A joint resolution to disapprove a rule promulgated by the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency relating to emission standards for certain steam generating units.

Mr. President, I yield 5 minutes to the Senator from Colorado.

Mr. President, I would ask I be notified when I have consumed about 25 minutes.

Mr. President, 20 years ago this month, a Republican President of the United States helped bring together all of the world's largest economies in Rio, in Brazil, to confront the issue of global climate change. The President was unequivocal about the mission. George Herbert Walker Bush said simply:

The United States fully intends to be the world's

preeminent leader in protecting the global environment. We

have been that for many years. We will remain so. We believe

that environment and development . . . can and should go hand

in hand. A growing economy creates the resources necessary

for environmental protection, and environmental protection

makes growth sustainable over the long term.

When he was asked about his own target for subsequent meetings of the global stakeholders, President Bush could not have been more clear. He said the United States ``will be there with specific plans, prepared to share, but more important, that others who have signed these documents ought to have specific plans. So I think this is a leadership role. We are challenging them to come forward. We will be there. I think the Third World and others are entitled to know that the commitments made are going to be commitments kept.''

That was the President of the United States speaking on behalf of our Nation and indeed the aspirations of the world 20 years ago. How dramatic and sad it is that 20 years later, shockingly we find ourselves in a strange and dangerous place on this issue, a place this former President probably would not even recognize.

Thomas Paine actually described today's situation very well. As America fought for its independence, he said: ``It is an affront to treat falsehood with complaisance.'' Yet when it comes to the challenge of climate change, the falsehood of today's naysayers is only matched by the complacency indifference of our political system.

It is well past time that we actually heed Thomas Paine's admonition and reaffirm the commitment first made by President George Herbert Walker Bush. As a matter of conscience and common sense, we should fight today's insidious conspiracy of silence on climate change, a silence that empowers misinformation and mythology to grow where science and truth should prevail.

It is a conspiracy that has not just installed but demonized any constructive effort to put America in a position to lead the world on this issue, as President Bush promised we would, and as Americans have a right to expect we will.

The danger we face could not be more real. In the United States, a calculated campaign of disinformation has steadily beaten back the consensus momentum for action on climate change and replaced it with timidity by proponents in the face of millions of dollars of phony, contrived talking points, illogical and wholly unscientific propositions, and a general scorn for the truth wrapped in false threats about job loss and tax increases.

Yet today the naysayers escape all accountability to the truth. The media hardly murmurs when a candidate for President of the United States, in 2012, can walk away from previously held positions and blithely announce that the evidence is not yet there about the impact of greenhouse gasses on climate.

The truth is scientists have known since the 1800s that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses trap heat in our atmosphere. With the right amount of those gasses, the Earth is a hospitable place for us to live. It is, indeed, the greenhouse effect that makes life possible on Earth. But if too much is added, which is what we are doing now at a record pace, temperatures inevitably rise to record-breaking levels. It is not rocket science.

Every major national science academy in the world has reported that global warming is real. It is nothing less than shocking when people in a position of authority can just stand up and say, without documentation, without accepted scientific research, without peer- reviewed analysis, just stand up and say: Oh, there is not enough evidence, and they say it because it suits their political purposes to serve some interest that does not want to change the status quo.

Facts that beg for an unprecedented public response are met with unsubstantiated, even totally contradicted denial. Those who deny the facts have never, ever met their de minimus responsibility to provide some scientific answer to what, if not human behavior, is causing the increase in greenhouse gas particulates and how, if not by curbing greenhouse gases, we will address this crisis.

In fact, when one measures the effect of taking action versus not taking action, the naysayers' case is even more confounding. Just think about it. If the proponents of action were somehow incorrect, contrary to all that science declares, but, nevertheless, if they were incorrect and we proceeded to reduce carbon and other gases released in the atmosphere, what is the worst that would happen?

Well, under that scenario the worst would be more jobs as we move to the new energy economy, the opening of a whole new $6 trillion energy market with a more sustainable policy, a healthier population because of cleaner air and reduced pollution, reduced expenditures on health care because of environmentally induced disease, an improved outlook for the oceans and the ecosystems that are affected by pollution falling to the Earth and into the sea, and surely greater security for the United States because of less dependence on foreign sources of energy and a stronger economy. That is the worst that would occur if the proponents were wrong.

But what if the naysayers are, in fact, wrong, as all the science says they are? What if because of their ignorance we fail to take the action we should? What is the worst then? The worst then is sheer, utter disaster for the planet and for all who inhabit it. So whose ``worst'' would most thinking people rather endure?

The level of dissembling--of outright falsifying of information, of greedy appeal to fear tactics that has stalled meaningful action now for 20 years--is hard to wrap one's mind around. It is so far removed from legitimate analysis that it confounds for its devilishly simple appeal to the lowest common denominator of disinformation. In the face of a massive and growing body of scientific evidence that says catastrophic climate change is knocking at our door, the naysayers just happily tell us: Climate change does not exist.

In the face of melting glaciers and ice caps in the Arctic, Greenland, and Antarctica, they say we need to ``warm up to the truth.'' And in the face of animals disappearing at alarming rates, species being destroyed, they would have us adopt an ostrich policy and just bury our heads in the sand and pretend it can go away.

Just last week, a group of State senators in North Carolina passed a bill that bans planning for rising sea levels when creating rules for housing developments and infrastructure in coastal communities. Jeffress Williams is the lead author of the U.S. National Climate Assessment Report. Ask him what he thinks about his legislation, and he will tell you it is ``not based on sound science.'' That is an understatement. But somehow the State senators who voted for this bill know better.

Al Gore spoke of the ``assault on reason.'' Well, exhibit A is staring us in the face: coalitions of politicians and special interests that peddle science fiction over scientific fact, a paid-for, multimillion-dollar effort that twists

and turns the evidence until it is gnarled beyond recognition, and tidal waves of cash that back a status quo of recklessness and inaction over responsibility and change.

In short, we are living through a story of disgraceful denial, backpedaling, and delay that has brought us perilously close to a climate change catastrophe.

Nothing underscores this Orwellian twist of logic more than the facts surrounding the now well negatively branded cap and trade program. Cap and trade was a Republican-inspired idea during the debate over ozone and the Montreal Protocol in the 1980s. It was actually inspired by conservatives looking for the least command and control, the least government-regulated way to meet pollution standards. It was implemented and it worked, and it is still working. But, lo and behold, when the strategists for the political right decided to make it a target because Democrats were leading the charge to address climate change, suddenly this free market mechanism was transformed into ``cap and tax'' and ``job killing tax.'' And guess who. Coal. Coal, the leading carbon polluter was leading the funding for those efforts. What is worse, we have all stood by and let it happen. We have treated falsehood with complacence and allowed a conspiracy of silence on climate change to infiltrate our politics. Believe me, we have had our chances to act in these last years. But every time we get close to achieving something big for our country, small-minded appeals to the politics of the moment block the way.

The conspiracy of silence that now characterizes Washington's handling of the climate issue is, in fact, dangerous. Climate change is one of two or three of the most serious threats that our country now faces, if not, in some people's minds, the most serious. The silence that has enveloped the once robust debate is staggering for its irresponsibility. The cost of inaction gets more and more expensive the longer we wait, and the longer we wait, the less likely we are to avoid the worst and to leave future generations with a sustainable planet.

In many cases what we are talking about is vast sums of money funneled into gas-guzzling industries and coal-fired powerplants. We are talking about pollution--pollution on a wide scale, the kind of dirty, thick suffocating smog that poisons our rivers, advances chronic disease like asthma, lung cancer, and creates billions in hospital costs and lost economic opportunity. It is the same pollution that Rachel Carson warned us about in ``Silent Spring'' when she said:

Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in

insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not

quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough

relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a world

which is just not quite fatal?

Well, today we do live in a world where there is an absurdity in the air, and it has complacence written all over it. Fish are dying in water polluted with pesticides. Roadless forests are being threatened by indiscriminate drilling. Industrial chemicals are sweeping into all of us. Young children are born with a burden of chemicals unprecedented in their amount. The burning of fossil fuels has overloaded our ecosystems with nitrogen and ravaged our plant life.

Just go out and look at the forests and look at the change in the topography of our country. Bottom line: We have substituted fantasy for reason, sheer whimsy for proven epidemiology, and it is wreaking havoc on our environment. You do not have to take my word for it. I am confident a lot of our colleagues will not. But you can see it across the planet with your eyes. Ice caps are melting; seas are rising; deserts are expanding; storms are more frequent, more violent, more destructive; pollution, famine, natural disasters, killing millions of people every year.

These are changes that many experts thought were still years down the line, but climate change is now radically altering our planet at a rate much faster than the scientists or even the pessimists expected.

All you need to do is look out your window. We just had the warmest March on record for the contiguous United States. The naysayers will tell us that one hot year does not prove global warming. But just look at this chart which charts the acceleration of warming in the United States after 1970. This is not an anomaly. It is a giant step in the wrong direction, and 2010 was the hottest year on record. The last decade was the hottest decade since we have started recording the weather. April, May, and June of this year are already continuing the trend.

For the first time in memory, the Augusta National azaleas bloomed and wilted before the first golfers teed off at this year's Masters. At the Boston Marathon, temperatures hit 89 degrees in April, more than 30 degrees higher than the average. People talk about official jackets and gloves and coffee? Who are you kidding? They are talking about hats and sunscreen and Gatorade and medical tents that were filled with heat- exhausted runners starting at mile 10 of the 26-mile course from Hopkinton into Boston.

I have been working to connect the dots on this issue for a long time. In 1988, 24 years ago, on an already hot June day, Al Gore and I took part in the first hearings on climate change in the Senate with Jim Hansen, who testified then that the threat was real, that climate change was already happening in our country--24 years ago.

Four years later, we joined a delegation of Senators to attend the first Earth Summit in Rio, where we worked with 171 other nations to put into place a voluntary framework on climate change and greenhouse gas reductions. Back in 1992, we all came together for a simple reason: We accepted the science.

President George H.W. Bush personally traveled to the climate change talks in Rio to help plant the seeds of this new beginning. We knew the road ahead would be long, but we also knew this was a watershed moment; that it created the grassroots momentum that made people sit up and start to listen and understand the damage we were doing to the environment. Sit up and listen they did. The principles that came out of Rio transformed into a mandatory requirement under the Kyoto Protocol. Each of the developed nations accepted its own target goal. The European Union reduction would be 8 percent and Japan's would be 6 percent and so on. We were thinking big back then, and our goal was to reach a total decrease in global emissions of 5.2 percent below the 1990 levels and reach it by 2010.

Well, 2010 has come and gone and so, too, have the targets. We all know the story: Global political leadership was distracted or absent. International negotiations in Buenos Aires and The Hague turned tense. The less-developed nations saw the targets and timetables for greenhouse gas reductions as a Western market conspiracy. Then there were trumped up, industry-funded so-called studies that challenged the scientific assertions for climate change scenarios.

Looking back, it is not hard to understand why the final agreement got sidetracked in the Senate. After all, the developing countries were excluded from the treaty's reduction targets, even though it had already become clear by then that China and India were significant enough as industrial powers that to exempt them entirely would be a mistake. Nations left out were deemed capable of undoing all the reductions that would have been achieved by the developed nations.

It is no wonder people were reluctant, no wonder American companies were understandably reluctant to put themselves at a competitive disadvantage. Many in Congress had not yet digested the science of climate change, even though we knew climate scientists were already studying the phenomenon of greenhouse gases.

The question is not whether the Kyoto treaty had flaws; the question is whether we got the fundamentals right. I believe the evidence is overwhelming, beyond any reasonable doubt, that we did. As I remind my colleagues, the view from 2012 is a whole lot different from 1992. Countries such as China, South Africa, Brazil, and South Korea have now made far-reaching choices to reshape their economies and move forward in a new and very different global area. Take China. China is already outspending the United States three to one on public clean energy projects. In the last year alone, China accounted for almost one-

fifth of the renewable energy investments, with the United States and Germany trailing behind. Steven Chu, the Secretary of Energy, said it best:

For centuries, America has led the world in innovation.

Today, that leadership is at risk.

