A joint resolution providing for congressional disapproval under chapter 8 of title 5, United States Code, of the rule submitted by the Environmental Protection Agency relating to "Waste Emissions Charge for Petroleum and Natural Gas Systems: Procedures for Facilitating Compliance, Including Netting and Exemptions".

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, I am here today in opposition to the measure that we are about to vote on, which would undo a rule that regulates the release of methane into the atmosphere.

Let's just start with the most basic simple proposition that methane is dangerous, it is poisonous, it is explosive. And for those reasons alone, it is something that the fossil fuel industry should not be leaking. The fossil fuel industry should be responsible about taking care of its leaks of a gas that is dangerous, poisonous, and explosive.

But in addition to that immediate danger, methane is also a really, really potent greenhouse gas. If you look at the effect over a 20-year period, methane in the atmosphere is 80 times--8-0--times more dangerous than carbon dioxide. So we talk all the time about carbon emissions, carbon limits, carbon pollution. Methane is actually 80 times more dangerous.

So there are two reasons why the fossil fuel industry should not be leaking large amounts of methane. First, it is dangerous, poisonous, and explosive. And, second, it is an 80 times worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period.

So how much methane is industry leaking, and why did we do this measure in the first place?

Well, industry told the EPA for years that it was leaking about 8 million tons--8 million tons--of methane, which all by itself is a pretty big number, but it turned out that the industry was not telling the EPA the truth.

It turns out that once independent sources got a chance to spot methane leaks using, for instance, satellites--this is a satellite image of a methane plume that is being released from a leak site--when they could find that--and satellites can now do that so we are beginning to know how much methane is actually being leaked and particularly when you backstop the satellite information with information from aircraft where the readings can be more sensitive than from a satellite--it turns out that what they were actually leaking was more like 32 million tons. They were only disclosing a quarter of what they were leaking, and even that 8 million that they disclosed was a pretty bad number. When you go to 32 million tons, that is a great deal of leakage of a gas that is dangerous, poisonous, explosive, and 80 times more powerful a greenhouse gas over a 20-year period than carbon dioxide.

Now, you would think that, as an attribute of basic human decency, these companies that are leaking methane would go and clean it up. It is the decent thing to do, but they didn't, obviously. They didn't even disclose truthfully and accurately what they were leaking. So, when we were confronted with a 32-million-ton annual leak of poisonous, dangerous, explosive methane, and its greenhouse effects on top of that, we tried to do something about it.

So what did we do?

Well, we did two things: a little bit of carrot, a little bit of stick.

The carrot was $1.5 billion--1.5 billion taxpayer dollars--in flatout corporate welfare to the leaking oil and gas companies so that they could use taxpayer money to clean up the mess they were making to deal with the pipes and the valves and the wells that they weren't properly maintaining and that were leaking, it turned out, 32 million tons of methane.

Now, one could argue that that was a pretty poor use of taxpayer money; that a basic tenet of corporate responsibility should be: You clean up your own mess. You take care of your own equipment. That is a basic tenet of human responsibility. I don't know why it shouldn't be a basic tenet of corporate responsibility, but the measurement of 32 million tons of leakage shows that, obviously, those companies were not meeting that basic corporate tenet of responsibility.

So along comes the $1.5 billion of free taxpayer money--corporate welfare--to polluters and leakers for taxpayers to pay them to clean up the problem that they were causing. I didn't love that, to tell you the truth, but it came with an incentive as well, and the incentive was, if you are still leaking methane after a certain period and if you are still leaking methane above a certain level--you had to be a big leaker yourself. It had to be a big leak, like 300 tons per leak, and you had to be in the worst sector of the oil and gas industry. If those things were true--if you had big leaks and you were a big leaker and you were in the worst performing sector of your industry--then you would be assessed a fee for the leakage, which would be an incentive, in addition to the free $1.5 billion the industry got to go out there and fix the darned pipes and valves and wells and stop the leaking.

What we are doing today is saying to this industry: You can keep the $1.5 billion. We gave you that whether you used it to clean up or not. I don't know that. I don't think the jury is back on that, but they did get the $1.5 billion. But the part where you have to pay if you are still polluting, after all of this, beyond industry standards--that is what we are stripping out today. This Congressional Review Act measure specifically helps the segment of the oil and gas industry that is not even meeting oil and gas industry standards for controlling leaks.

I think it is a pretty reasonable test to impose on industry leakers that they at least meet their own industry standard for leaking. This isn't some arbitrary standard that government has imposed. This isn't something that came out of the Green New Deal. This is the industry's own standard for responsibility about leaks, and you pay this fee if you don't meet your own industry standard for taking care of your equipment properly and avoiding leaks of a dangerous, explosive, poisonous

greenhouse gas 80 times more dangerous than carbon dioxide.

So that is where we are, and that is where we are at today. Today's vote only protects those worst industry performers who have not cleaned up their act and met their own industry standards. If there were ever an undeserving group for Congress's solicitude, that is the group. They are not even meeting their own industry standards. They are comfortable with dangerous levels of leakage beyond what even their own industry recommends as a standard, and on they go.

This is just a little bit of a piece with the recent designation by the Trump administration of what ``energy'' is. The Trump administration just put out a definition of ``energy'' that doesn't include solar or wind. Most of what came online and is slated to come online in 2025 has been solar and wind. It is the booming part of our energy economy. It is where the growth is and the jobs are and the innovation is. It is also a leading energy source in red States. If you look at who is best on solar and who is best on wind, you see States like Texas; you see Iowa; you see Wyoming. They have considerable investments in solar and wind, but the Trump administration won't even call solar and wind energy.

