Support Increased Domestic Energy Production

Floor Speech

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Mr. HILL of Arkansas. Madam Speaker, I thank my friend from South Carolina for yielding. He is welcome in the beautiful rice country of Arkansas to hunt ducks this fall at any time. I appreciate his leadership of the Sportsmen's Caucus, the largest bipartisan caucus we have here in the House, and all of the good work it does in wildlife conservation and conservation of our public lands, so I thank my friend for that.

It is true, I appreciate also his work in the House Energy Action Team and that of our whip, Steve Scalise of Louisiana. And that is because we all are talking tonight about the importance of energy to our economy, the importance of energy to our families, and how that has to be balanced in the world of public policy.

Madam Speaker, in 2018, crude oil was the world's number one export product. Last year, the U.S. accounted for 98 percent of global growth in oil production. Since the Congress lifted the 40-year ban on oil exports in 2015, U.S. production continues to set records, and, just last month set a new all-time high of exporting 3.3 million barrels of crude per day.

Lifting the ban has filled pipelines and sparked a surge of investment across this land in new shipping infrastructure around the U.S.

Total crude imports have also dropped significantly as we rely now more on domestic production and that production produced by our friends in Canada. Likewise, exporting clean natural gas is a leading export of the United States.

South Korea is now the largest buyer of American clean natural gas, Madam Speaker. That is cleaning up their skies, lowering their carbon emissions, and cutting their trade imbalance with the United States.

Exporting more gas, exporting more oil, and lifting the ban has allowed us to be an energy leader in the world. We are no longer second fiddle to the Gulf, to Saudi Arabia, or to Russia. This comes as the United States is leading the world also, Madam Speaker, in reducing global climate or carbon emissions. Between 2000 and 2014, the United States reduced emissions more than 18 percent.

On the contrary, the world's largest carbon emitters, like China and India, continue to have no policy to reduce their emissions, despite having the lowest marginal cost to do that. In the EU and the United States, it is very expensive for us to lower carbon emissions per unit. But, when you are a major carbon polluter, such as India and China, the marginal cost to clean up their action is so much cheaper.

Instead, China is building 300 new coal plants, and not a single country in the EU is on target to meet their carbon reduction goals. These countries must do more to be competitive with us on the efforts we are taking here in the U.S.

Like my friends from Georgia and South Carolina, I am a strong supporter of nuclear energy because it is the cleanest, most green form of base power generation. In Arkansas, we get about 19 percent of our electricity generated from nuclear.

And I support the idea of better and more effective ways to store nuclear waste, which we have talked about and tried to pass in this House. Any discussion of eliminating carbon emissions must include nuclear energy.

We also must invest in longer battery life technologies and lowering barriers towards solar cell innovation. The future of clean energy rests with harnessing the power of the Sun and being able to store that power cheaply and portably. No one, Madam Speaker, is doing more research on that than the United States. We are spending over $550 million a year on advanced energy research to make our country even more energy competitive.

So, I believe, like many of my colleagues, we need to pursue an all- of-the-above energy strategy that will lead us to a cleaner, less carbon-dependent world without forcing American families and Arkansas families to bear the burden of flawed policies like the Green New Deal or the Paris climate accord.

Madam Speaker, I thank my friend from South Carolina for this time, for his leadership, and I look forward to working with him on these issues in the years to come.

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