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Mr. HATCH. Mr. President, today the Senate voted 80 to 17 in favor of the Energy and Water appropriations bill, H.R. 3182. I praise Chairman Byron L. Dorgan and Senator Robert F. Bennett, the Republican ranking member, and the other members of the Energy and Water subcommittee for putting together what I consider to be a good bill and certainly a big improvement over the energy budget sent to us by the President.
Knowing that the funding measure would pass, I chose to vote against this bill, which funds the Department of Energy, as a signal to the Obama administration and the DOE that American taxpayers want and need a serious pro-energy plan, not the anti-energy strategy being pushed on us by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which this administration has adopted.
When the Secretary of Energy testifies before Congress that he believes it is his job to cut carbon-dioxide emissions by 80 percent in the next 40 years, then we know our Nation does not have an energy policy; rather, we have an anti-energy policy. Cutting our Nation's emissions by 80 percent would provide two certain outcomes: First, reducing CO2 at that reckless pace would certainly devastate our economy and ruin our Nation's global competitiveness. Secondly, according to the U.N.'s own calculations for CO2's warming ability, it would result in no perceptible reduction in global temperatures. At best, it would reduce temperatures by about 0.1 degrees Centigrade after 40 years of economic torture.
Maybe the media have fallen for this dangerous distraction to a real energy policy, but the polls show that the taxpayers have not.