So we are in this bizarre circumstance in which the fossil fuel industry, which drives so much behavior in this body after $100 million spent on the Trump campaign that we know of--probably hundreds of millions more secretly--has gained two big things: one, a completely false definition of ``solar energy'' and ``wind energy'' as not being energy despite the fact that it is fully operational, producing electrons, and was the largest source of new additions to the grid for 2025, and they just decree: This is not energy.

Why the fossil fuel industry would want that is a pretty strong signal of how low that industry will go in using its power over Congress. They will basically press the Trump administration to claim that solar energy and wind energy aren't even energy. It is a spectacularly foolish and false proposition, but bending the knee to the wishes of the fossil fuel industry appears to have no limits.

This vote is the second expression of that subservience to fossil fuel because of all the things that you could do, of all the things that would help grow America's energy markets, of all the things you could do to help take care of people who live near energy facilities or people who are being subjected to harm from climate change--of all the things you could do, probably the worst one would be to take the worst performers at leaking, which shouldn't happen in the first place, who leak so badly they don't even meet their own industry standards, who for years have been falsely saying that they leaked only a quarter of what they have actually been leaking, and they are the people whom we are going to come to the rescue of.

They had two choices here so that they didn't have to pay the fee for being among the worst leakers and not meeting their own industry standards. One is, clean up your darned equipment. Fix your pipes. Fix your valves. Fix your wells. Stop the leaking or at least reduce it to your own industry standard. If you do that, you don't pay this fee--or come to Congress. Use your power, the force of your dark money, of your influence, of your super PACs, of your political control, and get that requirement removed so that you can continue to leak, continue to leak methane--a dangerous, explosive, and poisonous substance--into your communities, continue to add this far more dangerous greenhouse gas to the atmosphere, and continue to meet no reasonable standard of corporate responsibility for taking care of your own gear and quitting the leaking.

And you know what they chose; they chose to come here and get a free pass--a hall pass from Republicans in Congress, a hall pass from the Trump administration--so that they can continue to leak to their hearts content, never mind their culpability of not meeting their own industry standards, never mind the harm that it causes.

This is an industry that lives off a pollute-for-free business model. If this industry were not allowed to pollute for free--if it had to compete, head-to-head, with hydro, geothermal, solar, wind, without the free right to pollute--we would have a very different energy mix, and they know that. So they insist on protecting their right to pollute for free, but of all the little quadrants of the industry whose pollution- for-free we should be coming to the floor to defend, those worst leakers who aren't taking care of their own equipment even to industry standards are at the bottom of any reasonable person's priority list, and yet they are the ones we are here to serve today.

The backdrop to this is, of course, ``climate change,'' a term that the fossil fuel industry has so ingratiated itself with the Trump administration that it is able to excise the term--a language attack-- excise the term from official documents, a little bit like saying that ``energy'' is everything except solar and wind. That is obviously false--provably false, in fact, and a preposterous assertion--but when serving the fossil fuel industry, that is the stuff they make you do, and here you go with saying that climate change isn't real when Exxon scientists talked about its being real 30 years ago. We are driving down a path of polluter-funded falsehood that ends in very dangerous places.

We have a pretty good idea of where it ends because scientists have been telling us where this goes for decades now, scientists in our major universities. I do not believe that there is a single State university, a State university with the name of the State in its name-- University of Rhode Island, for instance. I don't think there is a single State university in this country that does not teach climate change. That is how well-established climate change is as a factual proposition, and what it is going to do has been known for a long, long time.

The predictions are astonishingly accurate. Here in the Senate, we heard all those predictions. The first hearing on those warnings was actually by Republican Senator John Chafee of Rhode Island in his role then as chairman of the Environmental Public Works Committee. He had a senior scientist from NASA, John Hanson, come over and describe what the science was, what we knew about what was going on.

So there is a long, clear, indisputable scientific record warning us of what is coming--preview of coming attractions.

But then it came here, and, here, the fossil fuel industry butted in with enormous political force, turbocharged after the Citizens United decision allowed that industry to spend unlimited amounts of money. And in the enforcement--or nonenforcement--of that decision, allowed that industry to spend those unlimited amounts of money secretly from behind front groups and through Super PACs and from other devices where the public was denied the knowledge of who was trying to influence them. The basic right of citizenship is to know who is doing what to whom on the field of politics American citizens are supposed to police with their votes. That knowledge was denied them, and that flood of industry pressure came into this Chamber. And before you knew it, climate change was suddenly a partisan issue. If you wanted to be a Republican, you had to deny climate change. It was pretty much as simple as that.

Ask Bob Inglis from the House of Representatives what happened if you tried to break that grip of the fossil fuel industry on the House leadership, the fossil fuel industry grip on the House leadership on the Republican side.

So the science was right all along. We failed at the politics because of improper fossil fuel industry influence, probably the most maligned and large-scale political influence campaign in American history. We yielded to it. We allowed ourselves to not heed the warnings and take the steps that would have put us on a pathway to safety.

Now, having heard the scientific warnings, having failed at taking appropriate safety steps, we are now entering the third era, the era of consequences, when the stuff starts to hit the fan. And the warnings are coming from all over.