Our indifference to climate change is putting America's economy and leadership, with respect to economics and the future of energy policy, at risk. So the United States is now the laggard. We are missing out on achieving sustained economic growth by securing enduring competitive advantage through innovation. The facts speak for themselves. Today's energy economy is a $6 trillion market, with 4 billion users worldwide, growing to 9 billion in the next 40 years. By comparison, the market that made people so wealthy in 1990s in America and created 23 million new jobs and lifted everybody was a $1 trillion market with only 1 billion users. This is $6 trillion with 4 billion users today.

The fact is it is projected to grow to a $2.3 trillion market in the year 2020. America needs to get into this. We need to get our skin in the game or we are going to miss the market of the future--if not miss the future itself. We would be delusional to believe China, given the evidence, or any of our other competitors are going to sit on the sidelines and let this market opportunity fall through the cracks. They are not doing it now and they will not do it in the future. Only the United States is sitting there with an indifference toward these alternatives and the renewable possibilities.

I realize some will argue we cannot afford to address climate change in these tough economic times. Frankly, nothing could be further from the truth. Nothing could be more self-defeating. We will recover from this slowdown. When we do, we need to emerge as the world leader in the new energy economy. That will be a crucial part of restoring America as a nation in a way that honors the hard work and innovation and measures prosperity in those terms.

Anyone who worries whether this is the right moment to tackle climate change should understand we can't afford not to do this now at the risk of our economic future. It is now that the most critical trends and facts actually all point in the wrong direction. The CO2 emissions that caused climate change grew at a rate four times faster in the first decade of this new century than in the 1990s.

Several years ago, the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a series of projections for global initiatives. Based on the likely projections of energy and land-use patterns, today our emissions have actually moved beyond--this chart shows the emissions are going up from the 1960s all the way through to 2010. Today, we have moved beyond the worst-case scenarios that were predicted by all the modeling that was done by the IPCC. Meanwhile, our oceans and forests, which act as the natural repositories of CO2, are losing their ability to absorb more carbon dioxide. This means the effects of climate change are being felt even more powerfully than expected, faster than was expected.

The plain fact is there isn't a nation on the planet that has escaped the steady onslaught of climate change. When the desert is creeping into east Africa and ever more scarce resources push farmers and herders into deadly conflict, that is a matter of shared security for all of us. When the people of the Maldives are forced to abandon a place they have called home for hundreds of years, it is a stain on our collective conscience and a moral challenge to each of us. When our own grandchildren risk growing up in a world we can't recognize and don't want to, in the long shadow of a global failure to cooperate, then, clearly, urgently, profoundly, we need to do better.

Frankly, those who look for any excuse to continue challenging the science have a fundamental responsibility they have never fulfilled: Prove us wrong or stand down. Show with some science how this theory, in fact, is not being borne out. Prove that the pollution we put into the atmosphere is not having the harmful effects we know it is and that the science says it is. Tell us where the gases go and what they do if they don't do what the scientists are telling us they do. Pony up one single cogent, legitimate, scholarly analysis. Prove that the ocean isn't actually rising. Prove that the icecaps aren't melting or that deserts aren't expanding. Prove, above all, that human beings don't have anything to do with it.

I will tell you here right now, they cannot do it. They have not done it and they can't do it. There are over 6,000 peer-reviewed articles, all of which document clearly, irrefutably the ways in which mankind is contributing to this problem. Sure, we know the naysayers have their bought studies that don't stand up to scientific review and a few scientists who trade in doubt and misdirection about things such as Sun spots and clouds. But there is not a single credible scientist who can argue and withstand the peer review that climate change isn't happening.

In fact, even the naysayers are starting to come around, in their judgment. Just this year, a well-known climate skeptic, Dr. Richard Mueller, released a series of reports that were funded in part by the Koch brothers. Dr. Mueller thought his results were going to show something different than all the other climate studies, and what he found was not what the Koch brothers sent him looking for. Here is what Dr. Mueller, in his own words, said:

You should not be a skeptic, at least not any longer.

Bottom line: His studies found exactly what all the other credible climate studies have been telling us for decades--that global warming is real.

If we just step out and look around for a moment, we can see the effects everywhere: floods, droughts, pathogens, disease, species and habitat loss, sea level rise, storm surges that threaten our cities and coastlines. No continent is escaping unscathed: increasing ground instability in permafrost regions, increasing avalanches in mountainous zones, warmer and drier conditions in the Sahelian region of Africa leading to a shorter growing season, and coral bleaching events in the Great Barrier Reef. All these are attributed to this change in climate.

I wish to take a moment to bear down on the science, the cold, hard, stubborn facts that ought to guide us in addressing this challenge. It is detailed, to some degree, but it is the very detail that detractors can never address or refute. It is important to see the detail in its cumulative force. Unlike the naysayers, I am going to give point by point to some of the falsehoods and lay out a summary of the critical evidence that ought to lead America and the world to action.

Here is what the science is telling us: Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have increased by nearly 40 percent in the industrial era, from 280 parts per million to over 393 parts per million in the atmosphere. Before long, we are likely to see a global average of concentration at 400 parts per million and more. Within the last few months, monitoring stations in the Arctic region, for the first time, reported average concentrations of CO2 at 400 parts per million. Because of the remote nature of those monitors, they generally reflect long-term trends as opposed to marginal fluctuations in direct emissions near population centers.

As atmospheric scientist Pieter Tans, with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration points out:

The northern sites in our monitoring network tell us what

is coming soon to the globe as a whole. . . . We will likely

see global average CO2 concentrations reach 400

ppm about 2016 [4 years from now].

Why is this important? This is important because scientists have told us that anything above 450 parts per million--a warming of 2 degrees Celsius--could lead to severe, widespread, and irreversible harm to human life on this planet. When concentrations of other greenhouse gases, such as methane and black carbon, are factored into the equation, the analysis suggests that stabilizing concentrations around 400 parts per million of equivalent carbon dioxide would give us about an 80-percent chance of avoiding a 2-degree Fahrenheit increase above the present average global temperatures.

Considering what a 2-degree Fahrenheit increase would mean, scientists obviously are urging us not to take the risk. James Hansen, Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has done the math. His analysis shows that we need to be shooting

for a stabilization level of 350 parts per million in order to increase our chances of avoiding the 2-degree Fahrenheit increase. We have already exceeded that. So we are going to have to find a way to actually go backward in order to be able to prevent what scientists are telling us could create huge damage.

Even if we slam on the brakes now, science tells us we could be headed for a global temperature increase of 2 to 4 degrees by the century's end and greater warming after that. Let me share what some of the ``postcards from the edge,'' if you will, look like when you examine what is happening to our air, our health, and our environment. Warming temperatures, first of all. The first 10 years of this century were the warmest decade on record. And 2010 was tied with 2005 as the hottest year ever recorded. NOAA has reported that 2011 was the second warmest summer on record, just .1 degrees Fahrenheit below the 1936 record, and the U.S. Climate Extreme Index--a measure of the area of the country experiencing extreme conditions--was nearly four times the average.

Last year many Northeastern States experienced their wettest summers, especially those States caught in Hurricane Irene's destructive path. Meanwhile, persistent heat and below-average precipitation across the Southern United States created recordbreaking droughts in Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas, and these were of greater intensity than the 1930s famous Dust Bowl. Texas endured the country's hottest summer ever recorded for any State, at an average temperature of 86.8 degrees.

What is shocking is that the evidence of the rate of this transformation is happening faster and to a greater degree than the scientists predicted. So one would think reasonable people would say: Wait a minute, they predicted this, but we are getting this way up here, and everyone would sort of stop and take stock of what is happening.

According to the new climate report from NOAA, the lower 48 States elbowed their way into the record books this spring with ``the warmest March, third warmest April, second warmest May . . . the first time that all three months during the spring season ranked among the 10 warmest since records began in 1895.'' In fact, the average temperature this spring was so far off the charts that the lower 48 States beat out the old 1910 record by a full 2 degrees Fahrenheit.

Inland, worsening conditions are going to create persistent drought in the Southwest and significantly increase western wildlife burn area. That is critical. We have already seen the damage done to millions of acres of forest because of the pine bark beetles, which actually live longer because it doesn't get cold and therefore they do not die in the normal cycle. But in recent years, due to warmer winters, pine beetle populations have exploded, devastating these once majestic forests.

It is also having an impact on our health. As average temperatures rise, we can expect to see more extreme heat waves during our summers, and, as we know from history, that impacts people with heart problems and asthma, the elderly, the very young, and the homeless. In the United States, Chicago is projected to have 25 percent more frequent heat wave days by the end of the century. In Los Angeles, we could see as much as a four- to eightfold increase.

Climate change may also heighten the risk of infectious diseases, particularly diseases found in warm areas and spread by mosquitoes and other insects, such as malaria, dengue fever, and yellow fever. In some places, climate change is already altering the pattern of disease. In the Kenyan Highlands, for example, it is now one of the major drivers of malaria epidemics.

It is not just the health costs that are sounding the alarm. As many have seen with their own eyes, the Arctic is among one of the most startling places to witness the adverse effects of global climate change. Great sheets of ice have been breaking off of glaciers--sheets of ice the size of the State of Rhode Island. Marine mammals are now struggling to survive. Where there used to be only frozen landscapes, there is now open water.

Every new report that is public suggests the situation is getting grimmer in the Arctic. Last year the multi-country Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program released a new assessment of the impact of climate change in the Arctic. It found that the period from 2005 to 2010 was the warmest ever recorded. According to AMAP researchers, the changes in icemelt over the past 10 years ``are dramatic and represent an obvious departure from the long-term patterns.''

Their conclusion is startling. They expect the Arctic Ocean to be nearly ice-free within this century, likely in the next 30 to 40 years.

Think about that for a second. Within our children's lifetimes, one of Earth's polar icecaps will be completely gone. Average annual temperatures in the Arctic have increased at approximately twice the rate of average global temperatures. Within a generation, maybe two, kids will grow up learning geography on maps and globes that show simply an empty blue expanse on top of the world, no longer the white one to which we have grown accustomed.

In terms of impact, all of us who have been following this issue understand that the melting of the Arctic is at least partly mitigated by the fact that the ice is already floating, so the displacement in the ocean as it melts is not that significant. But what if there is an ice melt from the glaciers, as we are now seeing not only in the Arctic but we are seeing in Greenland and in Antarctica and across North America, South America, and Africa--when you realize that all over the globe, glaciers and icecaps are losing volume--that means other day-to- day, practical problems for our communities.

This is a photograph of the glaciers that exist out in the western part of our country, or used to. That was 1909, and this is 2004-- almost gone. Here is another vision of National Glacier Park, where it has almost disappeared. It is obvious for all to see the degree to which the glaciers are disappearing.

Many people may not also realize that a lot of communities in the United States rely on annual glacial melt for municipal water supplies and for hydropower. So as this disappears, the energy sourcing and water sourcing for the United States disappears with it. Just ask Washington State, where glacial melt water provides 1.8 trillion liters of water every summer, or talk to the folks in Alaska, where glacier melt plays a key role in the circulation of the Gulf of Alaska, which is important to maintaining the valuable fisheries--the halibut and salmon--that reside in this body of water. All these impacts are interconnected.

Again, the skeptics say: Hey, there are a couple of glaciers that are actually expanding. Yes, there are some glaciers that are responding to unusual and unique local conditions and increasing in snow and ice accumulation, but the overwhelming evidence, when we look at the vast majority, shows that most of America's glaciers are shrinking. Over the last four decades of the 20th century, North American glaciers have lost 108 cubic miles of ice. That is enough ice, translated into water, to inundate California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and Colorado with 1 foot of water if it happened all at the same time.

In 1850 there were approximately 150 glaciers in what is now Glacier National Park. Today, due to warmer temperatures, there are only 25 named glaciers remaining, and some models predict that the park's glaciers could disappear in just a few decades. But trust your own eyes, if you prefer. The photographs here depict glacial melt over various time periods in Glacier National Park, Montana, and Holgate Glacier and Icy Bay, Alaska. As you'll see, the effects are just staggering.

We all remember Wordsworth's lines about ``the Lake that was shining clear among the hoary mountains.'' Well, these mountains are no longer hoary, and soon, lakes will reflect not snow-covered peaks, but naked ridges and sun-splashed steeps.

To make matters worse, temperatures are likely to increase exponentially in the next coming years. Because the environment is a closed system, the more conditions change, the faster they change because each change has an impact on some other interconnected component of the environment.

