Choice in Automobile Retail Sales Act of 2023

Floor Speech

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Mr. RUIZ. Madam Speaker, last week, the Department of Energy's Geothermal Technologies Office released the most comprehensive analysis to date, quantifying the domestic lithium resources in the Salton Sea region of Imperial Valley, also known as Lithium Valley in my district.

The analysis found that Lithium Valley's total resources could produce enough lithium to manufacture over 375 million total electric vehicle batteries. This is more than the total number of cars currently on the road in the United States today. That is a lot of lithium and a lot of electric vehicles, and that will lower the cost of electric vehicles for everyone in our Nation.

Lithium Valley is a great example of how domestic solutions exist for our domestic and global supply chains, and my Republican colleagues should be as excited about this analysis as I am. Given their critical mineral supply chain concerns, I would think this is welcome news. However, instead of focusing our efforts on how to best leverage this report to further our domestic lithium production, we are here debating a bill that will do the exact opposite and harm our domestic supply chain efforts.

H.R. 4468, the Choice in Automobile Retail Sales Act, would prohibit the EPA from finalizing their proposed rule on multipollutant emissions standards, drastically cutting into the development and production of domestic technological innovations, such as electric vehicles and battery manufacturing, that our Nation needs.

Madam Speaker, I strongly oppose this bill in its entirety. In addition to slowing down our country's ability to compete with China on electric vehicles in the global market, it is a direct attack on our Nation's ability to curb vehicle emissions and help rural and marginalized communities in their own districts suffering from the highest pollution.

My home State of California and, in particular, my district, California's 25th, have significant air pollution challenges.

As a physician, I have seen the public health impacts of air pollution firsthand. These consequences are serious and have very real bad effects on the lives of my constituents. From having to skip work to deal with air pollution-associated health challenges to spending money on unexpected healthcare costs, my constituents are experiencing the negative impacts of air pollution every day.

Recently, the American Thoracic Society released its latest ``Health of the Air'' report, which estimated that we can prevent over 21,000 deaths by cleaning up our air, and a major step in doing so is by reducing vehicle emissions, which this bill will not do.

What we should be doing is following California's lead by taking concrete steps to reduce dangerous air pollution from transportation modalities. Instead, this bill specifically punishes California for its efforts, and that is unacceptable.

California has chosen to make the health of Californians a priority. This bill should do the same for all Americans, and I urge my colleagues to oppose this environmentally unfriendly and disastrous polluter-over-people bill.

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