Floor Statements

Mr. President, I didn't get a chance to elaborate on the subject that was covered by the Senator from Texas, Mr. Cornyn. I think it is very important when we are faced with the shutdown of the government. I happened to be here in 1995, and I remember, frankly, it wasn't as bad as everybody said it was going to be. This is something that is totally avoidable now. We have an opportunity to do a 7-day extension that would take care of the military's needs, and I think it is important to do so.

I wish to also mention the vote that took place yesterday--the last vote; we had four--having to do with the overregulation, I will call it, of the Environmental Protection Agency. The first three amendments before they came to mine were offered by Democrats for whom I have a great deal of respect. In each amendment, they made it clear that the author--all Democrats--thought it was not the place for the Environmental Protection Agency to do what Congress is supposed to be doing in terms of regulation of greenhouse gases.

The votes were overwhelming in terms of the fact that they didn't have Democrats supporting them because they were temporary fixes. The only real vote that took place was on mine.

I introduced legislation several weeks ago, in concert with my colleague over in the House of Representatives, Fred Upton, to take out from the Environmental Protection Agency the jurisdiction of regulating greenhouse gases. We all know how it happened. We know that since 2003, Members of this Senate have introduced legislation to call for cap and trade under the assumption that catastrophic global warming is taking place from anthropogenic gases, and we have been able to defeat all of those.

So while there has been a real effort by this administration to regulate greenhouse gases and do it by legislation, when they finally realized that wasn't going to happen, that they were not going to be able to garner sufficient votes to pass a bill that would allow for a cap-and-trade system--by the way, the cap-and-trade system would have amounted to between $300 billion and $400 billion a year as a tax increase, which would have been the largest one in the history of this country.

When President Obama decided--in the wisdom of both the House and Senate--we were not going to pass anything that would be a cap-and- trade bill, he said: That is fine, we will do it through regulation.

That is how this whole thing started. So the effort was for the EPA to come up with an endangerment finding which would say that greenhouse gases--anthropogenic gases, methane--were dangerous to health. Well, this has to be based on science.

I remember asking the Director of the EPA, Lisa Jackson, whom I respect--I said: If you are going to have an endangerment finding, it has to be based on science. What would that be? Well, it was the IPCC, which, for the edification of anybody who is not aware, is the United Nations. They are the ones who started this whole thing, and they are the ones who would be in a position to try to force the regulation.

Anyway, the time has gone by now, and since that time, we have almost unanimity in this body and in the other body, also, that we don't think the EPA has the ability or the authority to regulate greenhouse gases and to do administratively what we refuse to do through our own bills we pass.

That is where we are today. One of the things I am thankful for is that my amendment got 50 votes. It was 50-50, pretty much down party lines. But the people who are voting against my amendment are saying: We want to have the EPA have this authority--the authority of overregulation of not just the oil and gas industry but all other industries also. The primary target for them would be fossil fuels.

The fact that we have oil, gas, and coal--by the way, there is a fairly recent finding by the Congressional Research Service that we have the largest reserves in the United States--recoverable reserves-- of oil, gas, and coal of any country in the world. This is not something you hear on the other side.

We have heard President Obama say several times that we only produce 3 percent of the oil and yet we use 25 percent or whatever it is. Those are proven reserves. The difference is that a proven reserve means you have to drill and prove it is there. But the government won't let us drill. I am talking about the east coast, the west coast, the gulf, the northern slope--83 percent of our public lands are off limits. If we were to open that up, we could be completely independent of the Middle East for our ability to run this machine called America. That is why this issue is very important.

I have already served notice, but I will do it again to make sure it is clear. While we needed 60 votes, we only had 50 votes. I am going to put that amendment on as many bills as come up so we have an opportunity for people to know the seriousness of this problem.

I suggest to you--and I will not name names--that if people, prior to this vote, would have called different individuals, the staff would have responded: Well, we don't know how our Senator will vote, but he will certainly take your comments into consideration.

Now we know because we have the votes in so that we can say which ones did vote for it, and anybody who didn't vote for my amendment is saying they believe the EPA should have that total control that we refuse to give it through legislation.

Anyway, it is not over yet. In fact, I think that was a major milestone, a victory. We now know who is for it and who is against it. I know there will be another 10 Members who will see the light and realize that we still--it is fine, I am for all of the above, for the renewables--wind, sun, thermal--as well as the fossil fuels. We need all of the above to become totally independent and be able to run this machine called America. That is what is coming up. I am happy we have taken the next step, and I look forward to making another step after that.

I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

I ask unanimous consent that at the conclusion of the remarks of Senator Boxer, who I understand wants to speak for 10 minutes, I be recognized for about 10 minutes. That will be about the timeframe we have.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I agree in one respect with the Senator from California. Actually, we agree on a lot of points. We agree on infrastructure and things that we know the country needs. But in the area of the Clean Air Act, she said: Show me one Republican who supported it. I supported the Clean Air Act. It has been a tremendous success.

Stop and look at the real pollution. I am not talking about greenhouse gases. I am talking about the six real pollutants and what has happened. It is amazing the success of the Clean Air Act. I agree with that.

I remind everyone, though, that the Clean Air Act would not be regulating CO2 except the court said: If you want to do it, you can. They did not mandate that it be done. That is worth considering.

Since I have the time until we will be voting on the first of three cover votes before they get to my amendment, I wish to correct my good friend from California. She referred to it as the McConnell amendment. It is the McConnell-Inhofe amendment. In fact, it came from my bill that I introduced with Fred Upton sometime ago, a bill that is going to be voted on in the House Representatives today. So it is appropriate that we take it up now. This amendment has been postponed six or seven times. I applaud the majority leader for letting us have these votes. It is important that we do this.

This is what I believe is important. People need to understand a couple of things: First, this is all about, starting in the 1990s when they had the Kyoto convention that we were supposed to ratify, President Clinton never did submit it to the Senate for ratification. Nonetheless, it was one that regulated greenhouse gases. I remember at that time the Wharton School did an analysis that asked: What if the United States were to ratify the Kyoto treaty and live by its requirements? What would the costs be?

It came out somewhere in the neighborhood of between $300 and $400 billion. We never ratified it because the President never submitted it for ratification. Then in 2003, there came a number of votes. Almost every year we had legislation introduced that would do essentially what the Kyoto treaty would have done, which would have been cap and trade. We had MIT and others look at it to see what in fact would be the cost if we were to do this.

I can remember when my good friend, the junior Senator from California, Mrs. Boxer, and I talked on the Senate floor the last time we defeated her bill--I think this might have been the Waxman-Markey bill, but it doesn't matter because they are all the same--I stipulated to the science. I said: All right. Let's assume the science is right. It isn't, but let's assume it is so we don't have to talk about that. Assuming it is, let's talk about the economics. That is where we developed what it would cost.