Just about 2 weeks ago, the chair of the Federal Reserve testified to the Senate Banking Committee that in 10 to 15 years, it will be impossible to get a mortgage in entire regions of the country. How does that relate to climate change? That relates to climate change because climate change is creating changes in weather patterns that

make it impossible for the insurance industry to predict risk. That is why insurance rates are quadruple the national average in Florida, which is first and worst into this insurance crisis because of its storm and flooding risk, because it is on the path of so many hurricanes, because the Gulf of Mexico is warming so fast that it is powering worse storms, more heavily ladened storms, with rain onto Florida's coasts. And when you can't get insurance on your home, and you go to sell it, you have got a problem because the buyer can't get a mortgage if your home is uninsurable.

What the chief economists of Freddie Mac warned, the mortgage giant, is that the climate risk creates an insurance crisis, which rolls over into a mortgage crisis, which drives down property values so badly that it creates a 2008-style national economic crisis.

Those aren't the only warnings. Reinsurers look at this climate mess as a business proposition. The insurance industry has to get the future right in order to do its business, and it knows that what the fossil fuel industry is saying about what is going to happen in the future is a whole pack of lies. So they are raising their rates. The reinsurance companies are looking and saying, wow, this is getting way more dangerous. We are not going to reinsure without getting a lot more money.

Reinsurance rates have more than doubled since 2017. They were up as much as 40 percent in 2023 alone in some markets.

So it is not just the voice of the Fed; it is not just the voice of the chief economists of Freddie Mac; it is the reinsurance industry.

Go below the reinsurance industry to the insurance industry and look at the first and worst place, Florida. All the major insurers are out-- pulled the plug. Gone. Done. Pop-up insurers have come to fill the gap. Twelve to fifteen of them have gone bankrupt already. And when they go bankrupt, they don't pay claims, and Floridians are left stuck behind an insurer that was not solvent.

Florida has had to stand up its own homeowners insurance company, which now has a huge share of the market and an even bigger share of the risk because they have allowed the other insurers to come in and cherry-pick out the lowest risk properties. So Florida is carrying a liability right now on homeowner's insurance that is greater than its entire State debt.

If you want to look at the solvency of a State, look at what Florida's risk is for its property insurance companies, citizens' property insurance, and its backup fund that comes in when the pop-up insurance companies go bust and somebody else has to come in and pay the claims.

The insurance industry, which has to look accurately at the future is also telling us this is deadly, deadly serious.

There is an international Financial Stability Board whose job is to look at the world banking industry, the world banking sector, and warn of risks to the banking sector. They just put out a comprehensive report on the danger that climate change poses to the banking sector.

It comes in a couple of ways. One is the one I just described. When banks can't issue mortgages, they lose a huge revenue proposition. So they get hurt in the ``insurance to mortgage to market value to economic crash'' cascade.

But, also, as those values fall--let's say you went from carrying a $4,000 carrying cost for your property insurance to a $20,000 carrying cost. The present value of $20,000 every year into the future as long as you are going to own that home, diminishes the value of that home. It doesn't just diminish it for you and for the next buyer, it diminishes it for the bank that holds your mortgage. It is really important to banks that they have enough collateral to back their loan. Their loan-to-value ratio is what helps determine their solvency. So the International Financial Stability Board is warning banks around the world: Look out. The climate crisis is coming at you and for your solvency.

This was, perhaps, said best by The Economist magazine in April, which led with a cover article warning of the next housing disaster and saying that ``the severe weather brought about by greenhouse-gas emissions is shaking the foundations of the world's most important asset class''--real estate.

The number that they put to that risk that is shaking the foundations of the world's largest asset class is $25 trillion. A $25 trillion hit to the world's largest asset class.

In the United States, a new report by First Street, which is a technical firm that looks at flooding risk for a whole variety of corporate clients but also publishes as well--they just published a report that climate change could erase $1.4 trillion in real estate value by 2055--i.e., in the 30-year mortgage period--a $1.4 trillion hit to real estate values here in the United States. While $25 trillion dollars was The Economist's global number; First Street's is $1.4 trillion here in the United States.

Trillions are big, big numbers. And when it is hitting people in their most prized and valuable family asset--their homes--it is a very, very dangerous proposition.

Here is what The Economist said:

The impending bill--

For climate harms--

is so huge, in fact, it will have grim implications not

just for personal prosperity--

i.e., the homeowner--

but also for the financial system.

Hence the report from the International Financial Stability Board about the need to shore up the international financial system.

Here is how it goes down, they say:

If the size of the risk suddenly sinks in, and borrowers

and lenders alike realize the collateral underpinning so many

transactions is not worth as much as they thought, a wave of

repricing will reverberate through financial markets.

Punch line:

Climate change, in short, could prompt the next global

property crash.

Instead of dealing with this--even as Americans are already seeing their property insurance prices rise and double, are getting more and more nonrenewal notices to get them off the company--what are we doing? We are helping out the absolutely worst offenders at climate leakage.

Here is Deloitte. I will close with this. Deloitte is a corporate consultancy. This is not Green New Deal. This is a corporate consultancy:

If we allow climate change to go unchecked, it will ravage

our global economy. For the United States, the damages to

2070--

Which was their prediction date--

are projected to reach $14.5 trillion, a lifetime loss of

nearly $70,000 for each working American.

And we are not even talking about that seriously. We are here, instead, to let off the hook that segment of the oil and gas industry that is the worst polluters, that doesn't even meet their own industry standards, and that can get away from the fee that we will be voting down now by simply meeting industry standards. This is a shameful moment for the Senate.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, when Donald Trump and DOGE began their work, they kept saying the same thing. Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and DOGE said: This is about cutting waste; it is about efficiency; it is about meritocracy. Unfortunately, the truth has not been as advertised. It has been utter chaos.

