Executive Session

Floor Speech

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Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, let me say of my friend, the senior Senator from Wyoming, he does articulate this issue well. He has spent countless hours working on it. When you listen to him, his depth of knowledge and trying to work out something that would give improvements and avoid a total socialization of medicine, he knows what he is talking about.

When I go back to my State of Oklahoma, it is not all that different than from when he goes back to his State of Wyoming and people ask the question: If government isn't working well now, why do we want to put all the rest of these things in government, whether it is health care or the banking industry, the insurance industry, oil and gas and the other takeovers we are witnessing right now?

I do think you can summarize what he said very simply by merely saying, if there is a government option, of course, this is a moving target. For those of us who are not on a committee that is dealing with health care reform, we are not sure what is going on there, and I am not sure anyone else does either because it is a moving target. From one time to another, we hear different things that are going to be in the bill, and then they change their mind.

One thing we know, though, they keep saying there is going to be a government option. If there is a government option, we are going to see a huge impact on insurers, private companies that offer insurance, and you will see that market dwindling. You can't blame them for that.

The other thing that is a certainty in this whole issue of the Kennedy bill and what they are trying to do, what the administration is trying to do with the health delivery system in America is they would be putting Washington between the patient and the doctor. That gets a response when I am back in Oklahoma of we don't want that to happen.

So we have right now a lot of invasions on the systems that have worked well in America.

NATIONAL ENERGY TAX

I wish to talk about one other issue since tomorrow the House is scheduled to vote on what is known as the Waxman-Markey bill, which is the Democrat's answer to the worst recession in decades, a national energy tax, a tax designed to impose economic pain through higher energy prices and lost jobs or as a recent Washington Post editorial put it:

The bill contains regulations on everything from light bulb standards to the specs on hot tubs and it will reshape America's economy in dozens of ways that many don't realize.

In other words, this would be, if it were to pass, the largest tax increase in the history of America. I know a little bit about this issue because I started working on this issue back in the late nineties when they were trying to get the United States to ratify the Kyoto treaty. The Kyoto treaty is very similar to the proposals we have had since that time. We know what that would have cost at that time. Somewhere between $300 billion and $330 billion a year as a permanent tax increase.

There have been proposals on the floor of the Senate in 2003, 2005, 2007, 2008, and now this time. We in the Senate have more experience in dealing with this issue than the House does because this is the first time they have ever had it up for consideration.

Over the past several weeks, Speaker Pelosi has been facing an insurrection within her own ranks. We have been reading about the Democrats who are pulling out saying: We don't want to be part of the largest tax increase in the history of America. More and more people are jumping in and saying we cannot have it. As of yesterday, the American Farm Bureau came in opposing, the strongest opposition to this legislation.

Let me say, if the Democrats are having trouble passing this bill in the House, where the majority can pass just about any bill it wants, then there is no hope for a cap-and-trade bill to come out of the Senate. I think we know that. We watched it.

Right now, by my count, the most votes that could ever come for this largest tax increase in the history of America would be 34 votes--34 votes. They are not even close.

I say that because there are a lot of people wringing their hands: She wouldn't bring this bill up in the House on Friday unless she had the votes. Maybe she will have the votes. There has been a lot of trading, a lot of people getting mad. Nonetheless, she may have bought off enough votes to make it a reality.

The fact is the Waxman-Markey bill is just the latest incarnation of very costly cap-and-trade legislation that will have a very devastating impact on the economy, cost American jobs by pushing them overseas, and drastically increasing the size and scope of the Federal Government.

In the Senate, we have successfully defeated cap-and-trade legislation in the years I mentioned. Four different times it has been on the floor. I remember in 2005, I was the lead opposition to it. Republicans were in the majority at that time. It had 5 days on the Senate floor, 10 hours a day, 50 hours. It was the McCain-Lieberman bill at that time. It was defeated then and by larger margins ever since then.

