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“PRESIDENT PANDERING TO ENVIRONMENTAL GROUPS” mentioning the U.S. Dept. of Energy was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H4087-H4088 on June 27, 2013.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
PRESIDENT PANDERING TO ENVIRONMENTAL GROUPS
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Poe) for 5 minutes.
Mr. POE of Texas. Mr. Speaker, the President this week declared he's going to unilaterally stop climate change. That's right, he's going to part the oceans and change the temperature to his liking. How's he going to do this? Well, he's declaring war on fossil fuels--again.
This week it's coal. Mr. Speaker, coal counts for 37 percent of our Nation's electricity. How does the President plan to make up for that 37 percent? Well, the ruler doesn't really say. I guess that 37 percent will just have to do without heat come winter. In his radical climate change manifesto, to a room packed full of his environmental lobby, the President issued a edict to the EPA to regulate coal out of existence.
Both Congress and the American people have overwhelmingly rejected this policy in the past. Never mind the will of the people, never mind Congress has said ``no'' to these ideas. The President is pandering to the environmental groups, and he wants it his way. So he's just going to issue another one of those--what I believe is unconstitutional--
executive orders.
Mr. Speaker, there are consequences for such rash actions by the President. The White House war on coal will raise the cost of energy for American families, cripple the economy, and destroy hundreds of thousands of jobs of people who work in the energy industry. The war on coal is really a war on the American people.
Mr. Speaker, maybe the President is not aware that the coal plant over here on South Capitol Street heats part of the Capitol. Is this his way to silence Congress? Who knows. But this is just another day from the administration whose energy policy is ``nothing from below.'' Nothing from below the ground, nothing from below the sea. No oil, no coal, no gas, and no jobs. That's the result of this policy. That's why I've introduced the Ensuring Affordable Energy Act. My bill will put an end to this back-door attempt by this administration to go around Congress and circumvent the will of the people. This bill would prohibit any EPA funds from being used to implement the regulation of greenhouse gases. This has passed in the House, but it has yet to become law.
Now let's talk about natural gas. Down the street from the White House is another marble bureaucratic palace they call the Department of Energy. Sitting on their oak desks are dusty folders holding applications to export liquefied natural gas. In 2010, the oil and gas industry contributed almost $500 billion to our economy. And over the last 7 years, the amount of recoverable natural gas in our country has skyrocketed. For the first time in our Nation's history, we have more natural gas than we can use here in the United States, even if we tried. America can sell that gas on the global market for billions of dollars, creating thousands of jobs in the process; but we're not doing it, for one simple bureaucratic red-tape reason--the Department of Energy.
In typical Washington-style fashion, we've seen delay, delay, delay by the Department of Energy to approve these permits. Over the last 70 years, this bureaucratic hurdle was hardly noticed as the U.S. was an importer of natural gas, but not so anymore. Technology has changed all of this. There are some 18 export applications sitting over there on those desks in those dusty folders for the DOE to approve. The Department's response: no response. In the last 3 years, the DOE has granted only two applications. Meanwhile, countries that want to buy American natural gas are going to our worldwide competitors, like China and Russia. Isn't that lovely.
Understand this, Mr. Speaker, there is already an agency, FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, that is in the pipeline to approve applications such as this. So we have duplication with the DOE and FERC. So what we have to do is remove the DOE from the process, remove this duplication.
Mr. Speaker, we have enough oil, natural gas, and coal in America to make the Middle East turmoil, Middle East politics, and Middle East energy irrelevant if we would just use our own God-given natural resources. Washington bureaucrats sit at their large oak desks sipping on those lattes every day, and they are regulating American energy out of business. It's time to take the padlock off the marble palaces of the EPA and the DOE and remove the bureaucrats from the energy business. Let's use the resources the good Lord has given us to take care of America.
And that's just the way it is.
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