In my State of Oklahoma, I have a policy that when we talk about billions and trillions of dollars I try to put it into context as to how it will affect taxpayers in my State. I have a very simple thing I do. I take the total number of families who file tax returns and then I do the math. If I divide that, say, $350 billion a year, that means the average taxpayer in my State would have to pay $3,100 a year in additional taxes in order to pay for the cap-and-trade regime that comes with any type of legislation. We talked about that. Continually, we defeated each bill that came along.

This is the key. The Obama administration is very beholden to some of the far leftwing people. He had a commitment to try to pass some kind of cap and trade. He said: If we can't do it legislatively, we will do it through regulation. So we had all these regulations that EPA started coming down with.

I have to mention, of these regulations, one was very significant because I remember when she was before our Environment and Public Works Committee, I said to her--this is right before going to the big U.N. party in Copenhagen about 18 months ago--I have a feeling, Madam Director, that you are going to come up with an endangerment finding. When you do, it has to be based on science. What science will you base it on?

She said: Primarily on the IPCC.

To make sure everybody understands, the IPCC is the United Nations. They are the ones who came up with this whole thing and said this is what the end of the world is going to be.

I said: If you are going to have an endangerment finding that CO2 is an endangerment to health, then it has to be based on science. What science will it be based on?

The answer was, the United Nations. It is going to be based on the science of the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. That is the United Nations.

Coincidentally, right after that is when climategate came, and they found that they had been cooking the science for about 10 years and that the legitimate interests and input of real scientists were rejected. So the science just flat wasn't there.

That is why I said at the time that we had this bill up, I will stipulate to the science, even though the science is not there. I know it is not there, but what is there is the economics.

Here we were, faced with a situation where we were looking at the possibility of the Environmental Protection Agency regulating CO2. I contend that they can do it if they have an endangerment finding, but they don't have to do it. The economic punishment to America would be tremendous. However, it wouldn't do any good.

Here is the big question: What if I am wrong? People have asked me: Inhofe, what if you are wrong? You have been leading this fight for 9 years. What if CO2 does endanger health and cause global warming and all these scary stories we hear?

My response to that is, if that is the case, it is not going to make any difference because even the EPA director admits if we unilaterally pass some type of regulation that stops the regulation of greenhouse gases, it is not going to affect the overall release of CO2 emissions.

The reason is simple. If we do it only in the United States, we would argue that is not where the problem is. The problem is in China, Mexico, India, and Third World countries that don't have any emission controls at all. So I think everyone agrees if we pass something like these regulations of the EPA unilaterally, it would not reduce emissions at all. Consequently, we would be incurring economic punishment to achieve nothing.

I would take it one step further. As we chase away our manufacturing base, as they say would happen, we would be in a position where they would go to countries where there is no emission controls. It would actually have the result of increasing emissions.

Even if Senator Boxer is right in everything she says, she is wrong in the respect that if we pass it, it will not lower emissions. That is the fact.

We are running out of time, but I have the time right up to 4 o'clock. I will go over four things that will happen, finalizing the vote that is going to be at 4.

Let me finish because I am going to need all the time.

Reserving the right to object, is the Senator talking about doing it after 4 o'clock?

If he would include me to speak for 1 minute at that time, I have no objection.

Senator Baucus will have an amendment up. I think it is interesting. I refer to these three amendments as cover amendments. In other

words, there are a lot of Democrats who don't want to vote to take away the jurisdiction of the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gases, so they have offered other amendments. The Baucus amendment is one that is going to exempt certain small people, some small farmers and all that. But that doesn't exempt them from having their electricity rates escalate.

The American Farm Bureau says: We don't want any of the cover votes. We don't want the Baucus bill. We don't want Stabenow, and we don't want Rockefeller. Stabenow would also have a delay in certain parts of the regulation. The Rockefeller vote, which is going to be the third vote, is one that would have a 2-year delay. In other words, it says we can go ahead and do the regulation, but we will kind of put it off for 2 years.

The real vote and the one that is critical--and if there is anyone out there who doesn't want to go home and say: I am responsible for passing the largest tax increase in the history of America by defeating the Inhofe-McConnell amendment, then go ahead and vote that way. That is going to be a serious problem--not for me but for the Senators who might vote the wrong way.

The McConnell-Inhofe amendment will be the fourth vote. This is the critical one. The rest are cover votes.

With that, I yield the floor.

Madam President, a point of inquiry, not to be taken from the time I have. The inquiry is, When we get into the four votes, are we going to have additional time arguing for and against the amendments?

OK. I would ask the Chair, these 2 minutes are having to do with the Baucus amendment, the first one we will vote on; is that correct?

On the Baucus amendment?

OK. I thank the Chair very much.

Let me go first. In deference to my good friend, Senator Boxer, I said I would go first and she can go last.

Let me mention, this is only on the Baucus amendment. Yes, the Senator is right in presenting his amendment that it does exempt farmers and some small businesses from the higher costs and all that. But here is the problem with that: All we have to do is read the statement by the American Farm Bureau where they say: Look, all of our farmers across America--even if this only affects the refiners and the manufacturers, that increases the cost of fuel and the cost of fuel is going to go higher and we do not get anything for it. For that reason, they oppose the Baucus amendment.

Madam President, let me join my friend from California and say that the Stabenow amendment is similar to the one we voted on before. It admits that the EPA will harm manufacturers, but it doesn't do anything to protect anybody from the higher price of energy. The farmers will tell you that, and everybody else will. With the 2-year delay, EPA can drop its regulatory hammer on farmers and businesses. I urge your vote against this amendment.

Madam President, the 2-year delay encourages bureaucrats to stall new permits. It does not accomplish anything. It delays new construction, and it delays new jobs.

One of the interesting points about all three of these amendments is that everyone agrees EPA should not be regulating greenhouse gases. If you are going to have a root canal, does it help to wait 2 years?

I urge my colleagues to vote against the amendment.

Madam President, I think we learned something just in the last half hour, and that is that 90 percent of the Members of this body, of the Senate, do not think the EPA is qualified to regulate greenhouse gases. They voted against the Baucus amendment, the Stabenow amendment, and the Rockefeller amendment. I have referred to those as cover amendments. You don't get much cover when they get less than 10 percent of the vote.

So now is the chance to really do something. If you really want to do something that is going to stop the overregulation we get that is so offensive to the majority of people, we can do it with the Inhofe- McConnell amendment.

First of all, we know what the cost of this will be. The cost will be somewhere in the neighborhood of $300 billion a year. It will be the largest tax increase in the history of this country.

Secondly, what do you get? People have asked: Inhofe, what if you are wrong? What if these greenhouse gases are going to destroy this country?

If we are wrong, let's look at the response we received from the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa Jackson. When we asked her at a public meeting, if we were to pass these regulations or any of these cap-and-trade bills, would this have the effect of lowering the greenhouse gases, the answer was no because it would only affect the United States of America.

This is your chance to vote against a major tax increase to the American people.

Madam President, we hear a lot about the disaster and things that are taking place and the loss of lives in Libya as well as many other places, particularly in the last few months. But going seemingly unnoticed is probably just as great a disaster that is happening in Cote D'Ivoire right now as we speak.