Just a year later, with the economy in a deep recession, it is hard to believe that many more Senators would dare vote in favor of legislation that would not only increase the price of gas at the pump but cost millions of American jobs, create a huge new bureaucracy, and raise taxes by record numbers. It is not going to happen.

I appreciate that my Democratic colleagues desperately want to pass this bill. They argue that cap and trade is necessary to rid the world of global warming and to demonstrate America's leadership in this noble cause. But their strategy is all economic pain and no climate gain. This is a global issue that demands a global solution. Yet cap-and-trade advocates argue that aggressive unilateral--unilateral, that is just America; in other words, we pass the tax just on Americans--aggressive unilateral action is necessary to persuade developing countries--now we are talking about China, India, Mexico, and some other countries--to enact mandatory emission reductions. In other words, we provide the leadership and they will follow. But recent actions by the Obama administration and by China and other developing countries continue to prove just the opposite. They continue to confirm what I have been saying and arguing for the past decade, that even if we do act, the rest of the world will not.

If you still believe--and there are fewer people every day who believe that science is settled--that manmade gases, anthropogenic gases, CO2, methane are causing global warming--there are a few people left who believe that. If you are one of those who still believes that, stop and think: Why would we want to do something unilaterally in America? It doesn't make sense. The logic is not difficult to understand.

Carbon caps, according to reams of independent analyses, will severely damage America's global competitiveness, principally by raising the cost of doing business here relative to other countries such as China, where they have no mandatory carbon caps. So the jobs and businesses would move overseas, most likely to China.

This so-called leakage effect would tip the global economic balance in favor of China. A lot of them are saying China is going to follow our lead, they are going to do it. Look at this chart. This person is the negotiator for the administration. His statement is: We don't expect China to take a national cap-and-trade system. This is the guy who is supposed to be in charge of seeing to it that they do. This is Todd Stern. He is admitting it.

I wish those people who come to the floor and say: Oh, no, we know that if America leads the way, China is going to follow us--they are sitting back there just rejoicing, hoping we will go ahead and have a huge cap-and-trade tax to drive our manufacturing jobs to places such as China where they don't have any real controls on emissions, and the result would be an increase in CO2.

In other words, if we pass this huge tax in this country, it is going to have the resulting effect of increasing the amount of CO2 that is in the atmosphere.

By itself, China has a vested interest in swearing off of carbon restrictions in order to keep its economy growing and lifting its people from poverty. Add unilateral Federal U.S. action into the mix, and we give China an even stronger reason to oppose mandatory reductions for its economy. And China understands this all too well. I believe they will actively and unfailingly pursue their economic self-interest, which entails America acting alone to address global warming.

Consider that in other realms, whether on intellectual property rights or human rights. The Chinese have conspicuously failed to follow America's example. We have tried to get them to do it, and they haven't done it. All the human rights efforts we have gone through to try to get political prisoners released and all these other things we have said to them to do it--we have threatened, we have asked, we have begged--and they do not do it. So why would they do this? So for China, climate change will be no exception.

My colleagues in the Senate are rightly focused on the economic effects this bill will have on their States and their constituents. But with China and other developing countries staunchly opposed to accepting any binding emissions requirements, we should be asking a more fundamental question: What exactly are we doing this for? If the goal of cap and trade is to reduce global temperatures by reducing global greenhouse gas concentrations, and if China and other leading carbon emitters continue to emit at will, then how can this supposed problem be solved?

Well, if I accept the alarmist science that anthropogenic gases are causing a catastrophe, then reducing global greenhouse gas concentrations is a solution. But the unilateral Federal solution, again, that America must first act to persuade China and others to follow--please follow us, please pass a tax in your own country, and then they are going to be following our example--there is no evidence that has ever happened before or that it would happen again. The only thing America gets by acting alone is a raw deal and a planet that is no better off.

