Energy Policy

Floor Speech

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Mr. HATCH. Madam President, the first 3 years of President Obama's administration were a frenzy of activity. He pushed the stimulus, he spent over a year pursuing his health care law, and he forced through Dodd-Frank, imposing historic regulations on the banking industry. Even The Economist magazine has found fault with that. Yet, at a time when the Nation was in economic free fall, the President chose an agenda of more regulation and higher taxes.

The President ignored private sector job creation and the primacy of economic growth, and nowhere was this more evident than with respect to energy policy. President Obama has failed entirely to address one of the greatest obstacles to economic growth; that is, high energy prices.

Today he claims he is for an all-of-the-above approach to energy. All of a sudden, facing $5-a-gallon gasoline, weak job creation, and a Presidential election, he claims to have found religion on energy production. But whether we look at oil, natural gas, or the Keystone Pipeline, the American people are not buying this conversion story, and I certainly agree with our distinguished minority leader and his comments here this morning.

This failure by the President to tackle our energy needs is a national crisis for which the American people should hold him accountable. Yet his inability to put jobs ahead of his radical and unrepresentative environmental base has particular implications for the citizens of my State of Utah as well. Days after announcing in his State of the Union an ``all-of-the-above strategy that develops every available source of American energy,'' the administration cut access to Federal lands in the West for oil shale development by 75 percent and proposed a 50 percent royalty hike on domestic energy production on public lands.

Whether it is closing off more Federal lands to American energy production or saying no to the Keystone Pipeline, this White House has shown it is more focused on appeasing its extremist ideological allies than putting forward an energy policy that works for Utahans and Americans everywhere. With gas prices and home heating costs on the rise, the American people deserve action, not more campaign speeches--and I might add, from the most anti-American energy administration in our Nation's history.

When it comes to energy policy, the President is a man divided. On almost all economic policy, his answer is, tax the rich more. Taxing the rich more is his go-to option for reducing the deficit, paying for Obamacare, and paying for new roads and bridges. Higher taxes are a matter of fundamental fairness, the President claims, but when it comes to gas prices, the President sides with the 1 percent.

The folks who would benefit most from increased energy production are blue-collar workers and middle-class families. High energy prices hit the wallets of lower income Americans the hardest. Middle-class Americans are more likely to have longer commutes and bigger cars than wealthy urban citizens. The passthrough cost of high fuel prices hits the grocery budgets of all Americans. The jobs that never materialize due to the failure to develop energy resources undermines every blue-collar American.

The President claims to be for fairness and an egalitarian economic policy, but his energy policy is incredibly regressive, putting the burden of his environmental agenda on the backs of the middle class. The situation got no better with the budget the President recently submitted or with this long-delayed proposal for business tax reform.

Rather than advance an energy agenda that would spur production, lower prices, and create jobs, the President continues to advocate for increased taxes on oil and gas production in the United States.

On March 3 of last year, the Congressional Research Service concluded that the President's proposals would ``make oil and natural gas more expensive for U.S. consumers and likely increase foreign dependence.'' The same holds true today. These decisions are based in political appeals to his elitist base rather than any interest in developing sound energy policy. For example, in his budget the President cites the following as his reason for repealing tax incentives for oil and gas production:

Special tax treatment of working interests in oil and gas properties ..... distorts markets by encouraging more investment in the oil and gas industry than would occur under a neutral system.

Give me a break. The reason the President opposes current tax policy for oil and gas is because he opposes distorting markets?

The Energy Information Administration reports that in fiscal year 2010, $14.7 billion in energy-specific subsidies went to advance renewable energy compared to $4.2 billion in energy-related subsidies that went to advance fossil fuels. In other words, there are three times as many government subsidies going to renewable energy as there are going to oil, gas, and coal combined. Now, that is what you call distorting the market.

Contrary to the President's presentation, these are not tax loopholes that need to be closed. The term ``tax loophole'' implies that a tax incentive is susceptible to an exploitation of an unintended benefit. While the Tax Code has some tax loopholes that we must clearly eliminate, the tax expenditures that benefit oil and gas companies were intended to incentivize a particular activity or behavior. For instance, section 199 of the Internal Revenue Code includes an incentive for the domestic production of oil and gas. This is no loophole. Congress, on a bipartisan basis, understands that without this incentive, we could see an enormous reduction in employment, and it is simply inaccurate to state that this incentive adds little to our economic or energy security.

The American people need to understand that repeal of this policy will only increase our dependence on foreign-produced oil. But this does not seem to bother the President one bit. On March 20 of last year, the President told a group of political and business leaders in Brazil that we ``want to help with technology and support to develop these oil reserves safely, and when you're ready to start selling, we want to be one of your best customers.''