I came to the floor yesterday, and I talked about the fact that elections took place in Cote D'Ivoire last November. The President, the incumbent President, Laurent Gbagbo, was challenged by Alassane Ouattara. They claim Ouattara won the election. Ouattara comes from the north, the Muslim area up there.

We found so much voter fraud that we identified, and we specifically talked about on the Senate floor, that I have asked Secretary Clinton, by letter twice, to intervene and demand a new election.

When I say ``voter fraud,'' I entered this in the Record yesterday, so I will not do it again today. But this shows how they miscalculated all those votes in the north. In just one precinct, 100,000 votes-- well, actually 94,873. Obviously, if we have 100,000 or so votes in that one precinct, it can happen that way.

But use logic. If all else fails, stop and think about this. How could it be possible that in the northern part of Cote D'Ivoire, when they had the election, what we would call the primary election, President Gbagbo got thousands, thousands of votes in each one of the precincts. Yet when the runoff came, he got zero. That is a statistical impossibility. I think for those of us--certainly, the United States thought the U.N. and perhaps France was accurate in their initial response to this thing that we were going to have to get something done.

Let me go ahead and finish what happened. I mentioned yesterday in the town of Duekoue, Ouattara's forces, along with the French, went in there, murdered about--we think something over 1,000 people. We get the reports from the Red Cross and from other sources.

But Ouattara has tried to deny his involvement in this slaughter. His forces took the town earlier, and this was the week after the Gbagbo forces had gone. I think we can just look at Guillaume Ngefa, who is the deputy head of the U.N. mission in Cote D'Ivoire.

He said Ouattara's forces had carried out the killings in Duekoue. ``We have evidence. We have pictures. This was retaliation.''

So we have all this evidence I mentioned yesterday which was part of it. I read yesterday from the Guardian, the British Guardian. The U.N. mission said traditional hunters, known as Dozos, fought alongside Ouattara's forces and took part in killing 330 people in the western town of Duekoue, which we now know is over 1,000 people. The International Committee of the Red Cross said at least 800 people. It goes on and on, which I made a part of the Record yesterday.

In addition to that, we have a statement that was made on the BBC yesterday. Keep in mind, they have, in Duekoue--they murdered all those people. They have mass graves. People are charred and burned. I am going to quote right now, so hold your stomach.

I spot four pigs eating something dark in a charred

courtyard. Standing by a newly dug mass grave, a U.N. soldier

from Morocco is choking with rage and grief. I ask him if the

dead are children. He nods and begins to sob quietly into his

face mask.

So we know of this disaster that has taken place there, and we do nothing. We know about it. I just will say: America, wake up. The massacre could have been avoided if Ouattara had accepted the mediation effort from the African Union. President Gbagbo did accept, Ouattara did not. He rejected it, and I think we know why he rejected it-- because he wants that power. He wants that job.

Anyway, where we are now--and I am going to try to get this all in-- the United States should call for a ceasefire and for a new election. I have also been told, within the last day, that the U.N. helicopters, U.S. peacekeeping helicopters are firing upon Gbagbo's military camp.

Lastly, I have sent a letter to the Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry. Let me applaud John Kerry. He has agreed to hold a hearing to look at this. I cannot tell you how much I appreciate it because it takes courage to stand up against the United Nations and France and our State Department and admit that we have to look into this. So that is exactly what we are going to do.

But that was yesterday on the floor. What has happened? What happened last night? Last night, the job was finished. They went in, and they massacred I do not know how many people.

President Gbagbo had young children who were surrounding his palace and his residence. They are willing to sacrifice their lives to save their country from the French influence they are getting with Ouattara.

They were armed with baseball bats and 2 by 4s. I do not know, there are hundreds of them out there. Last night, Sarkozy had gone to Secretary General Moon and said: Use my forces to end this, and they did. We know what happened last night.

Maybe you do not know what happened last night. They went in with helicopters and with rockets, and they destroyed most of a major city, Abidjan, the capital of Cote D'Ivoire. We have evidence. I hope people will take advantage of this, particularly those people--I know there are a lot of people out there who are opposed to any intervention we have. They do not truly care about Sub-Saharan Africa. No one cares about Sub-Saharan Africa.

I have stood on this floor time and time again, back when we were sending troops into Bosnia, and the excuse was ethnic cleansing. I said: For every 1 day in any town in any country in Sub-Saharan Africa, there are more people ethnically cleansed than in any day in Bosnia.

But nobody seemed to care. So we have hundreds of kids around there, and last night they were mowed down. If anyone questions this, you can access on my Internet, inhofe.senate.gov, and get the YouTube that shows graphically what they are doing. I do not know how many hundreds, how many thousands of people were brutally murdered last night by the French, supporting Ouattara. It is something we need to get involved in.

When I look at President Obiang, who is from Equatorial Guinea, he is the chairman of the African Union. He says he condemned the foreign intervention in the Ivory Coast. We stand by idly, and we don't do anything about it.

I renew my request to Secretary Clinton and to the State Department and to others who care about the loss of innocent life in sub-Saharan Africa, specifically in Abidjan and Cote d'Ivoire, to come forward and help us find justice. I hope President Gbabgo and his wife Simone are not dead today. They might be dying as we speak. They are raiding their residence, raiding the palace. It is a brutal mess. I don't think I have ever seen in the years I have been here, particularly coming from France, supported by Sarkozy, the raid on innocent lives in sub-Saharan Africa.

If no one else comes in, I will talk longer. I ask unanimous consent to speak until someone comes in to speak.

Madam President, I guess you might wonder why I am concerned. I have had an interest in sub-Saharan Africa for quite some time. After 9/11, finally the United States decided they would do something of concern in sub-Saharan Africa. So what we have had since that time is an interest in helping them to build African brigades, as the terrorists come down through the Horn of Africa and Djibouti and into the continent. We need to help the Africans build brigades so they can resist, not doing it for them, not doing it in place of the Africans, but to help them so they can defend themselves. That is exactly what we have been doing.

I have been honored to be the point man on the Armed Services Committee to go over and work with these guys. These countries in Africa are our friends. They participate in programs such as the IMET program that allows us to train their officers in the United States, such as the Train and Equip Program that allows us to work with them and train these individuals. When we see an atrocity such as this take place, when we visualize the young kids out there being brutally murdered, we should do something about it.

I praise someone who philosophically I have not agreed with most of the time, Senator John Kerry, Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. I am on his committee as well as Armed Services. He is sympathetic to what is going on and has agreed to having a hearing. There is a man named Meltheodore. He was the mayor, when I first met him, mayor of Abidjan in Cote d'Ivoire. He is currently a member of Parliament in Cote d'Ivoire. He is the head of an opposing political party to President Gbagbo. He was a candidate against President Gbagbo when he ran successfully for President. Here is a guy who would have every reason to be opposed to President Gbagbo. Yet he is willing to testify before Senator Kerry's committee that not only did they rig the election, but he showed the documentation on rigging the election, and we should be in a position where we could strongly recommend another election.