Yesterday, the Department of Veterans Affairs said they were reversing course on canceling billions of dollars in contract work because, as it turns out, slashing billions in funding that helps veterans is extremely harmful for veterans. These VA cuts were lauded by DOGE as an example of eliminating waste. The VA Secretary claimed these contracts were for consultants ``to make PowerPoint slides and write meeting minutes.'' That is not even close to the truth.

Let me read some examples of what DOGE was actually prepared to cut: Funding for chemotherapy and imaging services, those were going to be cut--hardly make-work, hardly writing meeting minutes. Funding for veterans with disabilities--cut--even funding to help veterans suffering from toxic exposure in burn pits. One contract would help over 20,000 veterans track down their military service records from DOD in order to prove their toxic exposure, as is required. Without these records, getting affordable treatment would not likely be possible, and DOGE said: Let's cut that, too.

Even if the VA reverses course, canceling these contracts and firing VA staff is still immediately damaging--very damaging. There is the risk that you can't rehire workers back in time because they have moved on to other jobs or contracts aren't available because they took their business elsewhere, and, by then, the damage is

done. Vital services and operations that serve veterans can't continue as before. It could take months--maybe even years--to build this back, which had been built up carefully to help veterans over the years, and many of us in Congress worked for those things; so to cut these services and then say ``never mind'' still ends up being very destructive. Sadly, this is only one example.

Yesterday, Elon Musk led his first Cabinet meeting of this administration. He admitted that DOGE's approach has led to many erroneous cuts to staff and programs that are not wasteful but, on the contrary, vital.

For example, he said:

With USAID, one of the things we accidentally cancelled

very briefly was Ebola prevention.

Those are his words.

Are you kidding me? Cutting funds to stop one of the deadliest diseases in the world is reckless, especially when there is an Ebola outbreak in Uganda as we speak, and flights leave Kampala every day and go all over the world. When epidemics hit America, they oftentimes begin abroad, and U.S. funding is essential to prevent those diseases from reaching us here at all.

I should also note that the claims that Ebola funding is back online are false. Reports are out from last night that 95 percent of all USAID funding is now being cut. So we are not sure where it all is.

What DOGE is doing is not what efficiency looks like. If DOGE actually cares about efficiency and meritocracy, then it is failing, in many ways, its own test. It would be better to look at these programs, see which might be wasteful, see which are needed, and then make the cuts to the wasteful programs, not take a meat-ax or a blowtorch--call it what you will--cut everything, and then say we will restore some of the things that we shouldn't have cut, because once you make those cuts, it is very hard to put the pieces back together.

Taxes

Mr. President, on Republican taxes, last month, consumer confidence took its biggest nosedive in 4 years--the biggest nosedive in 4 years. This is how confident consumers, average Americans, feel about the economy. Inflation is trending back up. The price of eggs is sky high. The threat of a trade war looms over our country, and Americans are fearful that things are not going to get any better anytime soon. And what are Republicans doing about all of this? They are trying to cut taxes for billionaires--trying to cut taxes for billionaires--and make the American people pay for it.

The Republican agenda is quickly taking shape. Under Donald Trump's Republican Party, billionaires win; American families lose.

It doesn't matter if Republicans go with 1 bill or 2 bills or 50 bills. That is what they are debating right now. Their endgame--House and Senate Republicans--has always been cutting taxes for billionaires and forcing American families to pick up the tab.

Of course, Senate Republicans know that cutting Medicaid by over $800 billion to lower taxes for billionaires is wildly unpopular. They know that increasing the deficit by up to $5 trillion to help the ultrarich contradicts everything the so-called party of fiscal responsibility stands for. They say they have to cut all this stuff to reduce the deficit, and then, with their tax breaks for billionaires, they increase the deficit, no matter what sleight-of-hand accounting method they use.

What are Republicans doing about fiscal responsibility? Are they admitting that their plans would be a disaster for the deficit? No. Instead, Senate Republicans are engaged in budgetary hocus-pocus to hide the true cost of their tax cuts for the ultrarich, and there may be signs that House Republicans are going along.

Instead of admitting the truth about the consequences of their plans, they are pursuing a gimmick called ``current policy baseline''--a gimmick, if there ever was one--which is essentially an attempt to magically turn $5 trillion of deficit spending into zero dollars of deficit spending. Well, that can't happen and doesn't happen, and the economy will realize it doesn't happen. Any junior high school math student could tell you this is a bunch of bunk. You can't pass $5 trillion to cut taxes for the rich and pretend like it doesn't affect the deficit.

The issue isn't complicated. Republicans are trying to hide the true cost of their billionaire tax cuts from the American people. Meanwhile, they are getting ready to eviscerate funding for healthcare that serves over 80 million Americans--kids, seniors, rural communities. These cuts to Medicaid will dramatically hurt rural America, people with disabilities, and more.

The only people who seem to be opposing this is the hard-right Freedom Caucus, because they seem to really care about the deficit. Let's hope they stay strong for the sake of the economy and this country.

Of course, the American people are not going to take these Medicaid cuts lying down.

Last night, I got on a Zoom. Over 3,000 New Yorkers, worried about the attacks from Republicans on healthcare, got on the Zoom, many more than we expected. These were rank-and-file folks, healthcare advocates, union members, and concerned citizens from all walks of life. They were all upset about the cuts to Medicaid and putting those cuts in place in order to give tax breaks for billionaires.

