Alaska's Right to Produce Act of 2023

Floor Speech

Mr. Speaker, once again, instead of dealing with the real problems facing Americans every day, we are back on the House floor talking about the GOP agenda--guns, oil, and polluters. It is a relentless mission to wreak havoc on our planet and communities, but before we go into the merits of this bill, here is a dose of reality.

Last year, as our Republican friends turned a blind eye, the global climate surpassed 2 degrees Celsius, a threshold that ought to be taken quite seriously. For the first time in recorded history, we passed this threshold, and that made it the hottest year on record.

Experts have determined that a 2-degree rise in global temperatures will inarguably cause dangerous and cascading effects on humans and our planet. That hasn't stopped my colleagues across the aisle. It is as if the majority is playing a dangerous game of chicken with our environment, betting against Mother Nature.

In the disaster department, 2023 was a showcase of calamity. We tallied up a staggering $63 billion in weather-related catastrophes. This includes 19 severe storms, 2 tropical cyclones, 4 floods, a winter weather event, a drought, and a wildfire event. It is as if Republicans were sitting on the front row with the popcorn in their hands, leaning over to ask their oil and gas buddies what they needed in addition to all the other giveaways they have received from the Republican majority.

There is actually even more. In a display of unparalleled negligence, 2023 also came with 10 oil tanker spills because apparently the GOP agenda is also: Spill, baby, spill, and let the taxpayer foot the bill.

We are not even talking yet about pipeline leaks. Every day in America, some aspect of this spiderweb of fossil fuel infrastructure is exploding, bursting, leaking, spilling. Last fall, there were almost 1.1 million gallons of crude oil released into the Gulf of Mexico, yet my friends across the aisle don't ever legislate about that or do oversight about that. Republican Members don't talk about it or acknowledge it. One has to wonder if my colleagues on the other side of the aisle even care about it.

Here we are again with an effort to expand our Nation's carbon footprint and expose our coastal communities to future disasters and oil spills. Not only does this bill grant access to one of our most ecologically sensitive and difficult regions to productively drill, but it reverses significant strides by the Biden administration to protect lands that Tribal nations have occupied and held sacred since time immemorial.

The Arctic refuge is one of the last truly wild places left in America, and the urgency to preserve the Arctic refuge transcends environmental concerns. It is a rallying cry against irreversible devastation and destruction, things that would fundamentally change and ruin this unique, fragile, and wild place.

The coastal plain, which is the heart of the Porcupine caribou herd's calving grounds, hosts nearly 200 migratory bird species annually. Equally vital, the 9,000-strong Gwich'in Nation, whose subsistence and culture depend on the caribou herd, resides along the migratory route. This means that development in this area would disrupt not only biodiversity, but it would be an assault on their indigenous livelihoods and traditions.

We have already seen how that plays out. In Nuiqsut, the Alaska Native village nearest to the Willow oil and gas project, 70 percent of households rely on subsistence resources for more than half of their diet. With the new Willow development, hunters are being forced to travel farther and farther to find resources and avoid hunting grounds that are now dominated by the fossil fuel industry. Rolling back NPR-A protections would make matters even worse.

In the Bering Sea, which is home to many unique marine ecosystems and rich in indigenous cultures, sea ice is melting earlier and freezing later. This threatens access to subsistence hunting and fishing grounds. Any increased vessel traffic related to oil and gas development would further stress and create risk for an already vulnerable ecosystem.

Exploiting these sensitive areas is equivalent to sacrificing those on the front lines of the climate crisis as martyrs in order to temporarily quench the insatiable thirst of Big Oil for money.

Let's get one more thing clear. The drilling that would be green- lighted in this bill would not make us energy independent. The United States is already the number one producer of oil and gas in the world. We are exporting record amounts of fossil fuel, but consumers still get hit with price shocks anytime OPEC decides to raise prices or Russia starts a war in Europe because oil and gas are global commodities.

Fossil fuel dependence is not true energy independence because you are always on the roller coaster. You are always subject to the whims of some cartel, somebody gaming the global commodity market, some explosion, some international event.

If we want energy independence, we need a transition to clean energy, which is cheaper, safer, and generated entirely here at home, instead of being at the mercy of global price shocks like oil and gas.