I have nothing against Alassane Ouattara except I do know that he has been an enemy of the Gbagbos since long before 2002, when he was opposed to him. This is, I guess, the final kill. But at what expense is this coming? It is coming at a high expense in terms of a number we can't quantify today. If colleagues don't believe it, look it up. They can get the YouTube site. They can watch what happened last night. They can get that off of my Web site, inhofe.senate.gov.

I see my friend Senator Manchin from West Virginia. Before yielding the floor, I wish to applaud him for his being courageous and standing up for doing something about the EPA taking over the regulation of greenhouse gases that would put coal and oil and gas out of our reach. I applaud Senator Manchin.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President I am going to come back at 4 o'clock today

because there is something going on. With all the people talking about the atrocities in Libya and throughout the Middle East, there is one more atrocity that is taking place right now in a country called Cote D'Ivoire in West Africa. I want to make sure I get on record in that I believe our State Department is wrong in the position they have taken. I think we can right now avert a real tragedy, something maybe comparable to what happened in 1994 in Rwanda with that genocide. I want to come back and talk about that, but I am going to do that sometime around 4 o'clock this afternoon.

Mr. President, the business at hand is the amendments to the small business act. The amendment that has been most talked about is the one I have authored, along with Senator McConnell. It is the same thing as the bill I introduced some time ago with Congressman Fred Upton of the House and myself in the Senate.

To give a little background, let me say this has been about a 9-year battle for me. I have gone back, all the way back to Kyoto when we talked about the fact that we were going to have to do something to limit greenhouse gases at that time. This was a national treaty at that time during the Clinton-Gore administration. Everyone at that time stated and believed, and I agreed because no one said anything to the contrary, that anthropogenic gases, greenhouse gases, methane and so forth, CO2, caused catastrophic global warming. That started with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change. It met many years ago, back in the 1990s.

Then there was a wakeup call and we thought, Why should we, the United States of America, sign on to a treaty when the rest of the world was not going to do it, when it was going to be difficult for us economically, and it would not affect the developing world? So we passed a resolution saying we were not going to do it.

However, right after that, starting in 2003--2003, 2005, 2007, 2009, and as recently as last year--different Members have introduced legislation that would impose almost the same thing as the Kyoto treaty on us and that is cap and trade.

At that time, Republicans were the majority. I was the chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee. In that committee we thought we had better look at this to make sure the science is there. This is important, because we had found out that for us to pass a cap- and-trade bill, the cost would be somewhere between $300 and $400 billion a year. My feeling, as chairman of that committee, was let's find out if in fact the science is there.

Scientists started coming to me--one after another and another when they knew I was going to at least question the legitimacy of the science--and said: The science is not there. We would like the opportunity to get our views in.

That became a reality, so we defeated all the bills up to and including the Waxman-Markey bill that passed the House and came over to the Senate. Let me say we are talking about something that would cost the American people between $300 billion and $400 billion a year.

Sometimes I am not quite as smart as some of the guys here, so when you talk about billions and trillions of dollars I like to look and see how does that affect my State of Oklahoma. I have the total number of tax returns filed by Oklahomans. I do the math. When you do the math with $300 to $400 billion a year that means it would cost my average taxpayer who files a tax return in Oklahoma a little over $3,100 a year.

If that is going to stop the world from coming to the end, maybe it is worth that. But what do you get for that? I even asked Lisa Jackson, the Administrator of the EPA. She is one appointed by President Obama. I asked her in a public hearing if we were to pass any of these cap- and-trade bills that would be so costly to Americans, what would it do in terms of greenhouse gases?

Her response was it would do very little if anything because that would only affect the United States of America and that is not where the problem is. The problem is in China and India and Mexico, places where they do not have any restraints on emissions. So as we lost our jobs to other states, obviously it is going to end up not decreasing but increasing the emissions of CO2.

That is where we were. We passed all these things. With the President absolutely committed to doing something about the emissions of CO2, he decided he would do through regulation what he could not do through legislation. We had legislation that could not pass and so obviously he went ahead and started saying we are going to let the EPA do the same thing as we would have done in with legislation. That, again, would cost the American people between $300 and $400 billion a year.

This is kind of in the weeds, but to do that you have to have an endangerment finding and the endangerment finding has to be a proclamation by the administration. It has to be based on science.

A year-and-a-half ago, right before the Copenhagen event, again, Lisa Jackson, the Administrator of the EPA, a very fine person who is courageous enough to tell the truth when asked a question, was in and I again asked in a public forum: Director Jackson, I am going to leave for Copenhagen. I am going to be a one-man truth squad to go over there and undo the damage that has been done by people who are going to go over there and try to make people think we are going to pass all kinds of legislation. If you are going to do this through the administration, that means you have to base it on some type of science. I asked the question: What science would you base this assumption on, the endangerment finding?

The answer was the IPCC. That is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It is the United Nations. For others who get offended by some of the things the United Nations does, it all started with the United Nations. We are going to be in a position to see where we would go from here.

With that, coincidentally--and it was not by design--somebody uncovered a lot of e-mails and things over in Europe that totally debunked or discredited what they were trying to do over there with the science. In other words, the IPCC was cooking the science. I think we all know that.

Now we have an effort to use an endangerment finding to try to do this by regulation. They are going full ahead as much as they can.

I have to say, it is my feeling the Obama administration does not want to have fossil fuels. When I say that, I would back up some of those things by stating what the administration said. Alan Krueger, the Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy, said:

The administration believes it is not longer sufficient to

address the nation's energy needs by finding more fossil

fuels.

We are talking about oil, gas, coal, fossil fuels.

Then there was a statement made:

To the extent lower tax rate encourages overproduction of

oil and gas, it is detrimental to long-term energy security.

. . .

By this, the Nation is saying we want green energy. That is fine. After I am dead and gone, I am sure the technology will be there and we will be able to run the country on green energy. In the meantime, you cannot do it without oil, gas, and coal. Right now we are depending on coal for 50 percent of all of our energy.

I wish to say also, here is another statement out of the Obama administration. Steven Chu, Secretary of Energy, told the Wall Street Journal ``somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.''

In other words, unless we get the American people complaining about the high price of gas, we are not going to be doing anything. The bottom line is they are trying to boost the price of gas to do that.

This is the surprise here. I could not have said this a year ago, but the CRS, Congressional Research Service, which pretty much is not challenged, came out with the fact that we in the United States have more recoverable reserves in oil, gas, and coal than any other country in the world. Here we are. The next is Russia. Next to that is Saudi Arabia. You can see that we have more than Saudi Arabia, China, and Iran all put together. That is us right there, the United States of America. We have those reserves.

