Prohibiting the Use of Funds to Implement, Administer, or Enforce Certain Rules of the Environmental Protection Agency
Floor Speech
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Mr. CRAPO. Madam President, I rise today in support of S. 4072. I introduced this legislation and pushed for this vote to ensure that no fiscal year 2024 funds can be used to implement, administer, or enforce the Environmental Protection Agency's tailpipe emissions rule.
I deeply appreciate the support of the Senators who have spoken today. Senator Manchin, a Democrat, made it very clear that this is a bipartisan piece of legislation basically based on the fact that it violates the very deal that was made earlier to help us look at transitioning away from emissions that are harmful to the environment.
If you listened to Senator Manchin, he made it very clear that we don't have the capacity to do this right now. He talked about some critical points. Senator Ricketts just pointed out that we don't even have the capacity today to provide the necessary electricity.
Let me explain this. I was talking--and have talked to a lot of experts--to an expert recently in global warming issues. This person told me that we can have all the electric vehicle mandates we want, but if the road is not clean, then the solution will not be clean. What did that mean? That means that if the electricity that we rely on is not made by renewable sources, the mandate will be ineffective.
That is a critical point to be made because today, as has been indicated, our major source of the load is natural gas. The very electricity that is created in this country to utilize on the roads if this mandate goes into place is not going to be the sort of clean load that is necessary for this massive effort to transition to a completely electric vehicle economy.
The damage will be suffered by the American people in many different ways, but one of the critical ways that damage will be suffered is that whether it is with regard to the critical minerals that are needed-- which this administration is not assisting us in helping to improve in the United States and strengthen in the United States--or whether it is based on other aspects of developing that load they need, the American people will see the problem in our economy, and China will be the beneficiary.
It will be China who is the one who can economically accomplish these objectives and send these electric vehicles to us or the batteries that these electric vehicles require. China is not working with clean load either. As my colleague from Wyoming talked about, they are putting out unclean load, in the terms of this debate, every single day, at massive amounts higher than ours.
So what are we going to do? We are going to make the United States vehicle industry dependent on China. We are going to make the United States citizens, who drive cars and trucks, dependent on China and reduce our economic independence from China's anticompetitive pressures. That is what this debate really is about. The EPA's rule is the most aggressive form of tailpipe emissions standards ever crafted and imposes a de facto electric vehicle mandate on the American people.
Under the rule, automakers must decrease their average fleetwide emissions by more than 50 percent--down from the current 192 grams of CO
The only way these standards could possibly be met is through the mass production and adoption of electric vehicles--a fact of which the Biden administration and the Biden EPA is well aware--once again, increasing our reliance on China.
The rule effectively regulates gas-powered vehicles--cars and trucks--out of the marketplace, which, make no mistake, is the goal of this administration. As a result of the rule, internal combustion engine--or ICE--vehicles, which still represent the overwhelming majority of new car sales in the United States, can make up no more than 30 percent of new sales by 2032, if automakers are even able to be compliant with these standards.
The rule represents yet another attempt by the Biden administration to use the rulemaking process to force its costly climate agenda on Americans and pick winners and losers in our free market. These emissions standards go too far and will restrict affordable vehicle choices for families, harm U.S. businesses, degrade our energy and national security, and hand the keys of our automotive industry over to China, which currently dominates the entire electric vehicle supply chain and has no intention of reducing the carbon intensity of its economy anytime soon.
The personal decision of what a consumer chooses to drive should not be made by Washington, let alone by circumventing Congress.
I urge my Republican colleagues and my Democrat colleagues to join me in voting yes on this legislation to prevent American taxpayer dollars from being used to implement, administer, or enforce this disastrous EPA rule.
I yield back my time.
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