The Republican agenda is predictable, repetitive, and dangerous. They need to stop putting polluters over people.

Enough is enough. We can no longer exploit our frontline communities and delicate ecosystems to pad the pockets of the fossil fuel industries and its GOP cronies.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to oppose this bill, and I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. HUFFMAN. Mr. Speaker, I do appreciate my colleague's love of tennis, our mutual love of tennis and his sense of humor. I have less appreciation when he draws tortured analogies to international sanctions and national security issues. It is just hard to take that kind of sanctimony seriously from somebody who just last week voted, along with the majority of the House Republican Conference, to hand Ukraine over to Vladimir Putin.

As I often say in these debates, you have to take a lot of this political theater with a grain of salt, in this case, with a glass of vodka.

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Mr. HUFFMAN. Mr. Speaker, this is certainly a master class in deflection. I think perhaps the fact that a majority of the Republican Conference voted to hand Ukraine to Russia last week has touched a nerve as people have begun to consider the reality of that.

Going back and trying to deflect to a pipeline from many years ago that no longer even functions, because it was blown up, certainly doesn't change the fact that last week when we had a chance to vote for critical lifeline military support for Ukraine as it fights for its survival against Russia, a significant majority of my colleagues across the aisle voted ``no.''

They voted with Vladimir Putin and so congratulations on the deflection. Moscow Marge couldn't have done it any better. It might even make the highlight reel on RT tonight.

I don't watch that network, but I just have to wonder if maybe there wouldn't be coverage of some of these things that we are hearing from across the aisle.

Mr. Speaker, this is getting almost comical. I have now heard yet another speech pretending to oppose Vladimir Putin and Russia less than a week after the gentleman who just spoke voted to hand Ukraine over to Putin, voted ``no'' on essential military aid to our Ukrainian allies who are fighting for their very existence against this terrible war of aggression by Vladimir Putin made possible and financed, of course, by the fossil fuel industry in Russia, which American oil and gas companies truly helped to develop.

You just have to wonder if there is not a lot of damage control underway right now across the aisle. Maybe folks realize just how reckless and dangerous that vote against Ukraine was last week, that vote that a majority, solid majority of my Republican friends took right along with Moscow Marge and the rest of the pro-Putin caucus.

I am going to keep bringing this up each time I hear one of these anti-Ukraine voters pretend to care about Ukraine or pretend to oppose Vladimir Putin and Russia because last week they had a chance to actually show their colors, and we saw their colors.

There is another way in which they are really doing a great favor to Vladimir Putin and Russia, and it is by opposing the clean energy transition at every turn and in every possible way. Vladimir Putin's worst nightmare is to break the fossil fuel paradigm that made him rich and powerful, that enabled him to have all this influence and leverage over Europe because a clean energy economy would make him irrelevant. It would make him a lot less powerful.

Go ahead and keep helping Vladimir Putin with your votes, with your energy policy, but we are going to stand for a clean energy transition, and we are going to support Ukraine.

I thank the gentleman from Washington for his refreshingly rare vote for Ukraine military aid and also the chairman, Mr. Westerman, for joining Democrats in that very important vote in the interests of our national security.

I think, as we continue with this debate, it is worth talking about just what a fiscal and financial boondoggle drilling in the Arctic refuge is. It is, first of all, a proposition that is so deeply unpopular that the only way it became law was to sneak it into the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the Trump tax scam.

Two lease sales were included in the legislation to partly offset tax cuts for the wealthy. Initially, Republicans in Congress and the Trump administration claimed that these lease sales would bring in $1.8 billion in revenues for the Federal Government and the State of Alaska through bonus bids, and they proceeded to give a whole bunch of tax cuts away to billionaires and corporations on the basis of this illusory offset.

Later, the Congressional Budget Office lowered the estimate to $900 million, specifically $725 million for the first lease sale. Fast forward to the first lease sale that finally took place in 2021 in the final days of the Trump administration. Guess what happened? Well, it generated less than $15 million--not billion--in bonus bids, around 2 percent of what even CBO's reduced estimate had projected.