As the ice and permafrost melt, methane plumes from under the surface that have been trapped for hundreds of thousands of years are now emerging. During a survey last summer in the east Siberian Arctic seas, a team of scientists encountered a high density of methane plumes, some more than 1 kilometer across. They were emitting methane into the atmosphere at concentrations up to 100 times higher than normal. There are people who have stood by these methane plumes, lit a match, and they light on fire. The fact is, over a period of 100 years, methane has a warming potential roughly 25 times greater than CO2.

So we may become the victims not just of the climate change itself but of a vicious kind of feedback and feedback cycles in the climate system. Cycles associated with less cloud cover, changes in aerosols, peatlands, soils, and Arctic ice cover all can lead to accelerated climate change. One study estimated that thawing permafrost may turn the Arctic from a carbon sink--that is to say a place that gathers and stores carbon--into a carbon source by the mid-2020s, releasing 100 billion tons of carbon by the end of the century. What does that mean? One hundred billion tons of carbon is about equal to the amount of CO2 that would be released worldwide from 10 years of burning fossil fuels. So that is the future we are looking at if we don't respond.

Here is another postcard from the edge, Mr. President. North Carolina doesn't think they need to worry about the sea level rise, but take a look at the evidence. Our best studies predict a higher sea level rise than previously projected. With the melting of the west Antarctic ice sheet alone, global sea levels could rise by as much as 3.26 meters in the coming years, and the Pacific and Atlantic coasts could be in for a 25-percent increase above the average level by the century's end. In all, the melting of the Greenland ice sheet has the potential to raise global sea levels by about 7 meters, and the ice sheets of Antarctica have the potential to contribute to 60 meters of sea level rise.

Now, when people say, ``Well, global--it may not melt,'' there are Senators who have traveled to Greenland, who have stood on the ice sheet and looked down into it, into a hole 100-feet deep, and seen a massive, torrential river running underneath the ice out to the sea as the ice is melting.

Some scientists are even worried about the effects of that river under the ice. Could it act as a slide, where actually whole chunks of ice break off and slide down on this watery base on which the ice is sitting?

Think about what this all means. As the New York Times reported in March, some 3.7 million Americans living within a few feet of high tide are at risk from the rising sea. So all of you state senators out there, listen up: the effects of climate change will spare no one--from Tampa to Asheville, from Sausalito to Staten Island, all coastal communities are vulnerable.

NOAA's Benjamin Strauss, coauthor of a smart new study on topographic vulnerability, said the following:

Sea level rise is like an invisible tsunami, building force

while we do almost nothing. . . . We have a closing window of

time to prevent the worst by preparing for higher seas.

I think that is exactly right, and that is why city officials in Boston are currently actively planning for how to manage 100-year floods that are now arriving every 20 years. We don't have 100-year floods anymore, we have them every so often--every 5 years or 20 years. In the face of a global sea level rise of 3 to 6 feet by the end of the century, there will be massive amounts of flooding. So we ought to pass legislation at the State level to plan, not to ban the planning. It is easy politics to ban it, but it is not smart politics, and it certainly isn't courageous leadership. Just ask those living in Tuvalu and the low-lying nation of Kiribati. Think they could use some advance planning to deal with the ``king'' tides that may soon drown out life on their shores? You bet. But instead of learning from them, we've succumbed to the siren call of short-term interests.

One resident of Tuvalu poignantly asked: ``What will happen to us in ten years' time?'' I wish I could delay her fears. I wish I could tell her that the climate change would only be limited to occasional sea level rise, and that--naturally, surely--the king tides would recede.

But the truth is much more harrowing. We also have raging floods and water scarcity--a dichotomy--in various parts of the world. From Veracruz to Songkhla Province in Thailand, floods are devastating crops and stealing away opportunities for millions. In my travels, I have seen children orphaned by raging flood waters, families deprived of basic necessities, such as food, clean drinking water, and medicine. I have also seen the ways in which climate change has interacted with conflicts, food insecurity, and water scarcity. People are fighting and killing each other over water scarcity in various parts of the world. In Darfur and in South Sudan, there are tensions over arable lands. Think of drought in Syria and its impact on farmers in southern Dara'a. Think of water scarcity in Yemen--and the list goes on. These are the invisible tsunamis Benjamin Strauss spoke of, and they develop slowly and quietly and determinately, and they devastate communities just as surely as they should kindle our sense of urgency about the cost of inaction.

In addition, although I am not going to go into the details now, there is major decimation of animal life and plant life and species life as a consequence of this interconnectedness. In addition, forests are under siege from drought and experiencing more fires and more die- off as a consequence of insect infestation because it doesn't get cold enough anymore to maintain the previous cycles of those insects dying off.

So the fact is that unmitigated climate change is creating enormous economic dislocations already, and it is only going to get worse if we don't act. Professor Frank Akerman, a prominent economist at Tufts University, found that inaction in the face of climate change could cost the American economy more than 3.6 percent of GDP--``or $3.8 trillion--annually by the end of the century. And he is not alone. Harvard economist Joseph Aldy estimates that if temperatures push past the 2 degrees mark, up to 2 to 4 percent of world GDP would be lost.

I thank the Chair.

So developing countries are going to face similar costs. According to a major international initiative on ``The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity'', developing countries will spend an estimated $70 to $100 billion a year from 2010 to 2050 just to adapt to a two degrees Celsius change in global temperatures, with the majority spent on protecting infrastructure and coastal zones, managing the water supply, and protecting against the effects of floods.

The ``grow now, clean later'' approach is no longer viable--if it ever was. Before you know it, one quarter of the world's land surface will bear the marks of soil erosion, salinization, nutrient depletion and desertification. Imagine what this will do to agricultural productivity and water supplies.

Another way of looking at this is to consider not the cost, but the economic benefits of keeping our ecosystems intact.

Back in 2005 the World Bank estimated the total value of the world's natural assets to be $44 trillion. The countries that manage their forests, agricultural lands, energy, minerals, and other natural assets are going to be the economic leaders in the 21st century, and they will be able to reap the benefits of the ecosystem services like coral reefs, which provide food, water purification, tourism and genetic diversity--services valued at $172 billion annually. And they'll be able to invest more in the ``intangible'' drivers of growth like human skills, education, and innovation.

Mr. President, the message from all of this could not be more clear. Over 40 years ago, 20 million Americans--fully one-tenth of our country's population at the time--came together on one single day to demand environmental accountability.

It was called Earth Day. And they didn't stop there. They elected a Congress that passed the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, Marine Mammal Protection Act, Coastal Zone Management Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the Toxic Substances Control Act. They created EPA. America didn't have an EPA

until the 1970s when people said: We don't want to live next to wells that give us cancer. We don't want to live next to rivers that actually light on fire. So we made a huge transformation.

We need Congress now to do what the science tells us we have to do, to do what our economists tell us we have to do, to do what common sense demands that we do: It's time for Congress to stand up and do its part on climate change.

I don't know how many have read David Orr's terrific book, ``Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse,'' but it is important for everyone to understand his argument. Nowhere is the challenge of our moment more clearly expressed. He says:

The real fault line in American politics is not between

liberals and conservatives . . . it is, rather, in how we

orient ourselves to the generations to come who will bear the

consequences, for better and for worse, of our actions.

As Orr reminds us, we are at a tipping point--and it is going to take leadership to respond to it. Unfortunately, we have been witnessing just the opposite. In a talking point memo to his fellow Republicans last summer, House majority leader Eric Cantor of Virginia took aim at environmental safeguards. Job killers, he called them, listing the ``top 10 job-destroying regulations,'' seven of which dealt with reducing air pollution from industrial incinerators, boilers and aging coal-fired power plants.

Job killers? The facts just don't support that.

The Labor Department, however, keeps close tabs on extended mass layoffs, and in 2010 the Department found that of the 1,256,606 mass layoffs, employers attributed just 2,971 to government regulation. That is only about two-tenths of 1 percent of all layoffs.

In fact, decreasing carbon pollution actually presents a huge economic opportunity in terms of new jobs and innovation.

For every $1 we spend, we get $30 in benefits. The U.S. environmental technology industry in 2008 generated approximately $300 billion in revenues and supported almost 1.7 billion in jobs. The air pollution sector alone produced $18 billion in revenue.

If we're going to remake the world before 2050, and this is one area where I agree with my Republican friends, we're going to have to harness the power of the good old American market economy. And one way to do that is to put a price tag on carbon and other global warming pollutants.

With a price tag, we more accurately reflect the consequences of these pollutants, not just for the environment but also for the quality of our lives and the health of our families. If we understand the consequences of our choices, especially in economic terms, we'll make better choices.

One way to do this is to levy a pollution fee that reflects the true environmental cost of coal and oil. But there's no chance the current Congress will enact any tax, especially one on smokestack industries.

Over the course of 2011, the Republican-controlled House held nearly 200 votes to weaken our environmental safeguards, including the bedrock legislation spawned by the very first Earth Day--the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, even the agency created to enforce those laws, the Environmental Protection Agency.

If we don't use the market, the other option is, inevitably, direct regulation of carbon emissions by the EPA under the Clean Air Act. The conservative-dominated Supreme Court has already given the green light to the EPA to do this. But this invites even more bitterness and political partisanship.

Besides, pricing pollution has already shown itself to be effective. During the 1980s, instead of imposting regulations, we used a cap-and- trade system to reduce the sulfur dioxide emissions from power plants that caused plant- and soil-destroying acid rain. The system included cash incentives to over comply: polluters received allowances for every ton of sulfur oxide under the limits, and they could trade, sell or bank the allowances. The system worked so well that regulated plants reduced emissions 40 percent more than required.

There is every reason to believe some variation of that system would work just as well to curb carbon emissions. But anything related to or resembling ``Cap And Trade'' isn't the best rallying cry these days thanks to the concerted, cynical re-branding of the concept. But whatever rallying cry is used, the point is the time for action is now. We need a ``Million Man-Million Woman-Million Child'' March on Washington and the voting booths of America. We need people marching up the steps of the Capitol, pounding on the doors of Congress, demanding a solution to our climate crisis.

We also know we need deadlines to instill a sense of urgency. There is a deadline coming up this week in Rio where they are now having Rio Plus 20, the 20-year anniversary of that meeting I referred to at the beginning. Much has changed since the first Earth Day summit back in 1992--and much of it for the worse. True, we're seeing innovation and entrepreneurship flourish in countries that were once considered among the poorest. We should celebrate that. But I'll tell you: Twenty years after Rio and 15 years after Kyoto, we are still further behind than ever. The science is screaming at us, and the planet is sending us an

Mr. President, I think I have time reserved now for up to 30 minutes. I wish to first of all say that the subject we have been listening to is life threatening. It is critical. That is not why I am down here today because we have something else that is very important.

I have come to the floor today with some breaking news. The momentum to stop President Obama's war on coal is now so great that some of my colleagues--Senators Alexander and Pryor--are going to introduce a countermeasure to my resolution. My resolution would put a stop to the second most expensive EPA regulation in history--a rule known as Utility MACT, with which the occupier of the chair is very familiar. The countermeasure is a cover bill, pure and simple.

While my resolution requires the EPA to go back to the drawing board

to craft a rule in which utilities can actually comply, the measure that Senators Alexander and Pryor are offering would keep Utility MACT in place but delay the rule for 6 years. This alternative is a clear admission that the Obama EPA's policy is wrong, but it does not fix the problem. It simply puts off the day of execution for a matter of 6 years.

What is really going on here? Since my S.J. Res. 37 is a privileged motion, it must be voted on by Monday, June 18, unless we extend it, which I would be willing to do, until after the farm bill takes place. That might be a better idea. It requires 50 votes to pass. The Alexander-Pryor cover bill will likely be introduced tomorrow. It is a bill that will likely never be voted on and would require 60 votes to pass. Therefore, the Senators who want to kill coal by opposing S.J. Res. 37 will put their names on the Alexander-Pryor bill as cosponsors to make it look as if they are saving coal, when in reality that bill, the Alexander-Pryor bill, kills coal in 6 years.

We have seen this before. I remember when we considered the Upton- Inhofe Energy Tax Prevention Act when it came to the floor last year. It was a measure that would have prevented the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. I would like to expand on that, but there is not time to do that.