You will hear people say we do not because we only have 3 percent of the

world's supply of oil and gas. They are saying that because they are using the term ``proven reserves.'' In order to have proven reserves you have to drill to find out and prove the oil is there. Obviously, if we have a government, an administration that will not let us drill for oil and gas, then we cannot get about proving it, so we have to go by ``recoverable.'' No one will argue with this--well, they might argue but they cannot do it with a straight face--that our recoverable reserves are very large. Here, in the case of oil, it is this amount right here--135 billion barrels of oil, 83 percent of the oil. By the way, 83 percent of the oil that would be on public lands that we will not allow ourselves--or the liberals in this body will not allow us, and the White House, to drill on because of not just a moratorium but they stopped us from doing it sometimes through not issuing permits.

But we have enough oil out there to run this country for 50 years without relying upon anybody else, without relying upon, certainly, the Middle East or any of the rest of our hemisphere.

If we were to go ahead with the friendlies in our hemisphere, Canada and Mexico, we could be independent of the Middle East in a very short period of time.

The United States has 28 percent of all of the coal, and that is very significant. As far as natural gas is concerned, we have enough natural gas to actually run this country for 90 years at the rate we are using natural gas now, only on our own, if we would allow ourselves to go ahead and produce it.

So that is where we are right now. Of course, I would be remiss if I did not say we have been wanting my amendment. It is amendment No. 183 to the Small Business Act. We have been trying to bring it up for 3 weeks now. Several times it has been postponed. I think it has been postponed for one of two reasons. Either they do not have the votes to stop it--and according to Senator Manchin, West Virginia, who stated just the other day there are 12 or 13 Democrats willing to vote for my amendment, and you get all the Republicans, that would be enough to reach 60 and pass my amendment.

What does my amendment do? It takes away the jurisdiction from the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gases. Simple as that. So maybe we have the votes, but the other reason is-- and I do not blame the leadership on the other side of the aisle--they do not want to subject their Senators to voting, to have to cast a vote that would allow the EPA to continue harassing and overregulating manufacturers and refineries and businesses and farmers and the rest of America.

Well, there are two votes that are out there that they have offered as cover votes. One is the Baucus amendment; the other is the Rockefeller amendment. The Baucus amendment would exempt some of the smaller ones. Frankly, I think everyone knows that is something that would not work. In fact, somewhere I have the quote from the American Farm Bureau. Well, I do not have it right here, but, by and large, what they say is that they want to be sure everyone understands we cannot pass the Baucus amendment because that will just--we could exempt some farmers and some other smaller people, schools, maybe churches; but with the higher price of energy, it all trickles down to them. So that is why the American Farm Bureau, the Association of Manufacturers, and others are very much in favor of my amendment.

The other one is the Rockefeller amendment that would merely delay it for 2 years. The reason I am opposed to this--and on the floor of the Senate, Senator Rockefeller made some statements the other day that were not very flattering. That is unlike him because that is normally not the way he would do it. Unfortunately, my effort was dubbed as ``childlike,'' ``immature,'' and, yes, you guessed it, ``crazy'' too. But I will only say that over the years Senator Rockefeller has stated that the EPA--well, I will just read to you what he has stated: EPA has little or no authority to address economic needs. They say they do, but they don't. They have no ability to incentivize and deploy new technologies. They have no obligation to protect the hard-working people. And on and on.

So I would agree with those statements of Senator Rockefeller. I would just say, if we are going to get rid of this, the overregulation, let's go ahead and do it. Let's not postpone it for 2 years. We have documentation from various companies, industries that say we are going to put something in place that is going to employ a large number of people, but we cannot do it so long as the uncertainty is out there.

At Point Comfort in Texas, 1,182 jobs were lost. They wanted to--they were planning--Formosa Plastics--had been planning a $1 billion expansion. It would have employed 700 construction jobs, 357 service jobs, and 125 full-time operations and maintenance jobs. Yet they are not doing it because of the regulation that is taking place and the uncertainty of what the EPA is going to be doing to us.

El Dorado, AR, similar situation. Arkansas-based Lion Oil was forced to delay several hundred million dollars in refinery expansion because of the uncertainty of the regulation by the Environmental Protection Agency. Louisiana, the same thing; 1,850 jobs were lost.

I have had people ask me over the years: Inhofe, what if you are wrong? Well, this is what I would say and how I respond to that. When you stop and say I am wrong and actually that greenhouse gases do cause catastrophic global warming, if that is the case, then you are not going to resolve it by having the United States of America do something unilaterally.

The Chinese are over there celebrating right now, hoping we will pass something to stop us from regulating or make us regulate greenhouse gases because those jobs we have--we have all of the figures. If anyone is interested, my Web site is Inhofe.Senate.gov. We can quantify the jobs lost and money involved.

Stop and think about it. Anyone who has a comparable State to Oklahoma, do you want to increase your taxes by over $3,000 a year and get nothing for it?

With that, I would make another appeal to the administration and to the Democrats in the Senate, to call a vote on my amendment No. 183. Just call it and let's get this behind us. Let's try to save energy for America.

I yield the floor.

The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Blumenthal.) The Senator from Arizona.

Mr. President, first, let me say how refreshing it is to hear the Senator from Alabama, as scary as it is, to tell the truth about the problem we have. When I tell people back in my State of Oklahoma--I refresh their memories. I remember in 1996 standing at this podium--right here--when the Clinton budget came out for fiscal year 1996. It was a $1.5 trillion budget. I said a $1.5 trillion budget is impossible to sustain. And yet the budget the Senator from Alabama was talking about was the budget of this President--and, of course, with a majority in the House and the Senate--that actually has a deficit that is greater than the entire budgets around the entire United States of America in 1996. That is the deficit. That is what my 20 kids and grandkids are going to have to pay for.

When you use statements that are real and cannot be denied--and that is, that this President in the 2 years he has been here has increased the debt more than all the Presidents before him, from George Washington to George W. Bush--it is not believable. That is what makes it so difficult because people think: How can this possibly be? And yet, it is. That is the reality.

Mr. President, a few minutes ago, I talked at some length about a very significant amendment that is going to be coming up, and that is to take jurisdiction away from the Environmental Protection Agency having to do with cap and trade, something they were unable to do legislatively and they are going to try to do through regulations at the Environmental Protection Agency. I already talked about that issue.

There is something that has not been mentioned on the floor of the Senate that I think is significant. Surprisingly enough, hardly anyone is even aware that it is going on. We are all concerned. We hear every day about the atrocities that are committed in Libya and about the people who are being mowed down. What they do not realize is that is not the only place that is going on.

I have to share, as much as I hate to do it because I am disagreeing with our State Department when I say this, but I have to say it because somebody has to say it. Right now, the potential of having large numbers of people tortured and murdered in Cote d'Ivoire is taking place. Let me set the stage so people will be aware of it.