As hard as it is to believe, the administration does not even seem to share the desire of the American people for lower energy prices. The President's Secretary of Energy, Secretary Steven Chu, stated: ``We have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.'' Gas prices in Europe are $8 to $10 a gallon, and that is where the administration and environmental activists want gas prices to be for Americans. Even President Obama stated in 2008 that he would prefer a gradual adjustment to high gasoline prices, just maybe not a quick spike.

The President claims he is for an all-of-the-above energy policy so long as it does not include offshore drilling, drilling on our western lands, the development of energy in Alaska, and the Keystone Pipeline. My reading of his all-of-the-above approach is some-of-the-above and only those that are poll-tested and approved by environmental activists.

This is terrible tax policy, it is terrible energy policy, and it is terrible economic policy. Unfortunately, it is all we have from this administration.

The reality is that our country relies upon oil and gas because it is dependable, abundant, affordable, and domestic. Raising taxes on American companies that produce oil and gas will be felt by all Americans not only at the pump but also through a decrease in dividends to many middle-class shareholders. This is the wrong prescription for our ailing economy.

For this administration, the goal remains not lower energy prices but the liberal dream of getting America off of oil. Just the other day, the President's Secretary of Energy acknowledged that the overall goal of his Department is not to lower the cost of traditional energy but to decrease dependency on oil.

For what it is worth, this commitment to restricting domestic production is a policy that divides my colleagues on the other side of the aisle. They know the President is putting the preferred lifestyle policies of wealthy urbanites ahead of the needs of blue-collar and union workers and middle-class Americans. They know the decision by the President to kill the Keystone Pipeline put environmental interest groups ahead of the needs of workers, commuters, and families.

President Obama has traded in the hardhat-and-lunch-bucket heritage of the Democratic Party for a hipster fedora and a double-skim latte. He has put liberal environmental dreams ahead of the economic reality that working-class Americans have been struggling with for years. The Nation's unemployment rate has been above 8 percent for 36 straight months. The average duration of unemployment was 40.1 weeks in January 2012. Yet the President and his allies in the Senate have helped to kill projects that would undeniably lead to the creation of hundreds of thousands of high-paying American jobs.

Gas prices have now risen for 20 straight days. Gas prices are now up 30 cents over the last month and 18 cents in the past 2 weeks. We are cruising toward $5-a-gallon gas, and the President resists any long-term solutions to these rising energy prices.

The American people deserve better than this. They have waited 3 long years for a serious energy agenda from this President, and if he does not address this energy crisis soon, in less than a year the American people will be looking to another President to promote an energy program that will finally create jobs and lower the cost of energy for all Americans.

Look, we have energy within our country's boundaries. We have energy that is just begging to be developed, that would help us to make it through these trying times. We need the lowest cost energy we can possibly have, and we are not going to get it under this President. We are not going to get it under this administration. I hope my colleagues on both sides of the aisle wake up and realize we are putting our country right down the drain.

I saw, sometime over the last couple of weeks, The Economist magazine. The front page of that magazine criticizes us for the overregulatory nature of our economy and of our government. We are making it so it is almost impossible for businesses to expand and create high-paid jobs.

We can solve our own energy needs. We have between 800 billion and 1.6 trillion barrels of recoverable oil in oil shale in Utah, Colorado, and Wyoming alone. We have billions of barrels of oil in ANWR up in Alaska and billions of barrels of oil at other sites in Alaska. Fortunately, we found oil in the Bakken claim in North Dakota, but the only reason we have been able to drill there is because it is private land. Fortunately, we found some places down in Texas, but again they are on private land. We can't get the permits and the ability to drill on public land or even develop oil shale on public land. Yes, it would cost us more per barrel to develop that oil, but it would also bring down the intense problems we have in trying to find enough oil and gas to keep our country moving ahead as the greatest country in the world. We have to simply get this administration to wake up and realize there are many ways we can solve our energy problems--many ways.

We are also awash in natural gas. A lot of people have been saying we need to develop our natural gas. We need to develop more of our energy resources than we are developing now. And we can do it. America can do it if we get the government off the backs of those who produce energy. I hope and pray that Democrats and Republicans alike will lock arms, get together, and solve the problems facing our country, regardless of this President, who doesn't seem to know what to do or how to do it.

This is a crucial time for our country. There is no excuse for us to be in the mess we are in. But unfortunately, we are here because of the poor energy policies of this administration.

Madam President, I yield the floor.

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