My colleagues offered a number of counteramendments so they could have a cover vote. They wanted to appear as if they were reining in the out-of-control EPA--and I think everybody knows what is going on right now with all those regulations--for their constituents back home, all the while letting President Obama go through with his job-killing regulations. Some chose to vote for the only real solution to the problem--the Energy Tax Prevention Act--and some chose the cover vote. But all in all, 64 Senators went on record that day as wanting to rein in the EPA. But some of them did not have the courage to stand by it.

Of course, it is highly unlikely the Utility MACT alternative by Senators Alexander and Pryor will ever get a vote, but that is not the point. The point is just to have something out there that Senators in a tough spot can claim to support.

As I have said many times now, the vote on S.J. Res. 37 will be the one and only opportunity to stop President Obama's war on coal. This is the only vote. There is no other vote out there. If we do not do this, and that rule goes through--Utility MACT--coal is dead. This is the only chance we have.

Fortunately, we have a thing called the CRA. It is a process whereby a Senator can introduce a resolution to stop an unelected bureaucrat from having some kind of an onerous regulation. That is exactly what I have done with this. But this is the only chance for my colleagues to show constituents who they do stand with. Which of my colleagues will vote for the only real solution, which is my resolution, and which of my colleagues will vote for a cover vote?

What has changed over the past few weeks to the extent of my colleagues suddenly feeling it necessary for a cover vote?

A lot has changed because the American people are speaking up, and they are not happy about the Obama EPA. When I go back to Oklahoma, that is all I hear. It does not matter if you are in the ag business, if you are in the military business, if you are in the manufacturing business, they are all talking about the onerous regulations that are taking place in the EPA. I am pleased to say we have picked up the support of groups representing business and labor. Even more encouraging is a growing number of elected officials are working across the aisle to save coal. The Senate has taken notice, and the first Senate Democrats are beginning to come on board.

I want to commend Senator Joe Manchin, who happens to be occupying the chair at this time, and Senator Ben Nelson. They were the first two Senate Democrats to come out publicly in support of our resolution. I must say, I am very glad to see that they have made the right choice to stand with their constituents.

Senator Manchin's announcement came just after the Democratic Governor of West Virginia, Governor Tomblin, sent a letter asking him, as well as Senator Rockefeller, to vote for my resolution because, he said, EPA's rules have--and I am quoting now the Democratic Governor of West Virginia; and the occupier of the chair will know this--EPA's rules have ``coalesced to create an unprecedented attack on West Virginia's coal industry.'' Still quoting, he said: ``This attack will have disastrous consequences on West Virginia's economy, our citizens and our way of life,'' and that EPA ``continues on this ill-conceived path to end the development of our nation's most reliable cost- effective source of energy--coal.''

I am very proud of a lot of the officials in West Virginia for what they have come out with. Governor Tomblin is not the only Democrat to be concerned. West Virginia Lieutenant Governor Jeffrey Kessler sent a separate letter to the West Virginia Senators and others asking them to pass S.J. Res. 37 in order to save what he called West Virginia's ``most valuable state natural resource and industry.'' He reminded the Senators that:

On May 25, 2012, the State of West Virginia challenged the

MATS rule--

that is the kill coal rule--

and cited four reasons the defective rule should be rejected.

That is not all. A group of bipartisan State legislators from West Virginia also wrote the Senators and others urging them to support S.J. Res. 37 out of concern for the devastating impact on West Virginia. As they wrote:

Several West Virginia power plants have announced their

closure and the loss of employment that comes with it.

Additionally, it is projected that with the implementation of

this rule, consumer electric rates will skyrocket.

We all know that is true. Even the President has stated that.

I wish to note that we have support from nearly 80 percent of the private sector--those businesses that President Obama claims are ``doing just fine.'' Apparently, they do not think they are doing all that fine. American businesses are suffering because of aggressive overregulation by the Obama administration.

Let me take a minute to read the names of just some of the groups that are supporting our efforts to pass S.J. Res. 37: The National Federation of Independent Business, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the American Farm Bureau, the National Association of Manufacturers, the Industrial Energy Consumers of America, the American Chemistry Council, the Association of American Railroads, the American Forest and Paper Association, the American Iron and Steel Institute, the Fertilizer Institute, the Western Business Roundtable, and the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association.

That is just part of it.

Then the unions. The unions are coming too--I have talked about the businesses and read all of their groups--they have come to stop the overregulation that is killing jobs. Cecil Roberts, I had the occasion to meet him once. He is the president of the United Mine Workers, one of the largest labor unions in the country. He recently sent a letter to several Senators saying the union's support for my resolution is ``based upon our assessment of the threat that the EPA MATS rule''-- that is the coal-killing rule--``poses to United Mine Workers Association members' jobs, the economies of coal field communities, and the future direction of our national energy policy.''

Remember, Cecil Roberts is the one who traveled across the country in 2008 campaigning for President Obama. But after 4 years of his regulatory barrage designed to kill the mining jobs his union is trying to protect, Mr. Roberts has said his group may choose not to endorse President Obama or just sit the election out. As he explained:

We've been placed in a horrendous position here. How do you

take coal miners' money and say let's use it politically to

support someone whose EPA has pretty much said, ``You're

done''?

With even Democrats and unions supporting my effort to save millions of jobs that depend on coal, EPA has to be feeling the pressure.

Gina McCarthy, the Assistant Administrator of EPA's Office for Air and Radiation, came out with a statement last week vehemently denying that Utility MACT and EPA's other rules are an effort to end coal. She said:

This is not a rule that is in any way designed to move coal

out of the energy system.

Everybody knows better than that.

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson echoed this sentiment saying that it is simply a coincidence that these rules are coming out at the ``same time'' that natural gas prices are low so utilities are naturally moving toward natural gas. Her message was: Do not blame the EPA.

Last week on the Senate floor, I described why their public health and natural gas arguments do not hold up, so I will not go into that today. But what I wish to focus on today is that these claims backing up their efforts to kill coal are just a part of the far-left environmental playbook.

There is a pretty big difference between what EPA is saying publicly and what they are saying when they talk with their friends, when they feel as though they can let their guard down and admit what is really going on down at the EPA. That is exactly what happened in a video recently uncovered of Region 6 Administrator Al Armendariz. While President Obama was posing in front of an oil pipeline in my State of Oklahoma pretending to support oil and gas, Administrator Armendariz told us the truth, that EPA's ``general philosophy'' is to ``crucify'' and make examples of oil and gas companies.

You may remember last week when I spoke on the Senate floor, I talked about a newly discovered video of EPA Region 1 Administrator Curt Spalding who is caught on tape telling the truth to a group of his environmental friends at Yale University. At a gathering there, he said that EPA's rules are specifically designed to kill coal and that the process isn't going to be pretty.

He openly admitted:

If you want to build a coal plant you got a big problem.

He goes on to say that the decision to kill coal was ``painful every step of the way'' because it will devastate communities in Virginia, Pennsylvania, and any area that depends on coal for jobs and livelihoods. That is kind of worth repeating. He said it is going to be painful. At least he recognized that. And we all know exactly what he is talking about.

I read his whole quotes on the floor of the Senate. They are a little too long to read now. But he talks about how painful it is going to be for all these families who are losing their jobs because we are killing coal.

I talked a lot about President Obama's war on coal last week, but what I did not have time to address was the Obama administration's allies in this war. It would come as no surprise that Administrator Spalding and, indeed, many at EPA are working hand in hand with the far-left environmental groups to move these regulations to kill coal.

Last July, Administrator Spalding spoke at a Boston rally for Big Green groups--that is capitalized: ``Big Green''--supporting EPA'S Utility MACT rule. That is the rule that would kill coal. In a YouTube video of this rally, Administrator Spalding gushes over the environmental community, thanking them profusely for ``weighing in on our behalf.'' So here we have EPA admitting that Big Green is working for them.

His whole speech was directly out of the environmental playbook. This is something that really exists: the environmental playbook. It was all about the so-called health benefits of killing coal. And he said:

Don't let anybody tell you these rules cost our economy

money.

This is out of their playbook.

Administrator Spalding is not alone in his alliance with Big Green. Also appearing with these far-left environmental groups was Region 5 Administrator Susan Hedman. According to Paul Chesser, an associate fellow for the National League and Policy Center, Hedman told supporters at the rally:

We really appreciate your enthusiastic support for this

rule. It's quite literally a breath of fresh air compared

with what's going on in the nation's capital these days.

Of course, the former EPA region 6 Administrator Armendariz showed us again last week just how close EPA's relationship is with the far left groups. Armendariz had agreed to testify before Congress. It was actually over in the House, but at the last minute he canceled. As it turns out, Armendariz was in Washington that day. But while he apparently could not find time to testify before Congress, he did have time to stop by the Sierra Club for what has been described by the group as a private meeting. I suspect that Armendariz was there for a job interview. His ``crucify them'' resume makes him the perfect candidate.

Of course, EPA and their Big Green allies cannot tell the public the truth that they are crucifying oil and gas companies or that their efforts to kill coal will be ``painful every step of the way'' so they are deceiving the public with talking points from their playbook. When I say ``playbook,'' I mean a literal document telling activists exactly how to get the emotional effects they want.

We recently got a copy of this, and I have to say its contents are quite revealing. It comes from usclimatenetwork.com, a coalition of several major environmental groups, and it is a guideline for environmental activists when they attend hearings with the EPA to support the agency's greenhouse gas regulations.

A quick search revealed it was apparently written by a key player in the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal campaign, which is an aggressive effort to shut down all coal plants across America. After offering some tips on the word limit and how to deliver the message, the document urges activists to make it personal. It asks: Are you an expectant or new mother? Grandparent? If so, it suggests you bring your baby to the hearing. As it states, some examples of great visuals are ``holding your baby with you at the podium or pushing them in strollers, baby car seats,'' and so forth. ``Older children are also welcome.'' It encourages the visual aids of ``Asthma inhalers, medicine bottles, healthcare bills'' and all these other things that are good visuals.

The American Lung Association certainly took a page of this playbook. We have all seen the commercials of the red buggy in front of the Capitol. Of course, the Sierra Club put their principles to practice by inundating the American people with images of small children with inhalers.

The posters for the Beyond Coal campaign also featured abdomens of pregnant women with an arrow pointing to the unborn baby. The words on the arrow are, ``This little bundle of joy is now a reservoir for mercury.'' Another one says, ``She's going to be so full of joy, love, smiles, and mercury.''

Of course, the supreme irony is that the campaign that claims to be protecting this unborn child is the same one that is aggressively prochoice. It is coming from a movement that believes there are too many people in the world and actively advocates for population control and abortion.

Just after a hearing in May of this year, the Sierra Club posted pictures of their efforts. Sure enough, there is one of Mary Anne Hitt, director of the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal campaign, holding her 2-year- old daughter Hazel. But for all their efforts, it is clear the campaign is about one thing only; that is, killing coal.

At a hearing, Mary Anne Hitt with the Sierra Club said, ``We are here today to thank the Obama administration and to show our ironclad support for limiting dangerous carbon pollution being dumped into the air.'' She apparently sees the Obama administration as the closest ally in the Sierra Club's effort, and she has said about the Beyond Coal campaign:

Coal is a fuel of the past. What we're seeing now is the

beginning of a growing trend to leave it there.

Of course, it is not just coal they want to kill; they want to kill coal, oil, and gas. A lot of people do not realize that. It was not long ago that Michael Brune, the executive director of the Sierra Club, said:

As we push to retire coal plants, we're going to work to

make sure we are not simultaneously switching to natural gas

infrastructure. And we're going to be preventing new gas

plants from being built wherever we can.

So it is not just coal. It is oil. It is gas. We have to ask the question--at least I get the question asked when I go back to my State of Oklahoma because there are normal people there. They say: If we do not have coal, oil, and gas, how do you run this machine called America? The answer is we cannot.

As this vote on my Utility MACT resolution approaches, look for many of

my liberal friends to take their arguments directly out of the far left environmental playbook. Get ready to see lots of pictures of babies and children using inhalers. But these are the same Members who voted against my Clear Skies bill, that would have given us a 70-percent reduction in real pollutants, I am talking about SOx, NOX, and mercury. We had that bill up, and that was one that would have actually had that reduction--a greater reduction than any President has advocated. When President Obama spoke--at that time he was in the Senate--he said: I voted against the Clear Skies bill. In fact, I was the deciding vote, despite the fact that I am from a coal State and half my State thought I had thoroughly betrayed them because I thought clean air was critical and global warming was critical.