I have had occasion to be in Cote d'Ivoire--some people call it the Ivory Coast--in west Africa. It is an area where a lot of the slave trade came from to this country. It is a place that has been led by a President named Laurent Gbagbo for the last 10 years. I first became acquainted with the country before he was President of Cote d'Ivoire. In fact, his wife Simone--she is now his wife; she was not his wife at that time--was a member of Parliament. I sat through what happened in 2002 when there was a real effort primarily by one individual--his name is Alassane Ouattara from the northern part of Cote d'Ivoire--charging against him. It is kind of interesting because Cote d'Ivoire is one country, but in the north, they have primarily the Muslim area and in the south and east primarily the Christian element. There has been a real effort for quite some time for the chosen one up there, who is Alassane Ouattara, to defeat President Gbagbo.

Here is the problem. There is an election that took place a few months ago. It appeared that Ouattara actually beat the incumbent President, President Gbagbo. We were all concerned about whether this was a straight election. I am going to tell you in a couple of minutes why it was not but also try to call this to the attention of the administration.

In January after the election took place, I wrote a letter to Secretary Clinton, and I said: I wish to have you reevaluate--I am going to have that letter at the conclusion of my remarks printed in the Record--to look at this and evaluate this as to what actually went on in that election and how it was rigged.

Ouattara tried to deny involvement in a mass slaughter that took place a couple days ago. That was in a town called Duekoue. Duekoue is in the southern part, an area that is very strongly in favor of President Gbagbo. Somewhere between 300 and 1,000 people in that western town of Duekoue were slaughtered with guns and machetes.

Mr. Ouattara and his people tried to deny their involvement in the mass slaughter, but his forces took the town days earlier and the Gbagbo forces were not even near the town. They left a week before this happened. Do not believe me, but the Guardian, which is a British newspaper, reported last night--I am going to quote from the newspaper:

The U.N. mission said traditional hunters, known as Dozos,

fought alongside Ouattara's forces and took part in killing

330 people in the western town of Duekoue. The International

Committee of the Red Cross said at least 800 people were

killed in intercommunal violence in Duekoue last week.

What we do not know is that 800 plus the 330, so roughly it is 1,000.

Guillaume Ngefa, deputy head of the human rights division

of the UN mission in Ivory Coast, blamed 220 of the deaths on

the pro-Ouattara forces.

The full article goes into a lot of detail.

Also, a BBC reporter at Duekoue wrote in the last 24 hours:

I spot four pigs eating something dark in a charred

courtyard. Standing by a newly dug mass grave, a U.N. soldier

from Morocco is choking with rage and grief. I ask him if any

of the dead are children. He nods and begins to sob, quietly,

into his facemask.

I repeat, the massacre was not caused by the Gbagbo forces but by the Ouattara forces who had taken over the town. President Gbagbo has called for a cease-fire repeatedly. I repeat that. He has called for a cease-fire but the Ouattara forces have rejected it. Why?

This massacre could have been avoided if Ouattara had accepted mediation through the African Union. On March 27, the African Union sent former Cape Verde Foreign Minister Jose Brito to mediate between Ouattara and Gbagbo. Gbagbo accepted the mediation. Ouattara did not.

I have been following the events closely in Cote d'Ivoire since last fall, and after having spoken with various African dignitaries, I am convinced there is a serious question as to whether Ouattara is the legitimately elected President of Cote d'Ivoire.

I have received substantial evidence of massive voter fraud in the rebel-held north of Cote d'Ivoire. That is the area from which Ouattara comes. I have sent the evidence to Secretary Clinton on two occasions spanning the last few months. One letter is where we actually have the evidence of the number of votes that were stolen. In one letter I pointed out--the last letter, which I will have printed in the Record-- the evidence which shows that Ouattara received 94,873 votes that were listed on a tally sheet for one of the five regions in the rebel-held north. Times this by four, and it comes very close to the margin of votes that allegedly President Gbagbo lost. That is 400,000 votes.

If, indeed, a similar amount of voter fraud exists in these regions, Gbagbo is the actual winner of the November 28 Presidential election. That is too complicated. Look at it this way: In those five regions-- they do not call them precincts; some of the small ones they call precincts, so it is a little confusing. In the first letter I sent, I commented that Gbagbo, in what we would call a primary, had won thousands of votes in each one of those five precincts up north. However, in the primary runoff, he got zero. I suggest to you that is a statistical impossibility. You cannot get zero after you had thousands of votes.

In my letter to Secretary Clinton, I called for the United States to support new elections there, but thus far those efforts have received an inadequate response. Based on the news Ouattara has murdered some 1,000 people in Duekoue, I hope the United States will reconsider its position and call for a new election.

This Wednesday, April 6, will mark the 17th anniversary of the 1994 Rwanda genocide. I went back for the anniversary of that genocide. I have been

there many times before. We know that the U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan and others knew the extent of this violence early on but did nothing about it. Now we know there can be another genocide occurring, and we do know in advance. That is why the United States is going to have to call for an immediate cease-fire to prevent Ouattara and his rebel army from committing a mass slaughter of the Ivoirians, especially the many youths with sticks and baseball bats who are protecting President Gbagbo at the present time around the Presidential palace.

You have to get this mental picture: They have these young kids marching around. They do not have weapons. They are carrying baseball bats and 2 x 4s.

I have also been told in the last half hour that U.N. helicopters-- U.N. peacekeeping helicopters--are firing on Gbagbo's military camp, causing massive explosions. There could be some confusion on this because two of the articles that came out in the last half hour--one was talking about the French, who are kind of behind and supporting, of course, Ouattara, that they are involved in this. The other says the United Nations. I am not sure. One of the two is.

Lastly, I sent Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry--by the way, I talked with him personally about this situation. He is very concerned about it. I requested he convene a hearing as soon as possible into the atrocities committed by forces loyal to rebel leader Ouattara, as well as into what I believe were flawed elections that gave legitimacy to his claim of the Presidency.

I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the two letters sent to Secretary Clinton, along with the letter sent to Senator Kerry, and the miscalculation of the election that I honestly in my heart believe was stolen. This is the tabulation of the precincts. Add up the precincts and in just one precinct, there was a mistake of over 85,000 votes--just in one precinct.

I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, first of all, let me say to my good friend from Virginia, I agree with everything he said up to the last 3 minutes, because we have something that needs to be talked about. I would only make reference to the letter that has been entered into the Record that, yes, did make that statement, that if the choice is to do nothing at all or to have the Rockefeller amendment, it is better to delay something bad for 2 years. But that is not the choice.

The choice is--and he has referred to it as the McConnell amendment; that happens to be the bill I introduced and is now offered as an amendment to the Small Business Act--and it is one that will actually resolve the problem.

I think it is necessary to set the record straight as to what the two alternatives are. I call them covers. This is kind of a term that is used inside these Halls when someone is wanting to vote against something that people at home want and they give them something else to vote for so we can offer cover--something that normally is meaningless--such as these two cover votes.

The cap-and-trade agenda--I think we all understand--is destroying jobs in America and certainly decreasing our domestic energy supply. As a consequence, the consumers are going to pay more for their gas, for their electric bills, in a tax on affordable energy. But it can be stopped. It can be stopped by the passage of the Energy Tax Prevention Act of 2011 or, as we are looking at it now, that same bill being encompassed as an amendment called amendment No. 183 to the Small Business Act.