In 2022, two of those lessees actually asked BLM to cancel and refund their leases. They wanted out. Separately in 2021, two development companies, Chevron and Hilcorp, paid $10 million to get out, just to walk away from their legacy leases in the Arctic refuge. At least five major U.S. banks and 18 other international banks have said they won't finance drilling in the refuge.

If my Republican colleagues are interested in Federal revenues, if they are interested in fiscal conservatism, I am sorry to say that the pristine Alaska wilderness is not their piggy bank, and, in any event, it turns out that it is empty.

Mr. Speaker, I sometimes feel like, serving in this Congress, I need a good chiropractor because you just political whiplash one day to another, one week to another.

Just now, my friend from Louisiana, in service of the fossil fuel agenda, made a sanctimonious speech opposing Russia and Vladimir Putin as if the whole country, the whole world, didn't watch his vote last week with the rest of his Republican Conference to hand Ukraine over to Russia, to vote ``no'' on critical military aid to Ukraine.

It is like that. It is remarkable whiplash.

My friend has the ability to actually criticize the air quality in California caused by catastrophic wildfires driven by the climate crisis caused by our fossil fuel addiction and suggests that that is because of California's climate agenda, which is absurd, while ignoring the fact that the one place of persistent air pollution and respiratory illness and other problems with air quality in California is in the oil patch, Bakersfield, former Speaker McCarthy's district where it is frankly a lot like Louisiana and Texas. It is pretty rich.

Yet, we also have a Record if anybody is interested in cutting through the political theater and seeing where people really stand, including last week's vote against Ukraine.

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Mr. HUFFMAN. Mr. Speaker, I would also point out that if our friends across the aisle are so concerned with American energy bills, you would think they would at some point say no to the LNG export extravaganza that all serious economic analysis shows is driving up U.S. energy prices. Yet, they continue to come to this floor to introduce legislation and advocate against the commonsense pause that the Biden administration has taken so that we can look at the impacts of more LNG export infrastructure on U.S. energy prices as well as our climate crisis.

Mr. Speaker, I am glad to hear the gentleman from Arkansas talk about energy subsidies and to criticize the subsidies that he believes should be questioned for clean energy.

I hope he has the same concern about the much greater amount of subsidy, especially if you consider all the environmental externalities that taxpayers just pick up the tab for and have for the past hundred years when it comes to the fossil fuel industry.

There is a lot of work we could do together to take inappropriate subsidies out of U.S. energy policy, and I hope the gentleman would be interested in that.

I want to assure him when it comes to the forestry and trees and air quality part of our conversation that the wildfires and the air quality problems in California, because of them, are not something you can log your way out of.

I know the gentleman is interested in forest management, and there is a lot that we could work on there together as well for healthy forests. Some of the worst wildfires in California that produced the worst air quality were through heavily cutover land where there had been all the clear-cutting anybody could ever want.

The same can be said for some of the terrible Canadian wildfires last year that gave us awful air quality right here in Washington, D.C. Much of that ripped right through heavily cutover, clear-cut land.

Logging, you know, is not the simple solution to these problems. A better solution is to step back and realize the climate crisis that is driving it and to begin working together to actually reduce the worst impacts of that crisis.

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Mr. HUFFMAN. Mr. Speaker, I am prepared to close as well and yield myself the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, obviously, I oppose this bill. We have massive wildfires, prolonged droughts, stronger hurricanes, and coastal flooding. All across this country, our communities are feeling the increased severity and frequency of tragic events from the climate crisis, sending us dire warnings.

The crisis is real, it is here, and we need to act now for the sake of this planet and future generations.

In the Arctic, temperatures are rising four times faster than the global average. In the indigenous communities in northern Alaska who are so disproportionately facing the devastating impacts of the climate crisis, we must also pay attention to the impacts on them.

The melting permafrost is creating our country's first but not last climate refugees. Changing species migration patterns are threatening food security and cultural continuity. Oil and gas development only exacerbates all of these impacts.

Of course, not all Alaskans, including indigenous Alaskans, share the same perspective on oil and gas development. Native American Tribes are not a monolith.

You can bet that whenever my friends across the aisle can find some indigenous individual or advocacy group or other entity that supports oil and gas development, they are going to wrap themselves around Tribal consultation and pretend to be great champions for Indian Country.