Now, my Democratic colleagues want to sweep this reality under the rug. They argue that cap and trade--and I hope everyone understands what cap and trade is. I have often said, and other people have said--including some of the advocates of this--that they would prefer to have a carbon tax over cap and trade. Well, if you are going to have one or the other, I would too. But the only reason they use cap and trade is to hide the fact that this is a tax--a very large tax increase. So they argue that cap and trade will not only be at least to pull China along, but also it will solve our economic woes, create millions of new green jobs, and promote energy security.

Of course, these are laudable goals, and Republicans have a simple answer to this: Let's provide the incentives rather than the taxes and mandates to produce clean, affordable, and reliable sources of energy.

I am for all of the above. I want to have renewables, I want nuclear, I want wind, I want solar, I want clean coal, and natural gas. We need it all. Cut the redtape and encourage private investment. Let all technologies compete in the marketplace. However, that is not what the Democrats are proposing in the Waxman-Markey bill.

I am talking on the Senate floor about a House bill, and I am doing that because it is scheduled to pass tomorrow and then there will be an effort over here. We have had experience with this legislation. As I have said before, it is not going to pass here, but it is a very significant thing. Anytime one House is proposing to pass the largest tax increase in history, we have to be concerned.

This bill does the exact opposite. It closes access to affordable sources of energy by trying to price certain kinds of energy out of the market. It picks winners and losers that leave places such as the Midwest and the South paying higher energy prices to subsidize areas in the rest of the country. We have a chart that shows how much this would raise in the way of taxes in Middle America as opposed to the east coast and the west coast, and it creates more bureaucracy that will only increase the costs that consumers bear and add more layers of regulation to small business.

We have to ask: Why, then, do my colleagues believe creating a national energy tax is necessary? It is all rooted in fabricated global warming science. In fact, just last week, the administration produced yet another alarmist report on global warming--which, of course, is nothing new--that takes the worst possible predictions of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Fourth Assessment Report--is what it is called.

By the way, these assessment reports are not reports by scientists. They are reports by political people, policy people. I have to also say--and I have said this on the floor of the Senate many times before--a lot of the things that come out and that are not in the best interests of the United States come from the United Nations. That is where this whole thing started, back in the middle 1990s.

It was the IPCC of the United Nations where it all started. So it is no surprise that such a report was released just in time for the House vote on Waxman-Markey. However, what is becoming clear is that despite millions of dollars spent on advertising, the American public has clearly rejected the so-called ``consensus'' on global warming. There was a time when this wasn't true. I can remember back between the years of 1998 and 2005, when I would be standing on the Senate floor and talking about the science that rejects this notion. Since that time, hundreds and hundreds of scientists who were on the other side of the issue have come over to the skeptic side, saying: Wait a minute, this isn't really true.

I can name names: Claude Allegre was perhaps considered by some people to be the top scientist in all of France. He used to be on Al Gore's side of this issue back in the late 1990s. Clearly, he is now saying: Wait a minute, we have reevaluated, and the science just isn't there. David Bellamy, one of the top scientists in the U.K., the same thing is true there. He was on the other side and came over. Nieve Sharif from Israel, same thing. So there is no consensus on the fact that they think anthropogenic gases are causing global warming.

Of course, the other thing is, we don't have global warming right now. We are in our fourth year of a cooling spell. But that is beside the point. I am not here to address the science today but on the argument advanced by my colleagues, which is that U.S. unilateral action on global warming will compel other nations to follow our lead, as I have documented in speeches before since 1998.

By the way, if anyone wants--any of my colleagues--to look up those speeches, they can be found at inhofe.senate.gov. If you have insomnia some night, it might be a good idea to read them. They are all about 2 hours long. But I think many would find it very troubling indeed, that even if they believe the flawed IPCC or United Nations science, that science dictates that any unilateral action by the United States will be completely ineffective. The EPA even confirmed it last year during the debate on the Lieberman-Warner bill, and the same would hold true for this year's bill.

Put simply, any isolated U.S. attempt to avert global warming is a futile effort without meaningful, robust international cooperation. No one disputes this fact. The American people need to know what they will be getting with their money: all cost and no benefit. This chart shows that U.S. action without international action will have no effect on world CO2. This is assuming there is no change in the manufacturing base, which we know there would be.