Let me go back, if I could, kind of in history to make sure people understand where we are today and how we got here. Many years ago, back in the 1990s, they came forward--and this was during the Clinton-Gore administration--with the Kyoto treaty. They went to Kyoto, Japan, and said: We want to join with all the other countries and we want to reduce emissions from CO2. This was a treaty you would sign on to and most of the European countries did and many others did.

I might add now, many years later, none of them that signed on to it were able to accomplish any kind of reduction, meaningful reduction in emissions. But nonetheless, we had that.

I can remember standing at this podium and saying back then that we are not going to ratify any agreement that

is made at Kyoto that does not affect the developing countries the same as the developed countries. In other words, if it is not going to cover China, Mexico, and different countries in Africa, then we do not want to be the only ones this affects because it is going to be a very punitive situation. Secondly, we were not going to ratify any kind of a treaty that was an economic hardship on our country. We successfully stopped it.

Then, in 2003, they started introducing legislation that would do by legislation what the Kyoto treaty would have done, but it would only affect the United States of America. At that time, Republicans were the majority. I was the chairman of the committee that is called the Environment and Public Works Committee. We had the jurisdiction over this issue. So I almost unilaterally was able to stop this legislation from taking place. We had the same legislation that came up again in 2005, 2007, 2008, and 2009, and it has been before us for votes now in the Senate seven different times. Each time we defeated it. I might add, we defeated it by a larger margin each time we defeated it.

It is kind of interesting because I have had so many people say to me: Inhofe, what if you are wrong? What if CO2 is damaging to the environment? What if it causes some of these problems people say it does? Well, I have to say, the science has been mixed. The science has been cooked in many cases. The United Nations came up with the IPCC, which was the science that was used to base all these new programs on, and it has been pretty much scandalized in the climategate situation. But, nonetheless, that is something we do not need to talk about. The point is, we were able to stop any legislation.

Why did we want to stop legislation that puts restrictions on CO2? Well, one reason is--and it came up very clearly, and I always give my appreciation to Lisa Jackson. Lisa Jackson is the Obama- appointed Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. I asked her the question some time ago in a public hearing, live on TV. I asked: If we were to pass any of these pieces of legislation--at that time I think it was the Waxman-Markey bill--would this have any meaningful reduction in terms of CO2 emissions in the world? The answer was, no, it would not because this would only apply to the United States of America. If we do it here, we will take all the financial hardship of doing it; however, as we lose our manufacturing base, they will go to other countries where there are less emission requirements. China is a good example. China's doors are open now to try to say: Come, we are cranking out three to four coal-fired generating plants in China every week. So, manufacturers, come here. We have the energy you need. So they were then able to do it.

When the Obama administration came in, with a strong majority in both the House and the Senate, they said: All right, we will tell you what. Since you are not going to pass cap and trade, then we will do it through regulations.

What would cap and trade do to America? Granted, by everyone's admission, it would not reduce emissions at all worldwide. So what would it cost? Well, the cost was put together back during the Kyoto treaty by the Wharton School at that time. Since then, MIT, CRA, many others have come in. The range is always between $300 and $400 billion a year.

I am not as smart as a lot of guys around here, so when I hear about billions and trillions, I say: How does that affect people in my State of Oklahoma? So I have the math that I do. I say to the Presiding Officer, I take the total number of people and families in my State of Oklahoma who file a tax return, and then when they come up with something that is going to cost our Nation $300 to $400 billion, I do the math. What that would amount to for my average family in Oklahoma who files a tax return is $3,100 a year, and they do not get anything for it.

Anyway, the President came in with the new majority, and he said: Well, if you are not going to pass this, we are going to go ahead and do it by regulation. We will have the Environmental Protection Agency do it by regulation.

To do that, they had to have what is called an endangerment finding; that is, a finding that CO2 is an endangerment to health. The courts never said we have to regulate CO2. They said: If you want to, you can. That was the choice of this administration and of the Environmental Protection Agency.

So I asked the question again at one of the hearings--this is of the same Administrator Jackson; this was a year ago December--I said: I have a feeling you are going to come up with an endangerment finding so you have justification for regulating CO2 the same as if we were passing legislation to do it. Her response was kind of a smile. I said: To have an endangerment finding, you have to base that on science. What science are you going to base it on? She said: Well, primarily, the IPCC. That is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. That is the United Nations. They are the ones that started all this fun stuff.

With that, it was not more than 2 weeks later that the scandal broke with the recovery of some of the e-mails that were sent out by the IPCC that they had, in fact, cooked the science. Nonetheless, there are lawsuits that are pending right now and all that to try to stop the EPA from regulating CO2.

They are doing other regulatory things right now. They are trying to do regional haze regulation. They are trying to do regulation on ozone, changing the standards, trying to do what they call boiler MACT, utility MACT, other regulations. But, nonetheless, this one we are talking about today is the regulation of greenhouse gases.

This is what is happening right now. To keep them from doing it, I introduced a piece of legislation called the Energy Tax Prevention Act of 2011. My good friend over in the House of Representatives, Fred Upton, has been a friend of mine for many years. He is the chairman of the appropriate committee over there; the same as I am the ranking member of the appropriate committee here. So we introduced together the Upton-Inhofe legislation or, if you are over on this side, I call it the Inhofe-Upton legislation. That would take away the jurisdiction of the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gases. If we take away the jurisdiction, they cannot do it. That is the ultimate solution. That is the moment of truth, as we are going to read in tomorrow morning's Wall Street Journal. So they are taking that up. They will pass it over there. But on a partisan basis over here, they will try to kill it.

So what we have done is, Leader Mitch McConnell and I have offered an amendment that encompasses my bill, the Energy Tax Prevention Act I just referred to, as an amendment on the Small Business Act. That is scheduled for a vote tomorrow morning. I hope it does happen.

The reason I am talking today--I have already covered this several times, and I am sure people are tired of hearing it--but they have cover votes that are coming up, and we know this is going to happen. But why is it this administration wants to do something that is going to drive the energy costs of America upward?

This administration has said over and over again they do not want gas, they do not want oil, they do not want coal. And we cannot run this machine called America without oil, gas, and coal.

There is a motivation here; that is, it has come from this administration that they want to replace fossil fuels--oil, gas, and coal--with what they call green energy. Someday that might happen. It will be long after I am gone, I am sure. But they might have the technology to run this country on what they call renewable energy. Right now, we are going to use as much as we can. We are for wind power, we are for Sun power, solar power, all the other options. But, nonetheless, we still have to have fossil fuels to run the country.

Steven Chu, Secretary of Energy for the Obama administration, said:

Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of

gasoline to the levels in Europe.

That is $8 a gallon. This is the administration saying we want to increase the price of gasoline to be equal to what it is in Western Europe. So this is something that has been a policy of this administration for a long time. In fact, President Obama himself said that under the cap-and-trade plan--this is what they are trying to do

now--``electricity prices would necessarily skyrocket.''

