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 "Air Plan Disapproval; Colorado; Regional Haze Plan for the Second Implementation Period".

Mr. President, I am speaking in advance of my colleague from Colorado Senator Bennet's effort to seek redress in this body for a wave of pollution that is being unleashed in his State and neighboring States as well.

One of the things about our failed Environmental Protection Agency right now is that one State can't regulate pollution that comes to it from another State. And yet the good neighbor policy that somebody has to be able to say ``Hey, wait a minute; you can't pollute my State from another State'' is one that EPA has just walked away from.

In this case, the problem is a coal facility in Colorado. And just start with coal. It is really indisputable that coal is America's dirtiest, deadliest, and most expensive energy source. It is a dying industry for market reasons. It can't compete because it is dirty, deadly, and expensive.

And yet, since taking office, President Trump has worked desperately to keep coal on life support, perhaps because the coal industry paid $3.5 million in 2024 to help him get elected, and Trump is a man who understands a quid pro quo.

The Trump administration has taken every possible action to benefit the coal industry; never mind our health. Remember, it is the deadliest of energy sources. And never mind our bank accounts. Remember, it is the most expensive of energy sources.

He even rolled back health-protecting standards for mercury and toxic emissions from coal plants. Mercury is pretty seriously, deadly stuff; and he rolled back those standards.

He exempted one-third of all coal plants nationwide from toxic pollution standards. Who loses? Anybody exposed to the toxic pollution they emit. Who wins? Trump's big donors.

He even directed the Secretary of Energy to issue orders under the Federal Power Act to force coal plants to stay online, driving up consumer costs against the wishes of the utilities and even the plants' owners. But they still had to buy and burn coal. So there is somebody out there who is going to make money off that.

And now Trump has perverted the Clean Air Act to trample on States' rights to protect their own citizens.

Coal plants are the Nation's most significant source of haze. The same coal pollutants that drive health issues and deaths nationwide drive haze formations. Under the Clean Air Act's Regional Haze Program, States establish plans to reduce haze-causing pollution. States may choose to include coal plant retirements in their plans. Often, that is consistent with the utility and the plant owner's wishes, as an old plant ends its useful life. When the EPA approves these plans, the retirements then become enforceable.

In 2022, Colorado submitted a regional haze plan to the EPA that included coal plant retirements that Colorado utilities had independently and voluntarily planned for. ``They do better with cheaper, cleaner renewable energy'' is the simple answer.

In January of this year, the EPA turned around and disapproved Colorado's plan, making the argument that Colorado's plan, voluntarily entered into with these utilities, could represent a ``taking'' under the Constitution.

So we have here a really flagrant abuse of Federal authority: Make it more difficult for Colorado to protect its own citizens from toxic pollution and to provide affordable energy. And the resulting pollution won't just endanger Coloradans. This is a national issue because the haze blows, with prevailing winds, toward eastern States.

My State of Rhode Island, for instance, has occasions when we have bad air days. And if you are driving into work in the morning and you are listening to the talk radio, they will say: Today is a bad air day. Children should stay home. Elderly people and people with breathing difficulties should not go out.

It looks like a beautiful summer day. Kids will want to be in the yard, but it

is a bad air day. And so that health warning gets issued by the State of Rhode Island.

And there is nothing the State of Rhode Island can do about it. If every car in our State was an EV, if everything ran off of clean electricity, we would still be out of compliance because we are a downwind State.

And huge powerplants that push their pollution up into the sky, far enough that prevailing winds carries it out of their State and onto ours, they are the ones that are to blame, and there is nothing we can do about it.

So I am very sympathetic to concerns that the EPA has a particularly important job when neighboring States are polluting one another and can't reach a regulatory solution because it is out of State, and that is exactly the predicament that we are creating here today.

When Congress enacted the Congressional Review Act in 1996 to give Congress the opportunity to vote on regulations, well, that is why we are here today. We have a chance to undo this, and I hope we will because everybody here has a good chance of being a downwind State. Even California is often a downwind State from China. So you have got to be able to have protections from upwind pollution, and this would strip that.

So the Trump administration's effort here--at breakneck speed--to tear down protections of Americans' health, safety, and environment we have a chance to claw back. Congressional Review Act resolutions like this one can help hold the administration to account.

I will conclude by saying I just left the EPW hearing with EPA Administrator Zeldin. The point that I made in that hearing was that we are now headed into an election cycle in which the American people are desperately concerned about the cost of stuff. Stuff costs too much, and the Trump administration is ignoring the problem, if not making it worse. Those are basically the two buckets. They are either ignoring it completely or they are deliberately making it worse.