This brings us to a key question as to whether a new robust international agreement can ever be achieved. In addition to the domestic process ongoing in Congress, the United States is currently involved in negotiations for a new international climate change agreement to replace the flawed Kyoto treaty. This process is scheduled to culminate in Copenhagen this December. This will be the big bash put on by the United Nations to encourage countries to buy into their program.

The prospects of such an endeavor are bleak at best. Following the conclusion of the climate meeting in Bonn recently, the U.N.'s top climate official--Yvo de Boer--said it would be physically impossible--now this is the chief advocate of all this--to have a detailed agreement by December in Copenhagen. This is ironic to say the least, considering that President Obama was supposed to bring all the parties together to transcend their differences and to produce a treaty that would save the world from global warming. But the reality of the cost of carbon reductions has intervened, and now a deal appears--as it always has to me and others--far from achievable.

We must not forget where the Senate stands on global warming. As Senators may recall, in 1997, the Senate voted favorably, 95 to 0--95 to 0 doesn't happen often in this Chamber--on the Byrd-Hagel resolution. That stated simply that if you go to Kyoto and you bring back a treaty, we will not ratify that treaty if it, No. 1, would mandate greenhouse gas reductions from the United States without also requiring new specific commitments from developing countries--China--over the same compliance period; or, No. 2, result in serious economic harm to the United States.

Well, obviously, we have talked about the serious harm to the United States and the fact there is no intention at all of having China have to be a part of this new treaty now, what, 15 years later they are going to be talking about. So I think the Byrd-Hagel resolution will still stand strong support in the Senate; therefore, any treaty the Obama administration submits must meet the resolution's criteria or it will be easily defeated.

Remember that criteria: If they submit something in which the United States is going to have to do something that the rest of the world--or the developing world--doesn't have to do, then it is not going to pass; and, secondly, if it inflicts economic harm on this country.

Proponents of securing an international treaty are slowly acknowledging that the gulf is widening between what the United States and other industrialized nations are willing to do and what developing countries such as China want them to do. I suggest the gulf has always been wide but will continue to widen. Recent actions by the United States and China continue to confirm my belief.

Take China's initial reaction to the Waxman-Markey bill. The bill, hailed on Capitol Hill as a historic breakthrough, went over with a thud last week during the international negotiations. Get this: Waxman-Markey, which will be economically ruinous for the United States, was criticized by China for being too weak.

Another troubling aspect coming out of those meetings was the U.S. Government's official submission. Many in the Senate may be surprised to learn that this administration's position is to let China off the hook. You might wonder, why would China look at this thing that would destroy us economically and say they do not think it is strong enough; that they want it stronger? Because the stronger it is, the more manufacturing jobs will leave the United States to go to China. They have to go someplace where they are producing energy. Nowhere in the submission to the conference do we require China to submit to any binding emission reduction requirements before 2020. In fact, before 2020, the submission only asks for ``nationally appropriate'' mitigation actions, followed by a ``low carbon strategy for long-term net emissions reductions by 2050.''

I would submit this proposal is typical of the United States to say: Well, we have to do some face-saving, so at least let's put them in an awkward position of having to ``try'' to do something. It doesn't say they ``have'' to do anything; they have to try. So China can sit back and say: We are trying. Meanwhile, they enjoy all the jobs that are coming from the United States to China.

So what, then, is the Chinese Government's idea of a fair and balanced global treaty? Well, the Chinese believe the United States and other Western nations should, at a minimum, reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent below the 1990 levels by 2020. For comparison's sake, Waxman-Markey, which could become the official U.S. negotiating position, calls for a 17-percent reduction--not 40 percent--below the 2005 levels by 2020.

Despite the positive spin the administration is putting on actions by the Chinese Government to reduce energy intensely or pass a renewable energy standard, while laudable, the official position of the Chinese in their submission to the United States remains as such, which I will read.