At an April 17 hearing this year, Senator Barrasso and Brenda Archambo, of the Sturgeon for Tomorrow, who testified before the EPW Committee, ``Would Michigan lakes, sturgeon, sportsmen, families have been better off had those reductions already gone into effect when they had the opportunity to pass [Clear Skies]?''

Her answer was yes. We are talking about, by this time, 6 years from now, we would have been enjoying those reductions. There are crucial differences between Clear Skies and Utility MACT. Clear Skies would have reduced the emissions without harming jobs and our economy because it was based on a commonsense, market-based approach. It was designed to retain coal in American electricity generation while reducing emissions each year.

On the other hand, Utility MACT is specifically designed to kill coal as well as all the good-paying jobs that come with it. EPA itself admits the rule will cost $10 billion to implement, but $10 billion will yield $6 million in benefits. Wait a minute. That does not make sense. That is a cost-benefit ratio between $10 billion and $6 million of 1,600 to 1.

If their campaign is so focused on public health, why did Democrats oppose our commonsense clean air regulations? Very simple. Because we did not include CO2 regulation in the Clear Skies legislation. President Obama's quote only verifies that. He is on record admitting he voted against these health benefits because regulating greenhouse gases, which have no effect whatsoever on public health, was more important. In other words, the real agenda is to kill coal.

Just before President Obama made the decision to halt the EPA's plan to tighten ozone regulations, the White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley asked: ``What are the health impacts of unemployment?'' That is one of the most important questions before this Senate in preparation for the vote on my resolution to stop Utility MACT. What are the health impacts on the children whose parents will lose their jobs due to President Obama's war on coal? What are the health impacts on children and low- income families whose parents will have less money to spend on their well-being when they have to put more and more of their paychecks into the skyrocketing electricity costs?

EPA Administrator Spalding gave us a clue about the impacts of unemployment. It would be, as he said, ``Painful. Painful every step of the way.'' Do my colleagues in the Senate truly want that? I deeply regret that I have to be critical of two of my best friends in the Senate, Senators Alexander and Pryor, particularly Senator Pryor. Three of my kids went to school with him at the University of Arkansas. He is considered part of our family. He is my brother. But if someone has been to West Virginia and to Ohio and to Illinois, to Michigan, to Missouri, and the rest of the coal States, as I have, and personally visited with the proud fourth- and fifth-generation coal families, as I have and certainly the occupier of the chair has, they know they will lose their livelihood if Alexander-Pryor saves the EPA's effort to kill coal. I cannot stand by and idly allow that to happen.

Let me conclude by speaking to my friends in this body who have yet to make up their minds as to whether they will support my resolution. I know everyone in the Senate wants to ensure we continue to make the tremendous environmental progress we have made over the past few years. We truly have.

The Clean Air Act many years ago cleaned up the air. We have had successes. Unfortunately, this administration's regulations are failing to strike that balance between growing our economy and improving our environment. Rather, this agenda is about killing our ability to run this machine called America.

Again, I wish to welcome the support of Senators Manchin and Ben Nelson, who listened to their constituents. It is the rest of the Senators from the coal States that I am concerned about. What about Senators Levin and Stabenow, who come from a State that uses coal for 60 percent of its electricity?

What about Senator Conrad from a State with 85 percent of the electricity coming from coal? In Ohio, where Senator Brown is from, 19,000 jobs depend on coal. Then there is Virginia, home of Senators Warner and Webb, which has 31,660 jobs, a 16 to 19 percent increase in the electric rates.

Arkansas, the war on coal there, that is 44.9 percent of electricity generation in the State of Arkansas; Tennessee, 52 percent of electricity generation, 6,000 jobs; Missouri, 81 percent of electricity generation--81 percent in the State of Missouri. That is 4,600 jobs at stake; Montana, 58 percent; Louisiana, that is 35 percent of electricity generation. These are all States that depend on coal for their electricity generation; lastly, Pennsylvania, 48.2 percent of electricity generation, 49,000 jobs would be lost in Pennsylvania if utility MACT is passed. That is significant. I would not be surprised if all these Senators from coal States that I just mentioned will vote for the bill of Senators Alexander and Pryor that says: Let's kill coal, but let's put it off for 6 years.

I repeat. It does not do any good to delay the death sentence on coal 6 years. Contracts will already be violated and the mines will be closed. So I say to my colleagues that their constituents will see right though those of who choose a cover vote. The American people are pretty smart. They know there is only one real solution to stop, not just delay, EPA's war on coal.

I hope they will join Senators Manchin and Nelson and me and several others and stand with the constituents, instead of President Obama and his EPA, which will make it painful every step of the way for them all. We need to pass S.J. Res. 37 and put an end to President Obama's war on coal. This is the last chance we have to do this. There is no other vote coming along.

If a Senator does not want to kill coal, they have to support S.J. Res. 37. It is our last chance to do it. Again, we do not know when this is going to come up. It is locked in a time limit, unless we, by unanimous consent, increase that time. I have no objection to putting it off until after the farm bill because that is a very important piece of legislation. So we will wait and see what takes place.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, I want to spend a few moments talking about one of our job-creating titles in the farm bill, but first I want to thank colleagues who are continuing to work on this bill. As we continue to do the business of the Senate, they are working through the amendment process and coming together with what I am optimistic will be an agreement for us to be able to move forward so we can complete our task on the farm bill.

I thank the ranking member of the committee, Senator Roberts, for his leadership and his staff and my staff for working so hard together. There has been a lot of coffee involved for folks to be able to stay awake on some late nights right now. They are doing a great job, and we are very optimistic as we move forward in this process.

One of the reasons we need to get this done, as I have stressed many times but it bears repeating, is this is a jobs bill. As the distinguished Presiding Officer from Ohio knows--as well as myself, coming from Michigan--jobs are a big deal. Jobs are a big deal across the country, but we have been in the middle of it in terms of the recession. We are now seeing optimism because we are recommitting ourselves to making things and growing things in this country.

We make a lot of great things in Michigan, not the least of which is automobiles, but a lot of other things also. I know Ohio, as well, is a great State for making things. Both of our States are also States where we grow things, and I appreciate the leadership of the Presiding Officer who is on our Agriculture Committee and has played a very significant role in getting us to

this point. The distinguished Presiding Officer, Senator Brown, has helped with major reforms in this bill. He has put forward a bipartisan proposal that relates to moving a risk-based system to support our farmers. I appreciate very much the Senator's leadership on that as well as a number of other things.

But this is about growing things. Almost one out of four people in Michigan has a job because we grow things. We have more diversity of crops than any State, with the exception of California, and so that means every page of the farm bill matters to Michigan, which is why over the years I have paid attention to every single page of the farm bill.

Overall in our country 16 million people work because of agriculture. They may be involved in production, they may be involved in packaging, they may be involved in processing, they may make the farm equipment, or they may be involved in a variety of things, but they work because we grow things in America. Our one area of huge trade surplus, and where we have grown in the last 2 years by 270 percent, is in agriculture. We are creating jobs here and exporting, and so this is a jobs bill.

I want to talk specifically about a very important piece where we bring together making things and growing things in our economy, and that is the energy title of the farm bill. The energy title reflects the important work being done by America's farmers, ranchers, forest managers, and rural small businesses to help improve our energy security.

Since we added this title in the 2002 farm bill--I was pleased to be a strong supporter in doing that--the Rural Energy for America Program has helped put in place nearly 8,000 projects and jobs that have helped farmers lower their energy bills and actually produce electricity that goes back to the electric grid. In the last 10 years, we have seen incredible advances in advanced biofuels and biobased manufacturing, which is the ultimate way to bring together making things and growing things, both of which are supported and strengthened in this bill.

The farm bill is also an energy bill and it is a jobs bill. There are more than 3,000 companies doing innovative, biobased manufacturing, and using agricultural products instead of petroleum to manufacture finished products. Those companies have already created over 100,000 jobs and are growing every day. Many of these businesses are in rural communities, and supporting those businesses is one of the best ways we can create jobs and economic growth in small towns all across our country.

This kind of manufacturing is also a win-win for the farmers. They get new markets for their products and, in some cases, markets for their waste products.

We have also seen tremendous growth in biofuels. This farm bill shifts our focus to the next generation of advanced biofuels, such as cellulosic ethanol, to continue lowering prices for families at the pump. According to a study by the University of Wisconsin and the University of Iowa, ethanol has already helped keep gas prices more than $1 lower than they otherwise would be. It is the only competition we have at the moment at the pump. As a consumer, what we need is more choice and more competition so that depending on foreign oil is not the only choice.

Many of our colleagues have different feelings about our energy policies, and the great thing about the farm bill is that it doesn't matter what we believe or where we come from, it is a winner because it creates choices. If we want to reduce greenhouse gas pollution, this bill is a winner. If we want to make America more energy independent so we are not relying so much on foreign oil, this bill is a winner. If we want farmers to pay lower energy bills so they have more money to hire workers and improve their business, this bill is a winner. And if we want Americans to pay lower prices at the gas pump, as we all do, this bill is a winner for every American.

I especially want to thank Senators Conrad, Lugar, Harkin, Ben Nelson, Bennet, Brown, Klobuchar, Thune, Casey, and Hoeven, who worked very hard at putting together the energy title and the necessary funding to continue supporting these innovative farmers and businesses all across our country. I appreciate their leadership in working with us and being able to get this done.

I want to talk about some of the specific areas we have in the energy title. There is something called the Rural Energy for America Program, also known as REAP. It is one of the most successful programs in the energy title, and one we hear about most often from farmers and ranchers across the country.

This program helps farmers with loan guarantees and grants to purchase and install renewable energy systems and make energy efficiency upgrades. Farmers have been able to put solar panels, wind turbines, as well as biomass energy and geothermal and hydroelectric and other forms of renewable energy technology on the farm. Since 2003, REAP has supported 7,997 different energy-efficient projects that have generated or saved 6.5 million megawatt hours, which is enough power to meet the annual needs of nearly 600,000 households.

As a caveat, I also want to say that when we talk about all of these alternatives, I also see this from the standpoint of making things. When we look at a big wind turbine, a lot of folks see energy use. I see 8,000 parts. We can make every one of them in Michigan and probably an awful lot of them in Ohio. So when we talk about creating energy efficiency opportunities, we are also talking about creating manufacturing jobs in the process. REAP is a big success story, which is why we continued the program and streamlined the application process for farmers and small businesses applying for small and medium-sized projects.

Each project funded by REAP can make a significant impact, as I said, on utility costs incurred by the businesses. For example, one company in Georgia created an on-farm solar system that will produce about 60,000 kilowatt hours per year to lower the company's power bills. Another Kentucky company used an energy efficiency grant to improve lighting and support a refrigeration/freezer project that would give them 63 percent energy savings--63 percent. That is a pretty big deal when we are paying the bills.

The next part I want to talk about is something called biobased markets and part of a larger biobased manufacturing effort that I am very enthused about. Biobased manufacturing is rapidly becoming a critical component of our new economy. According to USDA, there are 3,118 registered biobased companies in the United States that have so far created about 100,000 jobs, and growing. With customers demanding more choices, oil prices rising, these innovative companies are taking new approaches, turning agricultural products into manufactured products. So as we can see, all across the country there are 3,000 companies. This is a huge area that is growing, the innovation process, where we are literally taking agricultural products and replacing chemicals, replacing petroleum and plastics, and doing a variety of things that allow us to create new markets for farmers, get us off of foreign oil, and create jobs. I would argue that in the next 5 years we will see many, many, many more dots on this map as a result of the farm bill and private sector efforts that are going on across the country.

In the 2008 farm bill, we created the biobased program to develop and expand markets for these biobased products. Here are a few examples: Papermate makes a biodegradable, retractable grip pen manufactured by Sanford Newell Rubbermaid in Georgia. This pen is made from biodegradable components that include an exclusive corn-based material to produce less waste and more compost.

Purell Advanced Green Certified Instant Hand Sanitizer is a green- certified product made by a company in Ohio, containing ingredients from renewable resources. It kills more than 99.9 percent of most germs. It is a product that is biodegradable.

