Energy Independence
Floor Speech
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Mr. LaMALFA. Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Moore for yielding.
Mr. Speaker, energy really is the cornerstone of a modern economy and a modern country, and the United States has been able to be a great innovator for so many decades on improving our lot with energy, and, indeed, exporting civilization to the rest of the world. Energy modernizes us and makes people more easily able to feed themselves, clothe themselves, withstand disaster and not have to have every heat wave or cold wave be a disastrous loss of life due to our ability to harness and produce energy that works for us.
Energy independence is something that just a few short years ago we were largely achieving finally under President Trump. Over the last 3 years, that has unraveled. That independence along with our food security is, indeed, what makes us strong so we can withstand outside threats. Those two items really go hand in hand.
I wish President Biden would realize that and not have the cabal behind him that is doing everything it can to unwind all the progress and all the good things that have been made in recent decades to make the country so strong previously.
We need to have decisive action to renew our economic vitality instead of more damage. Instead of supporting our farmers and ensuring a stable food supply, it appears agriculture and its industry of feeding our Nation has turned into a partisan issue somehow leaving farmers and ranchers to fend for themselves in an increasingly hostile business and regulatory atmosphere.
Costs of inputs--just a couple of years ago, we saw the cost of fertilizer triple and the cost of fuel triple. In my real life, I am a farmer at home. I saw it firsthand.
That has to be passed along. Otherwise, there is no longer a farmer there to produce those items if they do not make at least some level of profit.
As we work through these challenges to the agriculture sector, hopefully with a farm bill here that we can get heard next month and passed along to the Senate, we need to understand the far-reaching implications of Biden anti-American energy policies because that ties right back in. Agriculture in this country is really dependent on a good source of energy: diesel for our tractors and trucks and the ability to dry and process our products with electricity that is readily available at reasonable prices.
What do we get out of this lately? A brand-new push for more electric vehicles, a stroke of the pen by the President and his administration. We are going to be forced--if these things stand, in just 8 short years, the fleet will have to be two-thirds electric for our cars and pickups and about 46 percent on more medium-duty trucks, just by whim.
What are we finding? That our electricity supply in this country is already sometimes in peril, like in my home district. I was mentioning earlier that sometimes the power gets shut off in northern California because the wind blows and maybe they are afraid that a tree or a branch will blow into a power line and cause an outage and a massive forest fire like we see. How are you supposed to charge your vehicle at night when they have a 2- or 3-day power shutoff?
Even more so, we are going backward on energy production. They are tearing out the dams on the Klamath River that make CO
Windmills are extremely inefficient for the amount of energy and effort it takes to put one up versus what their output is. Solar is fine and dandy, but it is only a tiny percent, a niche of production currently in this country.
We need the mainstays. We need hydroelectric. We need to expand nuclear power because that is a good 24-7 baseload power supply. A small plant can produce a mass amount of power. You don't need thousands of acres of solar fields covering up good land, like they are trying to do.
Even in the San Joaquin Valley, some of the most productive farmland in the world right there in central California, their big idea is to have solar farms cover up this good land instead of the concentrated power plants that you have with nuclear, hydro, natural gas--yes--and the other forms.
I also want to talk about biomass. We don't get to talk about that a lot around here. Our forests are already way undermanaged. They have way too much material out there in them. We need to take more biomass and put it to work in power plants on a controlled basis. That is a 24- 7 fuel also. It is baseload power that is available. You don't have to rely on the wind to blow, the Sun to come up, the clouds to blow away, or the rain to stop. You have the ability to run that 24-7 whenever you want.
Additionally, putting forest products to work means it is not going to be out there burning in the woods. You are going to have a 99.9 percent cleaner output burning that material in a power plant.
One of the other side effects of ignoring our forests and the dead trees is that they are still going to give off carbon dioxide as trees decay, so you could either control it in a power plant more efficiently or have it just release out there. A tree grows, dies, and gives off the CO
One of the by-products not talked about much is methane gas released from a decomposing tree or other plant matter. My colleagues will talk about methane gas being much more volatile in the upper atmosphere than CO
We need to talk more about that. That is a highlight that hasn't been exposed much, what good forestry means to the energy grid and also to cleaning up the forests, making them less fire-prone with all of that ash and all of that particulate matter that gets into the air and fogs out hundreds of square miles of a region there with really foul air.
The pluses on biomass just outstrip any of the negatives, other than it is not cheap to move the material. That is something we need to assess. The Forest Service is going to have to do more with their lands, and this is a way of harnessing power to the good. It means jobs in those communities. It means safer, healthier forests. It means electricity you can depend on 24-7 with what is burning in those power plants.
We see so many implications of high costs of energy, with groceries, with what it means for normal families, and this doesn't have to be happening. These high costs of electricity and fuel do not need to be happening to the American people. We need the Biden administration to go in the right direction, help farmers, ranchers, consumers, and the producers of energy to actually produce in this country and not rely on imports from somewhere else. Let's get cracking on that and do the right thing.
Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding time.
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