Lower Energy Costs Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. LAMBORN. Madam Chair, I thank the gentleman, who is doing a great job as chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, for yielding.

Madam Chair, what should be crystal clear by now is that our friends across the aisle do not have solutions to the energy crisis. For the last 4 years, Democrats have controlled both Chambers of Congress, but in that time, not one single piece of serious legislation was ever introduced which would have lowered the cost of energy. After seeing costs rise for years on end, voters decided that they had had enough and elected Republicans to solve this crisis.

In 2019, a gallon of gas cost just over $2. Today, it costs almost $4. The price of groceries has gone up, as the price of energy to ship and keep them cool has gone up as well. Some items have seen as high as a 55 percent increase.

What has been done to help ease energy costs?

What solutions do my friends across the aisle have?

As a result of President Biden's Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the United States pumped $75.8 billion of taxpayer money into unreliable green tech. Besides that, Americans have pumped trillions of both public and private dollars into these industries for decades, but solar and wind combined still only make up 10 percent of American electricity generation.

Instead of making existing technology more affordable, this administration and its allies in Congress dumped billions of dollars into technologies that cannot provide reliable and dispatchable energy to even a fraction of the country. This so-called solution has done nothing to lower costs for the average American. We have higher costs. There is more potential for rolling brownouts. This is the best that my friends across the aisle can do.

An intelligent person would think, why not continue to invest in affordable and proven technology while we are waiting for these alternatives to become viable?

They might be in the future at some point. That is great. But right now it is only 10 percent of our national electrical production.

The PJM Interconnection, for example, which is a grid that services over 65 million people, has announced that they will be short 26 percent of their total energy obligations because radical environmentalists are retiring energy sources while providing no reliable backups.

EPA also recently finalized what they are calling the ``Good Neighbor'' rule by denying 26 different State plans to conform to EPA ozone regulations.

This denial means that 26 States, including my State of Colorado, will have sources of energy generation completely shut down while having no viable backup whatsoever.

This decision guarantees that costs and shortages will continue to increase for the American people with no end in sight.

Maintaining affordable energy is crucial to our way of life. It is what keeps water treatment plants open. It is what keeps hospitals open. It is what keeps traffic lights, libraries, schools, trucks, ships, and airplanes operating.

When the cost of powering these essential processes go up, costs go up. If the grid shuts down, everything relying upon it goes down. This will have catastrophic consequences.

Those of us around the country have seen what happens in places like California with its unrealistic energy policies and want nothing to do with it. High prices and shortages come with overregulation.

Let's face the facts: Current green tech cannot come anywhere close to powering our Nation right now or in the foreseeable future.

The Energy Information Administration expects fossil fuel demand to continue rising, not decreasing, beyond the year 2050.

Ironically, as an aside, fossil fuel industries have always made a higher profit when there is a Democratic President because of the increased per barrel price of oil, but that is just an aside.

Republicans also aren't neglecting permitting realities by ignoring unused drilling permits. We simply recognize that those permits on their own are insufficient to generate investment and production, especially when this administration is doing everything it can to discourage the producers of conventional energy.

What should be clear in this debate is that Republicans are the ones who know how energy works, and we are passing legislation.

H.R. 1 is serious legislation that will lower costs. I urge my colleagues to vote ``yes'' on this bill.

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