Greenware Cold Portion Cups made by Fabri-Kal Corporation in Michigan are made from materials such as plant-based and post-consumer recycled resins. My colleagues will note that this looks familiar because it is the same kind of cup we use in the Senate. This is something we are using and thereby supporting the biobased economy.

By including biobased manufacturing in the Biorefinery Assistance Program

within the energy title, we are expanding economic opportunities for farmers by giving them new markets for crops to grow and we are supporting cutting-edge manufacturing businesses that are making these products and creating these jobs.

We also have done other pieces that will strengthen this effort. I might mention, though we don't have a picture of it with us on a chart, one of the exciting things I am seeing in Michigan, as we bring together making things and growing things, is the extent to which our automakers are using biobased products in the making of automobiles. So for anyone who is buying a new Ford vehicle today--I sound like an advertisement--but a new Ford vehicle or a great new Chevy Volt or a number of new great American-made vehicles we have today, we are sitting on seats made from soy-based foam. We have soybean in the seats. Soy-based foam was actually started over 80 years ago with Henry Ford and has been something we have focused on, on and off, for 80 years. But now it has become a major effort. A major company in Michigan called Lear is making these seats. They are biodegradable. They are lightweight. We get better fuel economy. And as I often tell my friends, if you get hungry, you get something to munch on.

So the truth is we are seeing huge advances. One may very well have cupholders in their car that have a corn-based or wheat-based or other kind of agricultural-based product in the plastic, rather than petroleum--another way to get off of foreign oil. They are experimenting with tires, rather than using petroleum in tires. I think there is an explosion here of opportunity for innovation with our farmers and our manufacturers, with our universities, our scientists. It is very exciting, and it is part of the next generation for us of a new economy and new jobs. This farm bill strengthens that effort, working with the private sector, to help us rapidly move forward on jobs.

One of the other ways we support efforts to create and then the commercialization of products, to be able to move forward as it relates to creating, producing more products and so on, is to give consumers a way to find these products. So we have something called the USDA Certified Biobased Product label.

The mission of the BioPreferred Program is to develop and expand markets for biobased products through preferred Federal purchases of biobased products across the Federal Government and a voluntary labeling program to raise consumers' awareness and to help make sure we know that what we are buying is, in fact, a biobased product. Since the program was created in the last farm bill in 2008, there are now 64 different categories of biobased products and almost 9,000 products-- 9,000 products--approved for preferred Federal purchases. It is in everybody's best interests for us to be encouraging these new markets, encouraging innovation, and at the same time addressing other critical needs for our country, including getting off of foreign oil. In addition, another 430 products from 150 companies have been certified to carry the USDA Certified Biobased Product label. So this is important. And there are new efforts happening. The President, the Secretary of Agriculture, and I have come together to urge, in fact, that we increase the amount of biobased labeling that is going on and make sure that consumers are looking for this label.

We then have the Biorefinery Assistance Program which is a very important piece of all of this. The Biorefinery Assistance Program was originally created in the 2002 farm bill to support the development and construction of demonstration-scale biorefineries to determine the commercial viability of some of the processes that are involved in converting renewable biomass to advanced biofuels. It also guarantees loans for companies that are developing, constructing, or retrofitting commercial-scale biorefineries using these new technologies. In the last 2 years, companies participating in this effort have created nearly 300 direct jobs, and it is estimated that as this program is written into the 2012 farm bill, it will help these innovative businesses hire another 450 people as well.

We also expand eligibility for the program to include biobased manufacturing. This is a very important piece of this bill. We are now going from refineries, talking about advanced biofuels, to expanding the opportunity for tools for our biobased manufacturers within the rubric of the energy title and the focus on jobs.

We are talking about loan guarantees for companies to leverage private dollars. So for just over $400 million in loan guarantees, we have leveraged $1.5 billion in private dollars to help companies with the cost of retrofitting and building new commercial biofuels plants. When operational, these facilities are expected to produce 113 million gallons of advanced biofuels and generate almost 25 million kilowatt hours of renewable energy, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by an estimated 600,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide which, by the way, is the equivalent of taking 11,000 cars off the road. I have a little bit of a mixed feeling about that. Actually, we would much prefer to do it this way and keep great new advanced vehicles on the road.

In 2011, the USDA awarded $6.9 million in grants and $13.1 million in loan guarantees to 17 anaerobic digester projects--here we are talking about waste on the farm and turning it into energy--which will create enough energy to power 10,000 homes.

There are so many opportunities for us, whether it is animal waste, food waste. We have a facility in Michigan that will be opening in the fall that is up by Gerber Baby Food. We are the international home of Gerber Baby Food in Fremont, MI. There is a new biobased facility opening that will use all the food waste to generate energy-- electricity--for the northwestern area of Michigan. There are so many opportunities for us right now, using, again, food waste, byproducts from agriculture, and so on, where we can blend those together and create jobs and get us off of foreign oil.

The Biorefinery Assistance Program has helped build seven first-of- their-kind biorefineries to produce advanced biofuels in States from Florida to Oregon, Michigan to New Mexico. One of the companies, called INEOS New Plant Bioenergy, has just begun commissioning their plant in Indian River County, FL, which will use citrus and other municipal solid waste to produce 8 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol every year and 6 megawatts of renewable electricity. They have over 100 people working on the job, completing this first-of-a-kind plant, using 85 percent U.S.-manufactured equipment, by the way, for the facility.

There is so much. I could spend a long time going through all of the exciting efforts going on, literally from the east coast to the west coast, North and South, where creative entrepreneurs are coming forward, with support from the USDA to be able to get them through what is often called the valley of death, as they have a great idea but are trying to get it to commercialization, and efforts that are leveraging private dollars and public dollars to be able to have these companies move forward into full commercialization. Then they can create jobs, create renewable energy, get us off of foreign oil or create other kinds of products--all kinds of opportunities for us around products.

That leads me to another important piece, which is R&D, which is always a very important part of what needs to be done as we are looking at these new ideas. Entrepreneurs, companies large and small, many small businesses--in fact, most of them start as small businesses with a great idea, and they are looking for how to turn that into a great business, and hiring people, and so on. The Biomass Research and Development Initiative is an integral component to bridging the gap between technology development and commercialization. As I said, this is often called the valley of death. If you are somebody out there who is an entrepreneur with a great idea, how do you actually convince somebody to invest in it so you can move forward? Nearly $133 million in grants was provided through the research and development effort from 2003 to 2010 and they helped leverage $61 million in private investment.

One of the great success stories among many comes out of Wisconsin. We heard about this during one of our farm bill hearings when Lee Edwards, CEO of Virent Energy, came in to tell us about the great work his company is doing. They were awarded a grant as

seed money to develop their technology with the University of Wisconsin. Virent now has over 120 employees and plans to expand again after receiving a contract from Coca-Cola to develop a 100-percent plant-based bottle for its carbonated beverages. Virent's technology is feedstock-neutral and produces drop-in jet fuel and renewable chemicals. Their corporate partners include Cargill, Coca-Cola, and Shell.

We also have the Biomass Crop Assistance Program, which helps farmers and ranchers who want to plant energy crops for biomass that would be converted to biofuels or bioenergy. In 2011, this program supported between 3,000 and 4,000 jobs.

Our investment in the BCAP could result in companies hiring--in this farm bill, we are told--between 2,000 and 2,600 additional new employees. We have also addressed issues around collection, harvest, storage, and transport to address problems that had occurred in the last farm bill.

This program provides financial assistance to owners and operators of agricultural and nonindustrial private forest land as well. I have not talked a lot about forest land, but certainly biomass efforts--what has been done around forest by-products--are very important as well.

Steve Flick of Show Me Energy received the first BCAP project area, covering approximately 50,000 acres in 38 counties in Missouri and Kansas. Individual farmers within the boundaries of the project area can now sign contracts with the USDA to grow dedicated energy crops. This is another provision we have in the bill. Show Me's plant in Centerview currently pelletizes crops into biomass fuel for space heat and electric power. This technology will eventually provide liquid fuels that can replace gasoline and diesel. Steve Flick also testified at our hearing in February.

I could go on and on with examples. We have a very exciting project I visited not long ago in Alpena, MI, in the northeastern part of the State, which is a plant working with a paneling company that makes decorative panels, doing beautiful paneling work with 100-percent wood paneling. They are now taking what used to be waste that they sent to a waste treatment facility and pumping it right next door to a new company that is creating cellulosic ethanol. And they are now looking for other products. One of them will be a new green biodegradable effort to de-ice runways. So there are all kinds of possibilities.

What I am excited about is that this farm bill is focused on small businesses, farmers, ranchers, working with the forestry industry. How do we grow the economy by taking the two great strengths that have created the middle class of this country--growing things and making things? That is what this title is about; that is what this bill is about.

I am anxious to get us through this process so we can complete this bill and get on to the next generation of jobs.

Thank you, Mr. President.

Mr. President, I want to announce that I introduced a resolution of disapproval just a few minutes ago under the Congressional Review Act.

A lot of people don't know what the Congressional Review Act is, but it is an act that will allow Congress to look at some of the regulations. If there is something they don't believe is in the best interest of the country, they are able to introduce something to rescind that. It would call for a vote, and the vote would be a 51- vote. So it is one that has not been used very much, but it is a measure that would prevent, in this case the Obama EPA, from going through with its Utility MACT.

MACT is the maximum achievable control technology. That is used quite often because there are sometimes requirements in these EPA rules that require different industries to do things where there is no technology available to allow them to get that done. So the Utility MACT is one of the most expensive environmental rules in American history, second only to President Obama's cap-and-trade rules, which he was unable to achieve legislatively. Left untouched, the Utility MACT would destroy over 1 million jobs and cost the American economy billions of dollars.

My CRA, the Congressional Review Act, will be the moment of truth for a majority in this body who understand how harmful the Obama EPA regulatory agenda will be for their constituents. Remember, last year at this time 64 Senators voted in different ways to rein in the EPA's destructive greenhouse gas regulations. I had a bill to take away the jurisdiction from the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gases. It was called the Energy Tax Prevention Act. At the same time, there was another I call a cover vote. Sometimes when you want to tell people at home that you are against something, you can have a less maybe severe vote, and there happens to be a cover vote that takes place.

The bottom line is 64 of the 100 Senators voted to do something about the overregulation that is coming out of the Environmental Protection Agency. That particular one was on the regulation that would be the most expensive of all.

The Utility MACT I am offering the CRA on now is probably the second most expensive. But to refresh your memory, in order to have the EPA have jurisdiction of the greenhouse gases, they had to somehow come up with an endangerment finding. They did, and they based it on the IPCC science that gave rise to the concern that was exposed in climategate. I think everyone understands that was flawed science. But, nonetheless, that is what they used. That is why we were able to get two-thirds of this body to object to the EPA regulating greenhouse gases.

I think the bottom line now is that there are more than a dozen Senate Democrats who have claimed they want to rein in the EPA because they know the devastating impact the Agency's regulatory train wreck will have at home. The Senators understand if their constituents lose their jobs as a result of these overregulations, they might lose their jobs.

So today the Senate can look forward to having one more opportunity to stand up to President Obama's war on affordable energy. They can vote for this CRA which will put a halt to one of the Obama EPA's most expensive and economically destructive rules.

Under the Utility MACT, it would cost American families--and nobody disagrees with this--the range is between $11 billion and $18 billion in electricity rate increases. That is over an 11-percent rate increase on average that it would cost if we were to pass this Utility MACT under the regulations of the utilities. This would send ripple effects throughout the economy, causing approximately 1.4 million net job losses by 2020. And it is not just jobs in the coal industry that would be affected.

Dr. Bernard Weinstein of the Maguire Energy Institute at Southern Methodist University has estimated EPA's air rules could endanger 1 million manufacturing jobs outside of the coal and utility industry losses. Workers recently laid off in Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia are feeling the devastating impacts of the rule. Sadly, these lost jobs are all part of Obama's wider war on coal and fossil fuels.

You might remember that he admitted this was his goal in the campaign of 2008 when he said:

If somebody wants to build a coal-fired plant they can.

It's just that it will bankrupt them. And under my plan of a

cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily

skyrocket.

When the cap-and-trade failed, Obama began aggressively pursuing these goals through an executive regulatory barrage of unelected bureaucrats. So companies such as Solyndra got big cash payoffs while a regulatory train wreck was unleashed by the EPA to destroy America's fossil fuel industry.

