Weaponizing Co2

Floor Speech

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Mr. LaMALFA. Mr. Speaker, I am going to speak to you, once again, about our atmosphere, climate, and, most specifically, carbon dioxide, which has been weaponized in the argument around here, with government agencies against the people, as a tool, I think, to take more control of the economy and people's personal property.

Carbon dioxide, I will remind you, is 0.04 percent of the entire pie of our atmosphere; oxygen, 21 percent; nitrogen, 78 percent; trace gases other than that, 0.03. Argon is much bigger in our atmosphere than CO2. Yet, you would think, with the CO2 numbers creeping up slowly, it is the end of the world.

Everything around here has to be run through a CO2 filter, a climate change filter, and it is much to the detriment of our economy and the U.S. position in the world.

Most recently, the Securities and Exchange Commission has adopted rules on their own to decide that people are going to have to start disclosing their climate impact of how they operate their businesses. You are going to have to start accounting for your CO2 production and report that to a Federal entity.

This is pretty much going to mean everybody if they are connected to a certain size of business and what have you. Small suppliers to larger corporations that are caught in the snare of this will have to account for that.

For food production, let's say you have ingredients that are placed into a larger recipe for food products that you could buy from maybe a larger conglomerate. There are also individual small growers--say, a carrot farmer, a bean farmer. He is now going to have to disclose his CO2 production on his farm because he might be selling to a larger entity that is caught in the snare of the SEC.

Where does this all end? How much time does an individual like that have to chase around and figure out what his CO2 impact is going to be, especially since it is only 0.04 percent of our atmosphere?

There is much debate about what amount of the CO2 is caused by human activity. Some want to say, oh, it is 50 percent. Others believe it is very small, a tiny percentage, like maybe 3 percent.

There are those that want to say, well, the science is settled, merely because they want to move on and take control over so many aspects of our economy.

What are some of the issues that we have seen grow out of that? We have what is known as ESG, environmental, social, and governance.

The country of Sri Lanka, just a few short years ago, decided to adopt and try to meet these ESG goals, much to the great harm of their economy. It almost collapsed good portions of their economy because they went whole hog as a whole country on that to try to adopt ESG goals.

On the environmental side of the E, they forced farmers to completely convert to organic materials for their fertilizer and whatever pesticide products they were able to use organically. What immediately happened? Rice yields in the country dropped 20 percent. The price of rice went up 50 percent for consumers.

We saw that that blew a great big hole in the ag economy in that small country. Their country had to come in and start doing bailouts, basically, to help keep those farmers afloat until they finally got their senses and abandoned a lot of those ESG goals.

They are also an important tea exporter, which caused their exports to fall. They lost hundreds of millions of dollars on that as well.

Their economy collapsed by trying to meet some arbitrary ESG goal brought on by outsiders that really have this idealistic, elite whim of what people should be doing instead of what actually works.

I run this all by you here because the Biden administration has been causing this kind of harm on our own economy in this country. The focus of every agency seems to be climate, climate, climate all the time because of a tiny increase in CO2.

CO2 is a rounding error in the overall atmospheric chart here, and the increase of that is minute. How much can we blame on human activity versus what might be happening with other naturally occurring issues?

What do we have? Our economy is being outclassed by China and others in the Pacific Rim that can produce at will, and they are the much larger so-called polluters than we are of CO2.

Do you want to have a situation where we can actually have better control and reasonable regulations on how things are produced in this country, or do we want to export it all to China and places like that and have basically almost no control on how they are doing that?

What we are going to hear tonight when the President is going to be in this room, he is probably going to talk a whole bunch about climate and some new initiatives on that. Instead, why doesn't he focus on something that could have immediate help for the devastating things going on on our border in this country, eight steps he could take with the swing of a pen to clean up our border problems instead of blaming Republicans for his mess?

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