It was a great call. It was an energizing call. I urge my colleagues to do the same, as many of them are. It is a stark reminder of what is at stake but also a reminder that the American people don't like these cuts.

We heard from New Yorkers who are in danger of having their Medicaid coverage taken away if Republicans proceed with their actions, on this Zoom of over 3,000 people. But we also talked about taking action.

I urged participants to call their Members of Congress. I urged them to mobilize online and to organize in their communities. We urged everyone to make their voices heard, like we are seeing in the townhall meetings.

I reminded folks that organizing is not easy, but it works. It changes things, and it is going to make a difference in making sure Medicaid is protected.

Nomination of Linda McMahon

Mr. President, on our Education Secretary nominee, today, the Senate will vote on whether to advance the nomination of Linda McMahon as Secretary of Education.

Mrs. McMahon's nomination comes as President Trump has been clear about cutting funding for education and abolishing the Department of Education entirely.

Is Mrs. McMahon going to go along? I hope not.

Cutting education is not what the American people want. The American people don't want a radical, out-of-touch billionaire slashing funding for public schools. When you slash Federal funding for education, guess what happens. Since so many of our school districts--urban, suburban, rural--depend on this Federal money, it leads to higher property taxes for people back home.

If you eliminate the Department of Education as a whole, that means local communities are forced to pick up the tab to fund the schools. It means that families in these communities will pay in the form of higher property taxes to make up the loss of Federal funding. But communities will also be forced to slash other programs to make room for funding for schools.

Again, this is not what the American people want. This is not what they voted for.

Mrs. McMahon, in my judgment, is not qualified to lead America's public education. She seems not to care very much about it. But that is precisely why President Trump nominated her. She is the perfect choice to bring our public education system burning to the ground.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for a little more than a minute.

Mr. President, every American should be paying close attention to what is about to happen on the floor. In just a few moments, the Senate will vote on a Republican resolution that is straight from the wish list of Big Oil and Big Gas.

Instead of spending floor time pushing legislation that will lower costs for American families, Republicans are bowing to Big Oil and Gas billionaires by trying to reverse the methane waste emissions charge which Democrats passed in the Inflation Reduction Act. Donald Trump and DOGE claim to care about efficiency, but Republicans are undoing a measure to reduce oil and gas waste and are making prices for the consumer go up--prices going up--when they are saying they want prices to go down. The rule we passed has been one of our most important tools to lower energy prices, to hold Big Oil and Big Gas accountable, to keep excessive and harmful levels of methane

out of our atmosphere, which my friend Mr. Whitehouse, who has done such a good job on this issue, tells me is 80 times as poisonous as CO2. Without this safeguard, Big Oil and Gas can waste as much natural gas as they like and then pass the cost on to consumers.

Why are Republicans doing this? Well, it is simple. They are putting the needs of Big Oil and Gas companies over the needs of the American people, over the health of the American people and the health of our environment, our climate, our globe. And the consequences for the American people, for their health and their energy bills, are going to be very harmful.

I urge my colleagues to think carefully, one last time, before voting to overturn it.

Mr. President, I thank my great friend from the State of Virginia. I thank him for his leadership on this. I thank him for bringing out this very important subject because the American people are being robbed by the fossil fuel industry in broad daylight, and the Trump administration is driving the getaway car.

As the Senator from Virginia just said, in the United States, in 2024, 94 percent of all new electrical generating capacity installed is wind and solar and battery technologies--94 percent. What I am hearing on FOX News and what I hear from the--not ``all of the above'' but-- ``oil above all'' crowd is: Oh, my God, it is terrible what is happening in our country. Look at the war that is being declared upon oil and gas and coal.

Saying that wind and solar and batteries are a war against oil and gas and coal is like saying that the cell phone was a war against the black rotary dial phone. It is not a war. It is the entrepreneurial, innovative spirit in our country that is coming up with new technologies and new ways to solve the problem.

Just like, by the way, the black rotary dial industry, they didn't like it. They didn't like it at all. They had a monopoly, but there is a way to get around it. There was a way to have, out in the marketplace, new ways of generating communications technologies, and now there are new ways of generating electricity--new ways. They hate it. The incumbents hate it. They hate it because they had a bottleneck. It could only be they. It could only be oil, gas, coal. Then, all of a sudden, a new generation of young people arrived, and they say: No. Climate change is threatening this planet, and there are new, innovative ways that we can move.

So what is at the bottom of all of this? The oil, gas, and coal industries are scared--they are petrified--in the same way as the black rotary dial phone industry, in the same way that the horse-and-buggy manufacturer was scared.

There is an automobile now. Oh, no, what am I going to do?

How about getting in the transportation business rather than the horse-and-buggy industry? How about becoming, maybe, an auto dealer in Ohio? How about moving on, rather than being a horse-and-buggy company?

No. No. We are stopping that. We are stopping that. There are not going to be any roads. We are not going to build any roads for automobiles. That would be terrible.

So that is what we have. Right now, we have a war against innovation, a war against nonpolluting sources of electricity; a war against a generation of young Americans who are saying the planet is dangerously warming, and there are no emergency rooms for planets--$300 billion worth of damage in two storms, Hurricane Milton and Hurricane Helene; $250 billion worth of damage in the fires of LA. That is $550 billion worth of damage in just three incidents, and that is just the tip of the iceberg of what is coming.

