Important Issues Facing America

Floor Speech

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Mr. LaMALFA. Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague from Utah for yielding.

Madam Speaker, we come to this microphone day after day, especially the last 2\1/2\ to 3 years, recounting the difficulty that we--``we,'' this collective body, the House and Senate, and the government in general--we are putting the people of this country through, this unnecessary pain, unnecessary crisis, just one after another.

This isn't made by weather or nature or even foreign enemies, per se. We are causing it by the actions either from this administration directly or their bureaucracy. It is one thing after another. In my home State of California, we echo that in spades there as well.

One of them right now is the condition that we are treating women and girls in this country. Now, the usual saw might be about abortion or something. No, look what is happening. For girls and women in their sports, in their opportunities, you have men masquerading as women because they can't cut it on a men's team in sports, for example, so they switch over and just start competing on a women's team or girls' team in school.

How are we even at this point of entertaining this as a legitimate and wise way of doing things?

I keep asking, where are the feminist groups on this? Are they so locked into politics and being unified with the left that they are willing to sacrifice the futures of girls and young women in college with scholarships? Plus, the camaraderie of sports anyway, the goodness that comes from working as a team or those individual efforts you have in individual sports of excelling and finding that just dashed because there are a couple of biological males competing in that same sport with some of the built-in physical advantage they have in many sports, maybe not all but a lot of them.

We see them losing opportunities for scholarships at the college level or winning the gold medal in whatever sport it is.

I am glad to stand with the female athletes as they continue what has been a long fight to have that opportunity in sports. We have title IX coming along. We had some fits and starts getting there, but they deserve to have the same opportunities as men do.

It is a different fight these days. What we see is the left actually intentionally erasing women. Their opportunities are being taken. As I have said, the spaces on sports teams, filling out the rosters, with biological males on there, they lose scholarships, or on the podium, as they win their medals, being replaced with biological men.

Americans in these sports across the country are rightly outraged at what has happened and what is happening to women's and girls' sports. I have signed on to several initiatives at the congressional level to protect women and girls, such as the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act that keeps men from taking scholarships, roster spots, and championship titles from women athletes.

Indeed, it is a point of insanity where we are with this. It is really unfair that they would have to even fight for this opportunity to compete on a stage, on a field, or what have you, with biological men; be pitted against them in contact sports, possibly physically harmed due to the physical advantages that are frequent, or the indignity of having to share a locker room space the way you are raised, with modesty, with the obvious separation of the sexes--up until this recent phenomena that seems to be having so much momentum amongst the left, amongst people who it seems like have really lost their sensibilities.

This is an effective silencing of the voices of female athletes, with the expectation to conform, all because of a gender identity ideology that is running amuck right now. Indeed, we are kind of a laughingstock as a country from some of the countries that are still developing their own sports and contemplating what the heck is it they are doing over there.

Women are being directly hurt by this, as I mentioned, with the physical harm, concussions, skull fractures, other injuries, and being pushed out of their opportunities by this intrusion of males.

It is imperative for the next generation of girls that they be able to grow up and know that they are cared about, that they are loved, that they matter, instead of just being erased from these opportunities. It is just unbelievable we have to talk about this.

Indeed, under this Biden era and others, my home State of California and several other States that are doing this, it is one crisis after another.

I want to talk about energy for a minute, too, because that is another unneeded crisis that is being inflicted upon the people of this country due to the cost.

Now, energy is the basis for so much of our economy and the cost of our economy. In my real life, I am a farmer. Before the 2022 crop, we saw the price of fuel double and the price of fertilizer triple. In 2023 it came back down a little bit. In my home State of California, it is still often normal to see $5 fuel out on the roadway there. It is all because the day President Biden came in, he started having an anti- American energy policy, which is harming our ability to develop and transport natural gas, which is very important, for example, in fertilizer production, but also in warming grain storage around the country, putting warm air on the grain so it will dry out and stay preserved, and so many other forms of use of natural gas, heating homes and operating power plants.

With the miracle of hydraulic fracturing developed not that long ago, America came from being an energy user to the ability to be a major energy exporter. The prices came down so much that other countries were actually looking at locating more and more factories here because the cost of energy was going to be so low.

