Climate Legislation
Floor Speech
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Mr. McCONNELL. Madam President, yesterday, I mentioned that the DNA of the far-left Green New Deal is all over President Biden's spending bills. That wasn't just my opinion; it was the verdict of our colleague the junior Senator from Massachusetts.
Today, the President is scheduled to meet virtually with a group of the world's leaders on climate policy. His agenda, reportedly, is to encourage them to expand their countries' Paris climate agreement commitments to meet even more ambitious emissions goals. The problem, of course, as our colleagues, no doubt, remember, is that the hollow commitments these countries made back in 2015 carry no serious means for enforcement.
Under the last administration, even from outside this agreement, the U.S. economy proved more than capable of meaningfully reducing CO
As the Biden administration climate envoy, John Kerry, once lamented, ``[M]ost countries are . . . not getting the job done in living up to Paris.'' China, for example, has just kept emitting more and done it shamelessly. Their share of greenhouse gas emissions is now nearly double--double--that of the United States.
On a recent trip to Shanghai, Kerry tried to echo President Biden's encouragement on emissions reduction, but the kid-gloves approach didn't seem too successful. China's Vice Minister for Foreign Affairs said: ``I'm afraid this is not very realistic.'' A direct quote from the Chinese Government.
Democrats' zeal for imposing costly environmental agendas on our own country is not something our biggest foreign competitors seem to share. If that is true, our colleagues could inflict as many painful policies on American workers and American industries as they want and still not achieve a significant change in worldwide emissions or global temperatures.
The cost of these misplaced priorities is already hitting Americans hard. Remember, revoking permitting for the Keystone XL Pipeline and killing thousands of jobs was a day-one priority for this new administration. Now their so-called infrastructure plan would aim at completely decarbonizing our electric grid, which means hurting our coal and natural gas industries and putting good-paying American jobs into the shredder.
Borrowing money in order to kill jobs, now, there is a concept. Meanwhile, a mountain of redtape would keep public works projects smothered, literally smothered in endless environmental reviews, and their plan would thrust the west coast obsession with electric vehicles onto the entire Nation, onto rural school districts, onto industries, whether they like it or not.
Next week, President Biden is set to address a joint session of Congress for the first time. I expect we will hear more claims like the ones that have been debunked by fact checkers that all this Green New Deal DNA would actually create a lot of American jobs. Fact checkers are debunking that claim.
But even the most favorable analyses, even the administration's favorite projections, suggest that the President's plan would be terrible, just terrible at creating jobs. The rosiest numbers you could come up with suggest it might cost American taxpayers more than $800,000 for every job it might create--more than $800,000 per job.
And Ivy League economists have calculated that the plan's long-term effects on GDP, capital stocks, and hourly wages would all be negative. Let me say that again. These multiple trillions of dollars would buy us less GDP, less investment, and lower wages. It almost takes talent to craft something that completely disastrous.
So this is quite a one-two punch: toothless requests of our foreign adversaries and maximum pain for American citizens.
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