So what the young generation is saying is, Can we please install wind and solar and batteries and all-electric vehicles? Can we be smart? Can we think ahead? Can we have a generational response?

And what is happening is the oil, gas, and coal industries are just calling in their chips. They are just saying that they want to kill everything--kill innovation.

By the way, I was the chairman of the Telecommunications Committee in

the 1990s, when we were still in that old era. Believe me. Those old companies love their monopolies. There are three wires that go into people's homes: the cable wire, the telephone wire, and the electricity wire. So now we are on the third wire, the electricity wire. Are we going to make that competitive, too, or not? And they are petrified.

Just today--this is unbelievable--the Trump administration announced that he wants to lay off 65 percent of the Environmental Protection Agency's staff. Those are our frontline fighters who ensure our water is safe, that our air is clean, and that our land is not polluted with toxins and chemicals. They want to turn the EPA into every polluter's ally. That is their goal. That is what they want to have. That is not what the younger generation wants in our country.

The EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin also told the White House that he wants to get rid of the EPA's authority to regulate dangerous greenhouse gases based on the threat they pose to public health or welfare. It is known as the endangerment finding. Do greenhouse gas emissions cause warming that endangers the coastlines? that endanger cities like LA? that lead to $300 billion storms just ravaging through States?

Do you know that the Supreme Court decided 5 to 4? In April of 2007, the Supreme Court said: You must determine whether or not there is an endangerment, EPA; and, EPA, if you make that determination that it is an endangerment, you then have to do something about it.

That is what is ticking them off. No one will tell you.

In a footnote, in his dissent, Justice Scalia said: I am voting no.

Justice Scalia said: What is next--the regulation of flatulence from cows? Where are they going with all this craziness?

Do you know where we are going? Do you know where we went? We went to 94 percent of all new electrical generation capacity in the United States, in 2024. It is wind, solar, and battery technologies. That is where we went because there was an endangerment because you knew what was happening.

By the way, even the IRA that was passed just in 2022 has already unleashed $400 billion of public and private investment. It has created 400,000 new jobs--400,000 new jobs--in the clean energy sector. Oil and gas and coal are petrified. They are the black rotary dial phone of 2025. They can see what is happening. It is change. It is a brandnew era. It is almost as though, somehow or other, they have found enough allies here to lock us into the past--to lock us into the 19th century, to lock us into the 20th century.

Kids don't want to go backward. They don't want to look at the world in the rearview mirror. They want to look ahead to a brighter, better, safer, cleaner future, and that is what is going on. It is threatening the business model of all of these people.

So I directly questioned Lee Zeldin on this exact issue in his hearing before the Environment and Public Works Committee because I knew he wouldn't have the courage or the ability to stand up to the demands of Trump's Big Oil and Big Gas and Big Coal donors because, if these donors tell Zeldin to wipe any policy meant to protect public health and the planet off the books, it seems he is ready to take out an eraser and to hop to it, regardless of the science, regardless of the law, regardless of the well-being of the American people in the long run, especially young people. The Green New Deal generation, they want change. They want action. They want to move the same way we moved from a black rotary dial phone to this. It only took 20 years. It would have seemed impossible to a black rotary dial phone manufacturer, but it happened because you trusted young people to do the work.

What else is Trump doing for his fossil fuel friends? He is taking their money while he costs you your money.

Trump's billionaire oil and gas donors promised him $1 billion last April in a meeting if Trump would take all of the clean energy incentives off of the books--$1 billion. This is all pay-to-play. They raised the money for him, and he delivered a sham energy emergency Executive order that is already forcing working families to pay more in order to line the pockets of those big oil, big gas, big coal donors.

This emergency is a lie. The United States is already the world's largest oil and gas producer. It is the largest exporter of LNG in the world. It is a lie. It is a lie. It is a lie.

Everything Donald Trump says about an energy emergency is a lie to the American people because he has to lie to cover up the fact that oil and gas production is up. But they are so greedy, they want this body and the EPA to kill wind and solar, battery storage technologies, all- electric vehicles. That is how greedy they are. It is not enough that they have their largest production capacity in history, because this is really an excuse for Trump and Musk to rig the rules for Big Oil so they can produce the dirty energy while they easily seize Americans' lands and pollute the air and water.

They want to go on public land now to drill for oil and gas, even though we don't need it. We don't need it.

There is a revolution that if we just let it unfold, it would be 94 percent next year, 94 percent the next year. What they are afraid of is 10 years from now, when everyone says, oh, I love this new world we are living in, the nonpolluting, nongreenhouse gas world of renewable energy.

The real emergency, the real crisis is the climate crisis itself, which continues to turbocharge extreme weather. It is costing lives, billions in damages, sky-high energy bills, insurance rates out of control in all these States that are having these superstorms and fires. Yet Trump is dismantling programs that reduce energy prices, lower heating bills, keep our air and water clean, and create jobs while trying to ram through the dirty energy projects that will do just the opposite.

And what does he want to do? He wants to take out a chain saw. That is what he wants to do. He is taking out his chain saw.

He wants to call this waste, fraud, and corruption, a revolution that creates this incredible economic--

--to chop all of those programs down at the knees. We are going to fight it every single step of the way.

I thank Senator Kaine, and I thank Senator Heinrich for giving us this time on the floor to be able to explain to the American people what is going on.