We have the Biden administration doing everything it can to cut off more development and usage of natural gas at the pass. Why is that? Natural gas burns cleanly. It is one of the good transition fuels as we move from other forms to that, but we still need all of them. We need all of them.

Hydroelectric power is clean, CO2-free electricity, yet it is being pushed out as more and more dams--in my own district in northern California, four dams on the Klamath River are being attacked right now. One of them has already been taken down. Ostensibly, the idea is to save fish there, even though the fish historically really haven't traveled up the river the way it is claimed. They aren't true spawning grounds in a lake that is warm, Klamath Lake, and not ideal for this type of fish. Science doesn't seem to matter on that, because it is a political situation that is being hustled on us.

We are going to lose this hydroelectric at the same time that many are mandating by the year 2035 or 2045, or whatever they want to make up at the time, that we have to have X amount of electric cars or electric stoves or electric leaf blowers and lawnmowers. Heaven knows, we will be moving into trucks and trains and even airplanes.

They are taking away the ability to generate electricity, clean, CO2-free, baseload power such as hydroelectric and really clean fossil fuel but still a very clean and efficient natural gas.

I have been attending a lot of seminars on nuclear energy as well. There is another CO2-free power source that is baseload, that is dependable, that is 24/7. And we are having such difficulty procuring and permitting new nuclear plants. The technology has continued to improve and get better. For these smaller plants, it would be more ideal locating near cities where the technology, the safety is there, but we can't hardly talk about that. We have to have a breakthrough on that so we can be energy independent with low cost and what would appear to be renewable energy.

Renewable isn't just windmills and solar panels, which are really unreliable. We have the opportunity to have baseload power that would be low priced and available 24/7 with these technologies. We have roadblocks time and time again. They want to tear down dams. They want to get rid of natural gas. They are hesitant on nuclear energy. There just doesn't seem to be a solution for the left, because everything is ``no.'' It isn't all going to be served by solar panels and windmills, because those are a tiny percent of our overall grid.

The rest of the world is going ahead with oil and gas development and usage. The curve is going way up around the rest of the world. It is only us and a couple other western countries that are hamstringing our ability to be energy independent, develop the energy we need, and have an economy here. Instead, we are going to export our economy to China and Asia.

We are harming ourselves by having this administration in charge with their wrong-headed, backward policies on this. We need energy independence. We can do it. We can do it cleanly and responsibly.

I mentioned CO2 a couple times, CO2 meaning climate change and the fear factor that is causing around the country. I remind you; CO2 is only 0.04 percent of our atmosphere. When asked, the average person on the street who is busy with their lives doing what they do, they will typically guess, from all the hype, somewhere between 20 and 50 percent. No, it is 0.04 percent.

With the U.S. and a couple other western countries actually flattening their CO2 production, even dipping down a little bit, it is certainly not us that would be the so-called problem. It is the continued export of jobs, export of economy, and export of manufacturing to places like China and the Pacific rim where they don't have nearly the protections.

As we keep talking about a carbon-free life and going zero carbon, it is actually not necessary. Because so little of the atmosphere is carbon dioxide anyway, it is not a threat. It is one that is used by government, by organizations, by international organizations, to try and control more and more of our economy and of our lives; taking away our vehicles, taking away our mobility, telling us we need to live in stacked communities instead of the way we live; running people off the rural areas like in my district and the western States, running people out of the cattle business and such by introducing wolves, decimating the deer and elk populations, as well as livestock; basically pushing people out that are productive people that serve all of those folks that make these policies that live in the cities.

I guess maybe they need to go to the end of the food line when they are talking about what they are doing to devastate agriculture, as well as these other industries that provide the minerals, electricity, energy, and everything they need.

There are so many crises that are unneeded in this country, I could go all day long, but I shouldn't. I hope people will take heart on this and look at what the policies are that are being made by the Biden administration, by Democrats in the Senate, and the majority in my home State of California, 3-1 Democrat majority with Governor Newsom, and the havoc that is being wreaked on the people of California with these wrongheaded policies. Certainly, I would invite the rest of the country not to emulate what California does.

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