With respect to electricity costs, the Trump administration is deliberately making it worse. They are raising costs for consumers on purpose.

How are they doing it, and why are they doing it? Well, the ``how'' is that they are keeping inexpensive clean energy off the grid. We just went through this in Rhode Island. Our Revolution Wind offshore power facility was stalled by illegal orders of the Trump administration not once but twice, and the result was that power was delayed from coming ashore. Well, Revolution Wind has a contract to sell power onto the grid. That contract specifies a price. The price is 9 cents--9 cents. ISO New England--our grid operator--can do fairly easy math to show what the average grid price is for electricity. And guess what. It is 18 cents. So this 9-cent power was stalled going into an 18-cent grid.

Because it is 9-cent power, what would it have done? It would have been called up first by the grid because every grid calls up the least expensive power first. So that 9-cent power would have been flowing into the grid. It would have been filling up demand, and that would have meant that some dirty fossil fuel-polluting units would not have been called up. They were too expensive to run.

So, when they push all that clean energy off the grid and buy time for the dirty, polluting fossil fuel plants--that is money directly to the fossil fuel industry--two things happen: One, costs go up for all consumers because those new, more expensive plants called online raise the price for everybody. So electricity bills go up. They are driven up on purpose by the delay of clean energy getting onto the grid.

Where do those billions of dollars in extra costs that are extracted from American consumers go? Guess where--to the owners of those fossil fuel plants that are in the margin, the ones that get run because the clean energy has been kept off of the grid.

It is a ginormous money pump out of the pockets of ordinary American ratepayers and into the pockets of the fossil fuel billionaires who put so much money into getting Trump elected. That is being done on purpose. Electricity costs are being driven up on purpose.

Don't tell me that the Department of Energy or the Environmental Protection Agency or the Department of the Interior, for that matter, don't understand how the grid works. They have people who know exactly how the generation stack works. They know exactly that the least expensive units get run first and that the least expensive units displace the more expensive units, which is good for consumers, until the heavy hand of a fossil fuel-influenced government steps in and tries to prevent consumers from getting low-cost clean energy. Then the hole that that leaves that would have been filled by clean energy--you have got to go fill that hole by going up the stack to more and more expensive units, and virtually every time, that more expensive unit is a fossil fuel unit.

So, like I said, what the Trump administration has created on purpose is a ginormous money pump to extract billions of dollars from regular consumers who would otherwise be enjoying the benefit of low-cost clean power, and they have done it as a reward for Trump's big fossil fuel donors, the ones who threw hundreds of millions of dollars at his campaign and who are now reaping a multiple-times reward with that investment.

With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, Colorado is one of the most beautiful places not just in America but in the world.

In Denver, we have got over 300 days of sunshine annually. We have access to incredible green spaces, and if you look west, you can lose yourself in the best view in America--the Rocky Mountains.

But it wasn't always this way.

In the 1950s, Colorado was and still is one of the fastest growing cities in America. Even stretching back to my days as mayor back in the 2000s, one of our main goals was to attract young people to not just come and ski in Colorado but to visit Denver, perhaps consider starting a business there, building a business, growing your family, building a life.

To put it in perspective, between 1950 and 1960, Denver's population grew by just about 20 percent. This brought more cars, more industry but also more pollution. By the 1970s and 1980s, the smog was so bad that, nationally, there was a nickname for Denver--the ``brown cloud.'' There were days you couldn't even see the mountains at all, which, as a geologist and a Coloradan, pained me.

But then something incredible happened. In 1970, a Democratic Congress passed the Clean Air Act. It was signed into law by a Republican President. It is a reminder that clean air has never been a partisan issue. It benefits literally everyone. The Clean Air Act helped to propel States like Colorado and others to turn things around, to look at that pollution in a different light. Emissions testing and fuel standards soon followed, and guess what happened. The air got cleaner. Visibility improved. People such as my son who has asthma would be healthier.

Then, in 1999, the EPA created the Regional Haze Program. The initiative was rooted around one single idea: If you go to a national park, you should be able to see it. So States were asked to develop plans to cut pollution that limits those gorgeous views.

Once again, Colorado stepped in and led the way. In my first year as Governor, Colorado submitted our Regional Haze State Implementation Plan, which was first approved in 2012. It put us on a path to improving the quality of air we breathe in the place that we are lucky to call home.

