prosperity from sea to shining sea because what it does is raise energy prices for every American family by an average of $3,000 a year.

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Mr. GINGREY of Georgia. If the gentleman will yield for an additional few seconds.

Exactly. You break down this cost right at $3,000 a year for a family of four, it breaks down, as the gentleman has pointed out, Mr. Speaker, a 90 percent increase in the cost of electricity, 74 percent increase in the cost of gasoline, 55 percent increase in the cost of natural gas.

Now, when I was home during this Memorial Day remembrance and district work period, I went to visit one of the plants in my district--again, northwest Georgia, the 11th--Dow Chemical, and what they do is make all kinds of products out of polyurethane, and the dashboard in your automobile is an example. And the cost, their feedstock is natural gas. And what we're doing is putting additional costs on all of these manufacturers, everybody that produces electricity, and it was a cost that was never there before. And somebody has to pay for that cost. And who is that somebody? The American public.

I yield back to the gentleman.

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Mr. GINGREY. I appreciate the gentleman yielding to me, Mr. Speaker, because this is a great segue into what I think is the bottom line here.

When Madam Speaker became the Speaker in January of 2007, it was clear that her signature issue was this issue of global warming, and shortly after that Al Gore got a Nobel Prize. He shared it with an intergovernmental climate control panel of the United Nations, and of course, he came before the Science Committee and Energy and Commerce Committee. This was their signature issue. This was the most important thing, and here we are in 2009 in the deepest of recessions, the worst recession that we've experienced since the Great Depression--

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Mr. GINGREY. If the gentleman will allow me, just on that same theme that you were just mentioning, this is not the number one concern of the American people today. The number one concern of the American people today is their jobs and their families and the cost of all these things, not just the cost of electricity, but everything that they have to purchase and concern over what's going to happen to Social Security and Medicare. And here we are going crazy about this cap-and-trade when we're taping our hands behind our back, penalizing the American people and losing jobs by the hundreds of thousands. It is pure idiocy, especially in an economic time of crisis like we're in.

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