The political climate is much different now than it was in the days when global warming alarmists could bask in their historical gloom-and- doom predictions about the end of the world. Now, President Obama wouldn't dare say anything like that because the American people no longer are buying it. Instead, he has begun touting oil and gas development and saying he is for an all-out, all-of-the-above energy strategy. In an election year, he knows the American people want the hundreds of thousands of jobs and affordable energy prices that come with domestic oil and gas.

But he is clearly still determined to achieve his global warming agenda. His war on affordable energy is moving underneath the radar and wrapped in lies about protecting public health. Make no mistake, the train wreck will achieve all of Obama's global warming objectives, and it will severely undermine our Nation's economy in the process. So I will spend just a moment on that.

When President Obama could not achieve cap-and-trade through legislation, he said he would just do it through regulations. EPA's greenhouse gas regime will cost American families between $300 billion and $400 billion a year. This is important because no one has refuted this. We have gone through the Kyoto convention, and that was a range that was given to us by the Wharton econometrics survey at that time. And several others chimed in--MIT chimed in, CRA chimed in. So the cost of regulating greenhouse gas

would be about $300 billion to $400 billion a year.

When we talk about billions and trillions of dollars, I am like everybody else. I have a hard time seeing how that really affects us. In my State of Oklahoma, I regularly determine each year how many families in my State of Oklahoma are going to file a tax return, and then I do the math. This particular one, at $300 billion a year, would cost each family filing a tax return in my State of Oklahoma about $3,000 a year. Now, that is not just once, that would be every year.

What do you get for it? And this is the thing that I think is important, and the American people finally have caught on. They have admitted that through the EPA, when you ask them if we were to pass one of these things regulating CO2 through the cap-and-trade legislation that we have defeated, would this reduce greenhouse gases, the answer from the Administrator of the EPA is, no, it wouldn't because this only would affect the United States of America. This isn't where the problem is. China would still be doing its thing, India would be doing its thing, and Mexico.

I have contended if we are regulating these in the United States, it could actually have the effect of increasing the emissions because, as we chase our manufacturing base overseas to find energy, they would be going to countries such as China and India where they don't have the regulatory restrictions we have in this country.

So the Utility MACT is second only to the greenhouse gas regulations in terms of what it would cost, in terms of costing the people in terms of jobs and money. Actually, the regulatory thing would be worse when we are talking about greenhouse gases because under the bills that were introduced starting in 2003--that was the McCain-Lieberman bill, going all the way forward to the Waxman-Markey bill--the assumption has been that they would regulate industries and emitters that were over the 25,000 tons a year.

Now, if we do it through regulation, as they are trying to do it right now, the Clean Air Act has a limit of 250 tons. So we would be talking about regulating virtually every church, school, and hospital in America and not just the very large utilities. So that is where we were on that issue.

On oil, President Obama has been congratulating himself on decreasing the imports of oil from the Middle East, but he fails to mention his policies have been consistently against oil and gas. In fact, he and people in his administration have said they want to do away with fossil fuels. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu said they wanted to ``boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.''

Well, that is $7 or $8 a gallon. Right now we are looking at $4 a gallon, and that is what they want to do. What is their motive? To do away with fossil fuels. He claims to care about energy security, yet he stopped the Keystone Pipeline.

I am very proud of a lot of Senators in here who have talked about it. Senator Hoeven, for example, is very familiar with it because of the production in his State. We are talking about the sands up in Alberta and bringing them down through the United States. I am interested in this because Cushing, OK, happens to be one of the intersections that is there for the pipeline.

So here is something there is absolutely no reason to do away with except to kill oil because we know the pipeline is going to bring oil down into the United States through, I might say, my State of Oklahoma down to the coast where it can be used. A lot of people don't understand this because they have been told things that, quite frankly, are not true.

In terms of oil, gas, and coal, the United States of America has the largest recoverable reserves in the world. People keep saying over and over again: Well, we only have 3 percent of the reserves. Yet we use 25 percent. Quite frankly, they are talking about proven reserves. You can't get a recoverable reserve until you drill. If they don't let us drill because of the policies of this administration, then, obviously, we would be stuck with just the very small amount we could produce. Nonetheless, it is out there. We are the only country in the world that our politicians don't allow us to explore and recover our own reserves--the only country in the world.

Natural gas. We know it is happening right now. We know in areas like New York and Pennsylvania with the Marcellus debate, we have opportunities we have never had in this country. We have the opportunity to recover more natural gas. When the President made a statement in the State of the Union Message about being supportive of ``all the above,'' talking about natural gas, he slipped in one little statement: Well, we don't want to poison the Earth--or something like that.

What he is talking about is they have spent countless hours trying to regulate a process called hydraulic fracturing--a process that started in my State of Oklahoma in 1949. There has never been a documented case of ground water contamination since they have been using hydraulic fracturing. And we can't get into these tight formations without hydraulic fracturing. It can't be done.

So the President can get by with saying he wants to produce the natural gas we have locally, and at the same time take over the regulation of hydraulic fracturing by the Federal Government. We know what that would mean. I think the best evidence of that is President Obama in his current budget is doubling the funding for the antifracking agenda in the 2013 budget. Nuclear? That is agreed. If we believe in ``all of the above,'' you have to have fossil fuel as coal, oil, and gas, but also nuclear. It is a very important component. It is interesting that only yesterday President Obama sent his Energy Secretary, Steven Chu, to Georgia, to take credit for the 5,800 jobs that will be created when two new nuclear reactors are built there. As Secretary Chu said yesterday:

In his State of the Union Address, President Obama outlined

a blueprint for an American economy that is built to last and

develops every available source of American energy. Nuclear

power is an important part of that blueprint.

Yes, nuclear power is so important that President Obama forgot to mention it in his very long State of the Union message. To send Secretary Chu to Georgia is kind of ironic, given that Chu is the one who said that nuclear power is the ``lesser of two evils.'' It was the President himself who designated a Chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission who had been leading the antinuclear energy group for quite some time. In fact, Chairman Jaczko tried to delay the progress on licensing the very reactors in Georgia that they went up to try to take credit for.

We see this over and over again.

What does this all mean? President Obama knows he needs to talk the talk on domestic energy because people have caught on. I think people know now that we have the recoverable reserves to be completely free from the Middle East. All we have to do in a short period of time is develop our own resources. I know my environmental friends are already saying, about the CRA on the Utility MACT--the NRDC jumped on the story today with the headline ``Let Loose the Defenders of Mercury Poisoning.'' Nothing could be further from the truth.

I remember in 2003 and 2005 when we had the Clear Skies bill. The Clear Skies bill would have had mandatory reductions--keep in mind we are talking about 2003--mandatory reductions on mercury emissions by 70 percent by 2018. It was a matter of a few years from now, that would be reality. Think about it, 6 years from now we would already have a 70- percent reduction if the Democrats had not stopped the bill. The reason they did is because we refused--we want to have SOX, NOX, and mercury, which are the real pollutants, reduced and reduced in a rapid fashion, faster than President Clinton or anybody else has tried to do it. They held it hostage because they also wanted CO2 included in it, so we got none of the above as a result of it.

The EPA's Utility MACT is designed to destroy jobs by killing off the coal industry. EPA admits itself that the Utility MACT rule would cost an unprecedented $11 billion to implement. Of course these costs will come in the form of higher electricity rates for every American. Importantly, the EPA also admits that the $11 billion in costs will yield a mere $6 billion in direct benefits.

Do the math. It means the agency has by its own admission completely

failed the cost-benefit test. It has the advantage of reducing emissions without killing jobs and the Utility MACT would do little for the environment but destroy millions of jobs. Why did Clear Skies fail? As I said, it was held hostage because they didn't want us to just lose SOX, NOX, and mercury, the real pollutants. They wanted to include CO2.

Before Obama's decision to halt the ozone rule, which would have put hundreds of thousands of jobs at risk, then-White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley asked: What are the health impacts of unemployment?

That is a good question. What are the health impacts of skyrocketing electricity rates which hurt the poor the most? What are the health impacts on children whose parents will lose one of the 1.4 million jobs that will be destroyed by the EPA's rules on powerplants?

The Senate needs to focus on promoting policies that improve our environment without harming our economy. The EPA's Utility MACT does the opposite. My CRA, I think, is one of the things about which they say: You will never get it done. I have criticized people for bringing a Congressional Review Act up against regulations where I know the votes are not there. It takes just 51 votes. The reason I think the votes should be here now is if the people at home care enough to put the pressure on. That is exactly what happened on the ozone requirements. They said the President was committed to ozone changes. He changed his mind because of that.

Remember the farm dust rule? The President was going to have a farm dust rule on emissions that would hit the air. I always remember, I had a news conference in my State of Oklahoma, in the western part of the State. We had a couple of people there from Washington who had never been west of the Mississippi. We got down there in this area of Oklahoma. We were talking about farm dust. I said: You see this brown stuff down here? That is dirt. You see that round green thing? That is cotton. Hold your finger up in the air--that is wind. Are there any questions?

There is no technology to do that, yet the expense to each of my farmers in a farm State like Oklahoma would have been hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and not accomplishing anything. We were able to get the public to write in to complain about that. As a result of that, the President pulled back.

I hope enough people are concerned about Utility MACT and its devastating effect on our economy and on jobs in America that they will join in and apply the pressure necessary to help the people in this Chamber understand that we should pass this Congressional Review Act and do away with this particular, very harmful regulation that is before us.

I have often said--a lot of people do not understand this--but Presidents are the ones who put the budgets down every year. A lot of times they try to blame the House or Senate, Democrats or Republicans. No. It doesn't matter. Who is in the White House, they are the ones who determine what the budget is. During the Bush years there was a total of $2 trillion of deficits in 8 years. However, after this budget came out last week, in the Obama 4 years the increase has been, in deficits, $5.3 trillion. That is $5.3 trillion in 4 years as opposed to $2 trillion in 8 years.

As bad as that is, I contend that the regulations of this administration are actually more expensive to the American people than servicing this debt. So I think it is important that we talk about this, talk about not just Utility MACT but all of these. Utility MACT is where we should draw the line, however, because that is one that directly affects our ability to provide energy for America, for our manufacturing jobs. We are right now a little bit under 50 percent dependent upon coal for our ability to run this machine called America. If you do this, we would lose, it is anticipated, 20 percent of our generation capacity and that translates into a lot of money, as I have noted.

That is what we have introduced today. I encourage my Democratic and Republican colleagues to join us in passing the CRA.

Mr. President, I want to announce that I introduced a resolution of disapproval just a few minutes ago under the Congressional Review Act.

A lot of people don't know what the Congressional Review Act is, but it is an act that will allow Congress to look at some of the regulations. If there is something they don't believe is in the best interest of the country, they are able to introduce something to rescind that. It would call for a vote, and the vote would be a 51- vote. So it is one that has not been used very much, but it is a measure that would prevent, in this case the Obama EPA, from going through with its Utility MACT.

MACT is the maximum achievable control technology. That is used quite often because there are sometimes requirements in these EPA rules that require different industries to do things where there is no technology available to allow them to get that done. So the Utility MACT is one of the most expensive environmental rules in American history, second only to President Obama's cap-and-trade rules, which he was unable to achieve legislatively. Left untouched, the Utility MACT would destroy over 1 million jobs and cost the American economy billions of dollars.

My CRA, the Congressional Review Act, will be the moment of truth for a majority in this body who understand how harmful the Obama EPA regulatory agenda will be for their constituents. Remember, last year at this time 64 Senators voted in different ways to rein in the EPA's destructive greenhouse gas regulations. I had a bill to take away the jurisdiction from the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gases. It was called the Energy Tax Prevention Act. At the same time, there was another I call a cover vote. Sometimes when you want to tell people at home that you are against something, you can have a less maybe severe vote, and there happens to be a cover vote that takes place.

The bottom line is 64 of the 100 Senators voted to do something about the overregulation that is coming out of the Environmental Protection Agency. That particular one was on the regulation that would be the most expensive of all.