We also brought environmentalists and the energy industry together to create the first methane regulations in the world in 2014. This was the blending of environmental and industry discussions. I think those regulations--again, the first methane regulations in the world were in Colorado--helped in the years leading up to 2017 to reduce methane emissions from Colorado's oil and gas sector by 70 percent. That is right--70 percent.

Despite all that success, the Trump administration is now threatening to turn back the clock and reduce and diminish the success of Colorado's clean air efforts.

Earlier this year, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, whom I voted against, rejected Colorado's updated Regional Haze Plan. They didn't reject Colorado's plan because the science was wrong. They didn't dispute the goals, and they didn't dispute the modeling. They rejected it to prop up a handful of aging coal plants--coal-fired electrical generation plants--that were already planning to close. The utilities had created the models, had found the replacement sources of energy, and were ready to close those older, less-efficient, and significantly dirtier generation plants.

The Trump administration seems to think we must choose between clean air and affordable energy, which is nonsense. Colorado has shown that that is a false choice. Time and time again, we have brought communities and utilities and regulators together to protect our clean air supply without hurting our economy or our energy supply.

Last summer, the Front Range experienced the lowest number of ozone action alerts in a decade. Let me say that again. Last year was the lowest number of ozone action alerts in a decade. Thanks to bipartisan investments in renewable energy, Colorado ranked among the top 10 States in overall energy production.

The administration's decision doesn't lower costs for anybody. It just means more pollution and more haze in those very places we treasure the most.

Colorado is never going to move forward by returning to the 1970s. For decades, we have fought tooth and nail to ensure that our mountains are visible and our national parks are the most beautiful and the most enjoyable in America. We should support this measure and prevent Washington politics from clouding Colorado's hard-fought progress.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, today, I am bringing the Congressional Review Act resolution to the floor to challenge EPA's disapproval of Colorado's regional haze plan. I want to thank my colleagues Senator Hickenlooper and Senator Whitehouse for joining me in this effort.

For decades, we have relied on a simple principle in this country to keep our air clean: States and the Federal Government work together to reduce pollution and protect public health. That includes programs like Regional Haze, which is designed to improve visibility in national parks and wilderness areas, like Rocky Mountain National Park in Northern Colorado.

In 2022, Colorado submitted a good-faith plan to improve air quality. The State provided a range of solutions--including the voluntary, already-planned retirement of aging coal plants.

The decisions to close these plants were driven by basic economics. Colorado utilities recognized that it no longer made sense to keep them open, based on the high costs of maintaining and operating. And so in its regional haze plan, Colorado incorporated these previously made decisions into the State's strategy to reduce air pollution.

But EPA rejected Colorado's plan--not because it failed to meet Federal standards. EPA rejected it because President Trump is laser- focused on keeping even aging coal plants operational, regardless of the costs or the desires of the local communities.

EPA's disapproval of Colorado's plan was based on an unprecedented and flawed legal theory. EPA alleges that under section 110 of the Clean Air Act, Colorado must somehow prove these coal plant requirements would not violate the Constitution's takings clause, or, in other words, not constitute an illegal government seizure of private property. But that is an impossible case for the State to make. It is also not, in fact, what section 110 of the Clean Air Act requires or what Congress ever intended.

And to make matters worse, the EPA made this shift without any meaningful public input. And the consequences of President Trump and Lee Zeldin's actions are real. They are real for Colorado and for the West and for this country.

They are making it harder--harder--for Colorado to chart our own path on the energy transition and trying to force Coloradans to pay tens of millions of dollars to keep outdated coal plants running. And they are doing this at a moment when energy prices have already increased as a result of the administration's own reckless actions.

Since President Trump's unprovoked war, gasoline prices have risen over 30 percent in Colorado. They have cut investments in the cheapest types of electricity, while promoting the most expensive. Everything the administration has done has made it harder for parents in Colorado to pay their bills and heat their homes, and now to take their children to enjoy some of the incredible national parks and public lands our State has to offer.

If this ruling stands, it won't stop in Colorado. It could open the door to similar challenges across the country, weakening air quality protections and leaving States in an impossible position--responsible for results but stripping them of the tools and the authority to achieve them.

And so I urge my colleagues to support S.J. Res. 139 to overturn the EPA's decision.

I ask consent to yield back all time.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

I announce that the Senator from Maryland (Ms. Alsobrooks) is necessarily absent.

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