The right to development is a basic human right that is undeprivable. Economic and social development and poverty eradication are the first and overriding priorities of the developing nations.

So China is talking about themselves and India and other developing nations.

The right to development of developing countries shall be adequately and effectively respected and ensured in the process of global common efforts in fighting against climate change.

That is their written statement, and that speaks for itself.

Finally, and the most telling of all, the Chinese and other developing countries collectively argue that the price for reducing their emissions is a massive 1 percent of GDP from the United States and other developed countries. What does that tell us? That tells us they are not willing to pay anything.

So let me get this straight. China opposes any binding emission reduction targets on itself; China wants the United States to accept draconian emission reduction targets that will continue to cripple the U.S. economy;
and on top of that, China wants the United States to subsidize its economy with billions of dollars in foreign aid. In the final analysis, one must give China credit for seeking its economic self-interest. I sure hope the Obama administration will do the same for America.

Despite this reality, some here in the Senate will continue to tout the fact that China's new self-imposed emissions intensity reductions, which do not pose any type of binding reductions requirements, will somehow miraculously appear--will somehow suffice for binding requirements. I believe, however, that position will fail to satisfy the American people as acceptable justifications for passage of a bill that will result in higher United States energy taxes and no change in the climate.

I do not blame them. If I were in China, I would be trying to do the same thing. I would be over there saying we want the United States to increase their energy taxes, we want a cap-and-trade bill, an aggressive one that is going to impose a tax--now it is expected to be--MIT had figures far above the $350 billion a year.

That is not a one-shot deal. I stood here on the Senate floor objecting last October when we were voting on a $700 billion bailout. I can't believe some of our Republicans, along with virtually most of the Democrats, voted for this. I talked about how much $700 billion is. If you do your math and take all the families who file tax returns, it comes out $5,000 a family.

At least that is a one-shot deal. What we are talking about here is a tax of somewhere around $350 billion every year on the American people and the bottom line is, China wants no restrictions for theirs. They want the highest reductions for the United States and they want foreign aid on top of that.

I want to mention one other thing that just came up in today's Chicago Tribune. I read this because the Chicago Tribune has editorialized in favor of the notion that anthropogenic gases are responsible for global warming. I will read this:

Democratic leaders need to slow down. This proposed legislation would affect every American individual and company for generations. There's a huge amount of money at stake: $845 billion for the federal government in the first 10 years. Untold thousands of jobs created--or lost. This requires careful study, not a Springfield-style here's-the-bill-let's-vote rush job.

Then:

The bill's sponsors are still trying to resolve questions over whether and how to impose sanctions on countries that do not limit emissions. That's crucial.

That is exactly what we have been saying. Even the Chicago Tribune agrees with that.

That's crucial. Those foreign countries would enjoy a cost advantage in manufacturing if their industries were free to pollute, while American industries picked up the tab for controlling emissions. The Democrats need to delay the vote. Otherwise, the House Members should vote no.

That came out today in the Chicago Tribune. Even the Chicago Tribune says there should not be a vote, but there is going to be a vote. I can't imagine that Speaker Pelosi would bring this up for a vote unless she had the votes.

What is the motivation for this, knowing full well it will not pass the Senate? I mentioned Copenhagen a moment ago--the big meeting of the United Nations, all these people saying America should pass these tax increases. They have to take something up there that will make it look as though America is going to be taking some kind of leadership role. They are not going to do it. If they take the bill passed out of the House, I expect one will be passed out of the Senate committee--because that committee will pass about anything--they will take that to Copenhagen. Everyone will rejoice up there and come back only to find out we are not going to join in.

I am sure there is going to be some type of a treaty that is given to the Senate to ratify. We will all have to remember what happened in 1997. We voted 95 to 0 against ratifying any treaty that is either harmful to us economically or is not going to impose the same hardship and taxes on developing countries such as China as it does on the United States.

I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

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