Mr. President, I wanted to come down here and talk a little bit about energy with my colleagues in the Senate today, and part of the reason why is that as you know, Mr. President, and others know, the President of the United States has declared an energy emergency, and he did it on the day he was inaugurated here in the Capitol, on a day when he had lots of comments about the fact that God had saved him so that he would be there to be inaugurated--that this was going to be the greatest moment in American history, and that we had an energy emergency because there was an insufficient production of oil and fossil fuels.

As anybody who reads the newspaper in America knows--and there may not be anybody left who has access to a paper, but I encourage you to do it; it is a lot better than what you are reading on Twitter these days--the United States has actually produced more oil than we ever have produced in our history. In fact, last year, with the Biden administration, we produced more oil than any country in the history of humanity.

The same is true for natural gas. The same is true for LNG exports. The United States produces more oil than any other country in the world. We produce more natural gas than any other country in the world. We are the leading exporter of liquefied natural gas, which, by the way, has been incredibly important recently because we have allowed our allies in Europe to get off the Russian oil that they were on and replace that with liquefied natural gas produced by American citizens, exported by American citizens, to break the back of Putin's ability to restrain Europe's participation in the war, because we were able to replace half their energy. I am so glad that we were able to do that.

And we are also the world's leading producer of renewable energy, as well, and we have seen a huge amount of growth in solar, a huge amount of growth in wind, and I like to think of Colorado as the place that started an awful lot of that.

We are both a producer of fossil fuels and a producer of renewables. We know it takes everything to drive this economy, but we want to do all of this in a way that is cognizant of the very real climate issues that our globe faces and that our country faces.

The good news for the United States is there is no country in the world that is better positioned to lead the transition of our energy economy in this world than the United States of America. We are the wealthiest country in the world. We have the biggest and most abundant supply of fossil fuels and nonfossil fuels. We are less corrupt than almost any country on the face of the planet, and especially less corrupt than economies that are dominated by petrochemicals and by oil and gas around the world. We are the innovators in the world. We have a commitment to the rule of law. All of that puts us in this incredible position to lead.

I believe, 30 years from now or so, we are going to be in a place where we are able to say, not just to the American people but to the world, that we are at net zero from a carbon point of view and that we were able to get there through American technology and through American leadership and American ingenuity and American exports; that we took a strategic approach; that we had a plan that made sense; and that we captured, along the way, every--every--molecule that we could find of fugitive methane from oil and gas and from agriculture and from landfills; that we said yes to wind and solar; that we said yes to nuclear and yes to geothermal; that we said yes to investing in emerging technologies, like hydrogen, like carbon capture, and like the carbon dioxide removal bill that I have with my friend Lisa Murkowski from Alaska, which just goes to show you that you can have a bipartisan approach; that we can move to a position of real leadership that can help us create an economy again that America, when it grows, it grows for everybody, not just the people at the very top--because we have got good energy jobs that are concerned with the production of oil and gas and the production of all those other forms of energy.

By the way, just on that point--and I will be brief here because I know my colleague from Massachusetts wants to speak. On that subject, this Senate is about to get rid of the commonsense methane regulations that were passed in the last administration that are based on the work--that fee based on the work--that we had done in Colorado, working with industry, as the last administration did to create certainty, to create predictability, to send a message to the world that we want American gas to be the cleanest gas of any gas in the world.

And having us capture that fugitive methane is a hugely important part of that. We are saying no to that now. We are saying yes to the air pollution that is going to result. We are saying yes to the climate pollution that will result.

I say to my colleague from Massachusetts while she is here, I take no pleasure--and the President knows this--from the fact that Donald Trump is our President. I regret that he is our President, but he is our President. And one of the ways that he got to be our President is that he was elected twice.

And, in fact, more people voted for him this time than voted for him last time. I regret that. I am sorry for that, and I think there are lots of reasons for that.

But I think one of the reasons for that is that there is a mythology out there that the Democratic Party believes that we are going to turn fossil fuels off yesterday; or that we are going to turn fossil fuels off next week; or that we don't respect the men and women who work in our energy fields or in our energy processing across the country.

If there are Democrats who feel that way, I disagree with them, because the worst thing we could do at this moment when we have the energy abundance that we have, when we have the economic freedom we have, when we have the lack of corruption that we have--the worst thing we could do is elect a climate denier to be President whose most creative approach to energy was Sarah Palin's shopworn ``drill, baby, drill,'' which is what he announced under the dome of the United States Capitol the day he was inaugurated President and said--completely untruthfully--that we were in an energy crisis, when what we have is an energy abundance and no excuse--no excuse--for not leading the rest of the world in making sure that this transition on net-zero carbon is accomplished and that we do it in a way that protects our economy; that we do it in a way that protects our national security; that we do it in a way that recognizes the contribution that people have

made for generations in Northwest Colorado and all over our economy to be able to drive this economy forward.

And to the extent that the failure is a failure of the Democratic Party to make clear our position, I want to own that failure and that responsibility. It is not Donald Trump's fault that he was elected. He ran; he won. We own some of the fact that he got elected. And I think on this issue, we have not communicated clearly to the American people what we believe.

And as a result of that, once again, our children and grandchildren have a climate denier in the White House, even though a majority of the American people believe that climate change is real and that we should be doing something about it.

And those of us who are advocates on this, on this side, have to be very clear--much clearer, he said poorly and unclearly--but let me say again--have to be much clearer about what we stand for, which is for a transition that makes sense and that science commands and for the respect of people that are working in the energy industry no matter what part of the industry they are working in.

