EPA Regulations

Floor Speech

Mr. INHOFE. Madam President, I apologize to the Chair. I had a misunderstanding as to where we were, and I only wanted to try to get the point across, which I think I failed to do, regarding the cost of these regulations.

I think I used as an example the five--I mentioned, actually, six when you consider hydraulic fracturing also as one of the regulations. By far, the one that is the most expensive is the regulation that would be for the greenhouse gases. I think we have pretty much established the cost to do a cap-and-trade bill and the range being from $300 billion to $400 billion. The quotes I used, which I won't repeat now, were from Administrator Jackson and Senator Kerry and others stating that doing it through regulation would be far more expensive. So I think we need to be looking at it in terms of about $400 billion a year. This would be a tax on the American people. This would be the cost to our GDP.

I remember back in 1993 when we had the Clinton-Gore tax increase. It was the largest one in four decades at that time. It was an increase in the death tax, an increase in marginal rates, an increase in capital gains--an increase in almost all taxes--and it was a $30 billion tax increase. What we are talking about here is a tax increase that is 10 times that great--10 times. We are using the figure now of $400 billion because we know that through regulation, it will cost more.

Again, I go back and repeat the quote we had from Administrator Jackson of the EPA, who said in response to my question, live in our committee, if we were to pass legislation--at that time, I think it was the Waxman-Markey bill, although it doesn't really matter because cap and trade is cap and trade--would that reduce overall emissions, and she said no because it would only apply to the United States.

I would carry it one step further. If we were to pass or do anything through regulation here, all it will do is cause our manufacturing base to go out and find the energy necessary to operate. And where do they go? They go to places such as China, India, and Mexico--places that have almost no emission standards. So if there is a pollution problem, it becomes much greater, not less, in terms of overall emissions.

Another situation I often talk about is the time before I left to go to the Copenhagen United Nations event, where they were going to try to convince the rest of the world that we were going to pass legislation that would be cap and trade and impose this tax on the American people.

In a committee hearing, I said to Administrator Jackson: I have a feeling that as soon as I leave town, you are going to have an endangerment finding.

Sure enough, that is what happened.

I said: When you have an endangerment finding, it has to be based on science. So what science would you be using?

She said: By and large, it would be the science developed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Ironically, right after that, climategate came up and really destroyed the legitimacy of the IPCC.

I have read some of the quotes that were given by different people when they talked about climategate. One of them is a British writer George Monbiot, who is known for his environmental and political activism, and he is on the other side of this. He writes a weekly column for the Guardian. He said:

Pretending that this isn't a real crisis isn't going to make it go away.

Here, he is referring to climategate and the fact that they were cooking the science.

Nor is an attempt to justify the emails with technicalities.

Again talking about the participants in IPCC.

We'll be able to get past this only by grasping reality, apologizing where appropriate and demonstrating that it cannot happen again.

I also mentioned the Daily Telegraph in the UK. Quoting from it:

This scandal could well be the greatest in modern science.

Then the Atlantic Magazine, which generally is editorializing the other side of this issue, said:

The closed-mindedness of these supposed men of science, their willingness to go to any lengths to defend a preconceived message, is surprising even to me. The stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering.

That was the loss of credibility of the whole idea of the science that was put together by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change at the United Nations. But to make it even worse, we requested that the inspector general do a study and report back as to the science and how the science was developed by the IPCC and whether it followed the guidelines that were necessary. They came back just 1 week ago with a report that says the EPA has failed to follow the responsible guidelines. In fact, even before the scope of the study was finalized today, the EPA was already collecting data samples at the undisclosed fracking sites, so they are going in now to using the same type of flawed science and going after other parts of their agenda. In this case, it would be hydraulic fracturing, which I mentioned just a few minutes ago, is an attempt to stop our ability to develop our own resources.

In the course of this overregulation, I think we have to keep in mind and to keep talking about these six greatest and most costly regulatory problems that we have out there and how much it is going to cost the American people. Again, the one that is the most serious right now is trying to regulate and do a cap-and-trade through the regulations as opposed to doing it through legislation.

We are going to keep talking about that. It is not going to go away. People think time will make people forget. But we don't forget something of that magnitude.

I did a calculation in my State of Oklahoma; as I always do, I get the number of families who file a tax return each year. When something comes along that will cost something, I do the calculation and I do the math and then I go back to the American people and say: Get ready. This is what it is going to cost.

If we were to have passed any of the bills that were like the Kyoto Protocol, and the last one being the Waxman-Markey bill, the cost would have been at least $300 billion. If we take that annual cost, that would cost my tax-paying families in Oklahoma in excess of $3,000 a family, and they get nothing for it.

We can do an awful lot of talking about the deficits and the spending of this administration. Let's don't overlook perhaps the most expensive thing to the American people; that is, the overregulation that makes us noncompetitive with the rest of the world.

With that, I yield the floor.

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