The Utility MACT I am offering the CRA on now is probably the second most expensive. But to refresh your memory, in order to have the EPA have jurisdiction of the greenhouse gases, they had to somehow come up with an endangerment finding. They did, and they based it on the IPCC science that gave rise to the concern that was exposed in climategate. I think everyone understands that was flawed science. But, nonetheless, that is what they used. That is why we were able to get two-thirds of this body to object to the EPA regulating greenhouse gases.

I think the bottom line now is that there are more than a dozen Senate Democrats who have claimed they want to rein in the EPA because they know the devastating impact the Agency's regulatory train wreck will have at home. The Senators understand if their constituents lose their jobs as a result of these overregulations, they might lose their jobs.

So today the Senate can look forward to having one more opportunity to stand up to President Obama's war on affordable energy. They can vote for this CRA which will put a halt to one of the Obama EPA's most expensive and economically destructive rules.

Under the Utility MACT, it would cost American families--and nobody disagrees with this--the range is between $11 billion and $18 billion in electricity rate increases. That is over an 11-percent rate increase on average that it would cost if we were to pass this Utility MACT under the regulations of the utilities. This would send ripple effects throughout the economy, causing approximately 1.4 million net job losses by 2020. And it is not just jobs in the coal industry that would be affected.

Dr. Bernard Weinstein of the Maguire Energy Institute at Southern Methodist University has estimated EPA's air rules could endanger 1 million manufacturing jobs outside of the coal and utility industry losses. Workers recently laid off in Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia are feeling the devastating impacts of the rule. Sadly, these lost jobs are all part of Obama's wider war on coal and fossil fuels.

You might remember that he admitted this was his goal in the campaign of 2008 when he said:

If somebody wants to build a coal-fired plant they can.

It's just that it will bankrupt them. And under my plan of a

cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily

skyrocket.

When the cap-and-trade failed, Obama began aggressively pursuing these goals through an executive regulatory barrage of unelected bureaucrats. So companies such as Solyndra got big cash payoffs while a regulatory train wreck was unleashed by the EPA to destroy America's fossil fuel industry.

The political climate is much different now than it was in the days when global warming alarmists could bask in their historical gloom-and- doom predictions about the end of the world. Now, President Obama wouldn't dare say anything like that because the American people no longer are buying it. Instead, he has begun touting oil and gas development and saying he is for an all-out, all-of-the-above energy strategy. In an election year, he knows the American people want the hundreds of thousands of jobs and affordable energy prices that come with domestic oil and gas.

But he is clearly still determined to achieve his global warming agenda. His war on affordable energy is moving underneath the radar and wrapped in lies about protecting public health. Make no mistake, the train wreck will achieve all of Obama's global warming objectives, and it will severely undermine our Nation's economy in the process. So I will spend just a moment on that.

When President Obama could not achieve cap-and-trade through legislation, he said he would just do it through regulations. EPA's greenhouse gas regime will cost American families between $300 billion and $400 billion a year. This is important because no one has refuted this. We have gone through the Kyoto convention, and that was a range that was given to us by the Wharton econometrics survey at that time. And several others chimed in--MIT chimed in, CRA chimed in. So the cost of regulating greenhouse gas

would be about $300 billion to $400 billion a year.

When we talk about billions and trillions of dollars, I am like everybody else. I have a hard time seeing how that really affects us. In my State of Oklahoma, I regularly determine each year how many families in my State of Oklahoma are going to file a tax return, and then I do the math. This particular one, at $300 billion a year, would cost each family filing a tax return in my State of Oklahoma about $3,000 a year. Now, that is not just once, that would be every year.

What do you get for it? And this is the thing that I think is important, and the American people finally have caught on. They have admitted that through the EPA, when you ask them if we were to pass one of these things regulating CO2 through the cap-and-trade legislation that we have defeated, would this reduce greenhouse gases, the answer from the Administrator of the EPA is, no, it wouldn't because this only would affect the United States of America. This isn't where the problem is. China would still be doing its thing, India would be doing its thing, and Mexico.

I have contended if we are regulating these in the United States, it could actually have the effect of increasing the emissions because, as we chase our manufacturing base overseas to find energy, they would be going to countries such as China and India where they don't have the regulatory restrictions we have in this country.

So the Utility MACT is second only to the greenhouse gas regulations in terms of what it would cost, in terms of costing the people in terms of jobs and money. Actually, the regulatory thing would be worse when we are talking about greenhouse gases because under the bills that were introduced starting in 2003--that was the McCain-Lieberman bill, going all the way forward to the Waxman-Markey bill--the assumption has been that they would regulate industries and emitters that were over the 25,000 tons a year.

Now, if we do it through regulation, as they are trying to do it right now, the Clean Air Act has a limit of 250 tons. So we would be talking about regulating virtually every church, school, and hospital in America and not just the very large utilities. So that is where we were on that issue.

On oil, President Obama has been congratulating himself on decreasing the imports of oil from the Middle East, but he fails to mention his policies have been consistently against oil and gas. In fact, he and people in his administration have said they want to do away with fossil fuels. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu said they wanted to ``boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.''

Well, that is $7 or $8 a gallon. Right now we are looking at $4 a gallon, and that is what they want to do. What is their motive? To do away with fossil fuels. He claims to care about energy security, yet he stopped the Keystone Pipeline.

I am very proud of a lot of Senators in here who have talked about it. Senator Hoeven, for example, is very familiar with it because of the production in his State. We are talking about the sands up in Alberta and bringing them down through the United States. I am interested in this because Cushing, OK, happens to be one of the intersections that is there for the pipeline.

So here is something there is absolutely no reason to do away with except to kill oil because we know the pipeline is going to bring oil down into the United States through, I might say, my State of Oklahoma down to the coast where it can be used. A lot of people don't understand this because they have been told things that, quite frankly, are not true.

In terms of oil, gas, and coal, the United States of America has the largest recoverable reserves in the world. People keep saying over and over again: Well, we only have 3 percent of the reserves. Yet we use 25 percent. Quite frankly, they are talking about proven reserves. You can't get a recoverable reserve until you drill. If they don't let us drill because of the policies of this administration, then, obviously, we would be stuck with just the very small amount we could produce. Nonetheless, it is out there. We are the only country in the world that our politicians don't allow us to explore and recover our own reserves--the only country in the world.

Natural gas. We know it is happening right now. We know in areas like New York and Pennsylvania with the Marcellus debate, we have opportunities we have never had in this country. We have the opportunity to recover more natural gas. When the President made a statement in the State of the Union Message about being supportive of ``all the above,'' talking about natural gas, he slipped in one little statement: Well, we don't want to poison the Earth--or something like that.

What he is talking about is they have spent countless hours trying to regulate a process called hydraulic fracturing--a process that started in my State of Oklahoma in 1949. There has never been a documented case of ground water contamination since they have been using hydraulic fracturing. And we can't get into these tight formations without hydraulic fracturing. It can't be done.

So the President can get by with saying he wants to produce the natural gas we have locally, and at the same time take over the regulation of hydraulic fracturing by the Federal Government. We know what that would mean. I think the best evidence of that is President Obama in his current budget is doubling the funding for the antifracking agenda in the 2013 budget. Nuclear? That is agreed. If we believe in ``all of the above,'' you have to have fossil fuel as coal, oil, and gas, but also nuclear. It is a very important component. It is interesting that only yesterday President Obama sent his Energy Secretary, Steven Chu, to Georgia, to take credit for the 5,800 jobs that will be created when two new nuclear reactors are built there. As Secretary Chu said yesterday:

In his State of the Union Address, President Obama outlined

a blueprint for an American economy that is built to last and

develops every available source of American energy. Nuclear

power is an important part of that blueprint.

Yes, nuclear power is so important that President Obama forgot to mention it in his very long State of the Union message. To send Secretary Chu to Georgia is kind of ironic, given that Chu is the one who said that nuclear power is the ``lesser of two evils.'' It was the President himself who designated a Chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission who had been leading the antinuclear energy group for quite some time. In fact, Chairman Jaczko tried to delay the progress on licensing the very reactors in Georgia that they went up to try to take credit for.

We see this over and over again.

What does this all mean? President Obama knows he needs to talk the talk on domestic energy because people have caught on. I think people know now that we have the recoverable reserves to be completely free from the Middle East. All we have to do in a short period of time is develop our own resources. I know my environmental friends are already saying, about the CRA on the Utility MACT--the NRDC jumped on the story today with the headline ``Let Loose the Defenders of Mercury Poisoning.'' Nothing could be further from the truth.

I remember in 2003 and 2005 when we had the Clear Skies bill. The Clear Skies bill would have had mandatory reductions--keep in mind we are talking about 2003--mandatory reductions on mercury emissions by 70 percent by 2018. It was a matter of a few years from now, that would be reality. Think about it, 6 years from now we would already have a 70- percent reduction if the Democrats had not stopped the bill. The reason they did is because we refused--we want to have SOX, NOX, and mercury, which are the real pollutants, reduced and reduced in a rapid fashion, faster than President Clinton or anybody else has tried to do it. They held it hostage because they also wanted CO2 included in it, so we got none of the above as a result of it.

The EPA's Utility MACT is designed to destroy jobs by killing off the coal industry. EPA admits itself that the Utility MACT rule would cost an unprecedented $11 billion to implement. Of course these costs will come in the form of higher electricity rates for every American. Importantly, the EPA also admits that the $11 billion in costs will yield a mere $6 billion in direct benefits.

Do the math. It means the agency has by its own admission completely

failed the cost-benefit test. It has the advantage of reducing emissions without killing jobs and the Utility MACT would do little for the environment but destroy millions of jobs. Why did Clear Skies fail? As I said, it was held hostage because they didn't want us to just lose SOX, NOX, and mercury, the real pollutants. They wanted to include CO2.

Before Obama's decision to halt the ozone rule, which would have put hundreds of thousands of jobs at risk, then-White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley asked: What are the health impacts of unemployment?

That is a good question. What are the health impacts of skyrocketing electricity rates which hurt the poor the most? What are the health impacts on children whose parents will lose one of the 1.4 million jobs that will be destroyed by the EPA's rules on powerplants?

The Senate needs to focus on promoting policies that improve our environment without harming our economy. The EPA's Utility MACT does the opposite. My CRA, I think, is one of the things about which they say: You will never get it done. I have criticized people for bringing a Congressional Review Act up against regulations where I know the votes are not there. It takes just 51 votes. The reason I think the votes should be here now is if the people at home care enough to put the pressure on. That is exactly what happened on the ozone requirements. They said the President was committed to ozone changes. He changed his mind because of that.

Remember the farm dust rule? The President was going to have a farm dust rule on emissions that would hit the air. I always remember, I had a news conference in my State of Oklahoma, in the western part of the State. We had a couple of people there from Washington who had never been west of the Mississippi. We got down there in this area of Oklahoma. We were talking about farm dust. I said: You see this brown stuff down here? That is dirt. You see that round green thing? That is cotton. Hold your finger up in the air--that is wind. Are there any questions?

There is no technology to do that, yet the expense to each of my farmers in a farm State like Oklahoma would have been hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and not accomplishing anything. We were able to get the public to write in to complain about that. As a result of that, the President pulled back.

I hope enough people are concerned about Utility MACT and its devastating effect on our economy and on jobs in America that they will join in and apply the pressure necessary to help the people in this Chamber understand that we should pass this Congressional Review Act and do away with this particular, very harmful regulation that is before us.

I have often said--a lot of people do not understand this--but Presidents are the ones who put the budgets down every year. A lot of times they try to blame the House or Senate, Democrats or Republicans. No. It doesn't matter. Who is in the White House, they are the ones who determine what the budget is. During the Bush years there was a total of $2 trillion of deficits in 8 years. However, after this budget came out last week, in the Obama 4 years the increase has been, in deficits, $5.3 trillion. That is $5.3 trillion in 4 years as opposed to $2 trillion in 8 years.

As bad as that is, I contend that the regulations of this administration are actually more expensive to the American people than servicing this debt. So I think it is important that we talk about this, talk about not just Utility MACT but all of these. Utility MACT is where we should draw the line, however, because that is one that directly affects our ability to provide energy for America, for our manufacturing jobs. We are right now a little bit under 50 percent dependent upon coal for our ability to run this machine called America. If you do this, we would lose, it is anticipated, 20 percent of our generation capacity and that translates into a lot of money, as I have noted.

That is what we have introduced today. I encourage my Democratic and Republican colleagues to join us in passing the CRA.