In many other votes, when Indian Country opposes pipelines and dams and mining projects and other things that are against their interests, I am afraid the Tribes are thrown under the bus by my Republican friends pretty much every time.

Revenue from extraction often supports local governments and indigenous regional and village corporations.

That is part of the consideration in Alaska, but in so many cases, the tradeoffs create unacceptable impacts as well. That is why it is not a monolith when you talk to indigenous communities in Alaska.

This bill is an instrument of blunt force that allows for extraction across Alaska in places that are too special and too fragile to drill.

It would reinstate oil and gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, an area known to the Gwich'in people as ``The sacred place where life begins.'' These were leases the Biden administration canceled because they were based on shoddy Trump-era analyses.

The bill would withdraw the administration's rule to protect over 13 million acres of public land in the NPR-A, a region that is already feeling the impacts of oil and gas development.

It would undo protection of 125 million acres of the Arctic Ocean from offshore drilling, and it would undo the reinstatement of the Northern Bering Sea Climate Resilience Area. In the Bering Sea, an oil spill would be beyond detrimental. It would be catastrophic.

Rolling back these protections is the wrong approach. We can't simply give these lands and waters away to the highest bidder.

I urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' on this bill and yield back the balance of my time.

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Mr. HUFFMAN. Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to the amendment.

We have a process problem. Last week, the Rules Committee issued a notice for amendment submission for this bill, and 16 amendments were submitted: 12 from Democrats, 4 from Republicans.

We really should be having an open, robust, and lively debate, but no. The amendment debate this afternoon will be really quick because all six Natural Resources bills up this week, with all six of those bills, this is the only bill that was open to any amendments, and Republicans made only one, this one, this fossil fuel industry wish. That was the only one made in order.

Republicans have made a mockery of what they promised, and they boasted about back in the early days of this Congress.

They guaranteed it would be a robust and open process. Half the time, the Rules Committee isn't even open, but when it is, it is cooking the books like we see this week with this one single amendment for us to debate.

With other bills that have been up this afternoon, the so-called Mining Regulatory Clarity Act, my colleague, Representative Leger Fernandez, filed several amendments, amendments that Ranking Member Grijalva previously offered at the bill's markup.

They would prevent foreign bad actors, for example, including adversaries like China from mining our Federal lands, something that is all too common today through their thinly veiled American subsidiaries, but no, that was not ruled in order, so we don't get to talk about it.

Yesterday at the Rules Committee hearing, Chair Westerman told us he didn't accept the amendment because it wasn't worded properly.

Well, this language was already in the Republicans' prized H.R. 1 where it was included as a Republican amendment, so it is hard to take that argument seriously.

Maybe they realized H.R. 1 would never become law and that is why more than a year later, Republicans still haven't sent that bill even to the Senate, or maybe they realized foreign bad actors also happen to be padding their pockets.

If that is not the case, I am eager to continue working across the aisle to get these bad actors off our Federal lands, and we will be following up.

Now, back to Alaska. The amendment we are here to debate would do nothing but make the bill more extreme. It would prevent the administration from designating any further special areas without an act of Congress, preventing further protections for an area that is so fragile, special, and ecologically important.

They blocked debate on every other amendment, including my amendment to require a study on the impacts to subsistence resources, another to prohibit the Secretary from issuing the lease sale until revenue is raised at least to the level that CBO estimates, and one to prohibit oil and gas leasing in the Arctic Ocean.

Representative Peltola, the sole House Representative for Alaska, filed an amendment to protect the critically important Northern Bering Sea Climate Resilience Area, but Republicans refused to let that proceed. This is not good faith debate.

I will end with a word about my friend's statement that he asked Secretary Haaland repeatedly about Tribal consultation. My friend would have been well-served to listen to Secretary Haaland and learn a thing or two about Tribal consultation. She is the highest-ranking indigenous person in American history. She knows a thing or two about this subject, including the fact that a nonprofit advocacy group, which is the consultation that my friend was referring to, is not a group she has to meet with or consult as part of Tribal consultation.

Tribal consultation is government to government. That is how it works. If there was a little more listening and a little less screaming and table-pounding, there might be a better understanding of Tribal consultation across the aisle.

Mr. Speaker, I urge a ``no'' vote, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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