And the fact that Donald Trump--even when oil is at $73 a barrel at his inauguration and we are producing more than we have ever produced in the history of mankind for the United States--thinks we are in an energy emergency or he claims that we are surprises me not at all.

Since he said he was going to drive prices down, the price of eggs are so high today as we meet here, you need a mortgage practically to buy a dozen eggs in the United States of America.

We can do better than that, and we can do better than his ``drill, baby, drill'' energy policy.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, there is an issue that I have spoken about so often on this floor, and it is one that should concern each and every one of us; and that is the issue of human trafficking and sex trafficking that is happening in this country. And what we have learned is that today in the United States a child is either bought or sold for sex every 2 minutes. Now, think about that and think about the harm that is happening to children because of this amount of human trafficking and sex trafficking.

What we also have learned is that, globally, this has turned into a $150 billion-a-year business. This is something that we also have learned affects every town, city, and community in our Nation. It is pervasive.

In Tennessee, my home State, there were 1,170 reports of human trafficking through November of last year, and that is according to the data we have from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigations. Now, that number was actually down from the number in 2023, which had been 1,432 reports, and that was because of the effort that our Governor, Bill Lee, the Tennessee General Assembly, and the Tennessee Bureau of Investigations made into fighting this human trafficking and trying to bring an end to what truly is modern-day slavery.

But, unfortunately, what we saw as we looked at the data was that last year's total of 1,170 was still 62 percent higher than the number in 2019. So as we have looked at this in recent years, what you have seen is an explosion of human trafficking and sex trafficking in this country. While we know that human trafficking has been a problem over a period of time, the concern is this heinous crime and how it has exploded in the recent past.

Now, there are some reasons and some contributing factors to the escalation numbers, and one of them is during the Biden administration, basically they surrendered our southern border to cartels and gangs and criminals and traffickers. Many of us have been to the border. We saw what was happening on the border during the Biden years. And as a result of the inaction that

took place there, every town in this country became a border town, and every State became a border State. And because of the drugs, because of the human trafficking, the sex trafficking, the American people suffered the consequences.

Just this month, earlier this month, authorities charged eight Venezuelan illegal aliens in Middle, TN, for trafficking women across our border for the purpose of sexual exploitation. That was eight Venezuelan illegal aliens. After entering our country illegally, the criminals conducted their operation out of Nashville motels between 2022 and 2024. And like so many criminal illegals in our country--no surprise--they are tied to the violent gang Tren de Aragua, which has plagued cities across this country with organized crime.

All too often these traffickers target not only vulnerable women, they also target children. According to our TBI data, there were 514 reports of children being sex-trafficked in Tennessee in 2024. That is 1 year, 514 reports. That was more than twice the number of reports of adult sex trafficking.

The report also notes that there has been an increase in the number of unaccompanied minors who were trafficked into our country and exploited. This should come as no surprise. Under Biden, hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied children have reached our southern border, while many more arrived with adults who falsely claimed to be their relatives. Although Biden had a responsibility to place these children with vetted sponsors, his administration, obviously, did not do that. We have learned that they lost track of more than 320,000 migrant children who face the threat of abuse, trafficking, and sexual exploitation.

Thankfully, after 4 years of failure under the Biden administration, President Trump is working to secure our border, to protect our communities, and to bring human trafficking to an end. And there is so much more that Congress can do to support this effort.

Last week, I introduced the bipartisan GRACIE Act, which would require the recording of all Child Protective Services interviews with children and adults. Although 60 percent of child sex trafficking victims in our country have engaged with the foster care system, too often CPS staffers miss the signs of abuse. By recording interviews, we can increase the likelihood that child trafficking victims will be identified and rescued.

Last month, I also reintroduced a package of bills that will do much to combat human trafficking. My SAVE Girls Act would provide States, local governments, and nonprofits with the resources they need to end the trafficking of young women and girls.

My National Human Trafficking Database Act, meanwhile, would establish a national human trafficking database at the Department of Justice and incentivize State law enforcement agencies to report their data.

To help bring an end to trafficking at the border, I also introduced the End Child Trafficking Now Act, which would require a DNA test to determine the relationship between illegal aliens at the border and any accompanying child. Now, it is so important to note, I have introduced this bill before, and I did it because during the Trump administration, there was DNA testing. It was ended during the Biden administration. They said it took too much time. I inquired about the amount of time. It took 45 minutes.

What we know from the time we did DNA testing, 30 percent of the children that were DNA tested by border agents shared no relation to the illegal aliens who were falsely--falsely--representing themselves as family members. I think 45 minutes is worth it to save the life of a child.

And my PRINTS Act, which has been reintroduced, would give Customs and Border Protection the authority to fingerprint noncitizens under the age of 14 to combat the horrific practice called child recycling.

Just this week, I also sent a letter to FBI Director Kash Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi requesting that they release the complete, unredacted flight logs from Jeffery Epstein's private jet.

In addition, I also requested Ghislaine Maxwell's little black book and all video surveillance footage from Epstein's residence in Palm Beach, FL. After years of stonewalling by former Director Wray, we still do not have all the necessary information regarding Jeffrey Epstein's crime, who his associates were, and who was involved in his global human trafficking and sex trafficking ring. That is information we need if we are going to bring an end to this practice of human trafficking and also if we are going to bring justice for the women and children that were abused and trafficked during these human trafficking and sex trafficking rings.

It is past time to bring this practice to an end. With these efforts, we can provide this administration with the tools they need in order to bring an end to this practice.