The President had it right. The point of cap-and-trade regulation is to make us pay more for energy bills, and the Obama administration and EPA are here to make that happen. In a recent editorial, the Wall Street Journal calls the Energy Tax Prevention Act, my bill, ``one of the best proposals for growth and job creation to make it onto the Senate docket in years.''

Why is that? It is because the EPA's regulations will raise energy prices and strangle economic growth. As the National Association of Manufacturers stated:

At a time when our economy is attempting to recover from

the most severe recession since the 1930s, [EPA] regulations

. . . will establish disincentives for the long-term

investments necessary to grow jobs and expedite economic

recovery.

That is the National Association of Manufacturers. The families, the workers, and the consumers are all going to feel the pain.

In a study that Charles River Associates International did, they estimate that EPA's cap-and-trade regulations could increase wholesale electricity costs by 35 to 45 percent. What we are talking about is-- everyone understands--if they are able to do these regulations, the EPA doing what the legislature refused to do; that is, regulate the emissions of fossil fuels, it will increase electricity prices about 40 percent.

What do we get in return? I think we have already mentioned we do not get anything for this because it would drive our jobs elsewhere, and it would only affect the United States of America.

The claims that the Energy Tax Prevention Act--that is the amendment we will be voting on tomorrow--would undermine health protections or fuel economy standards are disingenuous on their face. The amendment does not touch EPA's authority to regulate criteria or hazardous air pollutants. What is more, both emissions of CO2 and real pollution have been in steady decline. Yet instances of asthma have been on the increase. So as the emissions decline, the instances have actually increased. Carbon dioxide emissions do not cause asthma, either directly or indirectly, and they do not harm public health.

The Energy Tax Prevention Act is not about asthma and public health, but it is about protecting jobs.

By the way, there is a very well respected scientist by the name of Richard Lindzen from MIT, and he wrote a letter to me which I received a couple of days ago--well, it was actually a little bit longer than that.

As to the impact of increasing CO2 on general

welfare, there is widespread agreement that modest warming

should improve welfare for the U.S. Under the circumstances,

we are in the bizarre situation of declaring something to be

a pollutant when the evidence suggests that it is beneficial.

In other words--I hesitate saying this. I am the first one to admit I am not a scientist, but certainly Professor Lindzen is. He says, Here we are talking about reducing something that is not a problem certainly to health.

Then the other thing having to do with the Highway--this was mentioned by the Senator from Virginia a few moments ago--that somehow this is going to impair our standards of lowering gas consumption. The amendment doesn't prohibit the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration from setting fuel economy standards. It stops the EPA from regulating carbon dioxide from tailpipes after 2016. So the regulation would have no effect on that whatsoever. That is not done by the EPA; that is done by the National Highway Safety Administration, called NHTSA.

The vote comes down to a simple choice: Are you for jobs and affordable energy or President Obama's strategy of energy taxes and bureaucratic regulations? Of course, when you look at the things that are coming along--I mentioned when I started talking that there is something called ``cover,'' that if there is something out there that the people at home are clamoring for, that they want--in this case they want this amendment that will stop the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases--then if they can vote for something else that does nothing, they can say, Well, I voted for this. It is called cover.

The Rockefeller vote would be nothing, except kicking the can down the road for 2 years, and in the meantime the regulation goes on.

Under the Baucus amendment, this is something that is called the tailoring rule. It is a little more complicated because when you talk about the emissions that we are concerned with that the EPA would be regulating, they would be on any emissions that would affect all the farmers, the schoolhouses, and everybody else. Well, the Baucus amendment would exempt some of these smaller ones. However, if you listen to the Farm Bureau, which has been very helpful in this all along--I think I have their quotes here. Yes. Listen to this, the American Farm Bureau, a recent quote, just this year:

Farmers and ranchers would still incur the higher costs of

compliance passed down from utilities, refiners and

fertilizer manufacturers that are directly regulated as of

January 2, 2011.

So if the Baucus amendment passes, it is going to still be regulated--the refiners, the manufacturers--and that is going to be passed down and it is going to increase the cost of power and energy and that is why the Farm Bureau is so emphatic. In fact, I just left the Farm Bureau a couple of minutes ago before I came here, talking about this very subject.

The manufacturers feel the same way. The Industrial Energy Consumers of America wrote the Baucus approach:

does not solve the underlying problem that regulating

[greenhouse gases] under the Clean Air Act is very costly for

manufacturing, will impact global competitiveness and

encourage capital investment outside the United States.

Why would that be? Because if China ends up with all the jobs, then they are the ones who would be getting the investment.

The only way to stop the higher costs of compliance, which the Farm Bureau fears, is to pass the Energy Tax Prevention Act which is now Senate amendment No. 183.

The contrast couldn't be starker. I was told that tomorrow morning we may see the moment of truth going on--and I think it is going to be in the Wall Street Journal--that people are going to realize there is only one way to stop this massive tax and regulation increase that will come. It won't be by the Rockefeller amendment and it won't be by the Baucus amendment. It will be by the Inhofe-McConnell amendment that hopefully will be voted on tomorrow and that will take out from the jurisdiction of the EPA the ability to regulate greenhouse gases. That is what we are hoping will happen, and I think when people realize it, they are not going to be fooled by some of these what I refer to as cover votes.

With that, I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Madam President, I suggest we proceed to the vote on the joint resolution.

The joint resolution (S.J. Res. 48) was ordered to a third reading and was read the third time.

Madam President, I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, I rise today to bring to the Senate's attention H.R. 473. This is the HALE Scouts Act, and the House author is Congressman Dan Boren, D-Okla. I am announcing today introduction of a companion measure in the Senate, and I look forward to working towards its enactment into law in the 112th Congress.

This bill authorizes the U.S. Forest Service to sell, at fair-market value, 140 acres of land in Southeast Oklahoma to an Oklahoma Boy Scouts group, the Indian Nations Council of Boy Scouts, which has a camp site adjacent to this land. This campsite hosts 6,500 campers every year and urgently needs the new expansion.

In the 110th Congress, this same bill passed the House by a vote of 370-2 in the form of H.R. 2675. The bill gained even more support in the 111th Congress passing through the House by a vote of 388-0 as H.R. 310. CBO has written that it has no cost, and the U.S. Forest Service testified before the relevant House subcommittee that it does not oppose the bill. Much work has gone into this bill to get it to this point, including hearings and House floor consideration. Senate passage represents final action necessary for its completion.

Mr. President, I rise today to bring to the Senate's attention H.R. 473. This is the HALE Scouts Act, and the House author is Congressman Dan Boren, D-Okla. I am announcing today introduction of a companion measure in the Senate, and I look forward to working towards its enactment into law in the 112th Congress.

This bill authorizes the U.S. Forest Service to sell, at fair-market value, 140 acres of land in Southeast Oklahoma to an Oklahoma Boy Scouts group, the Indian Nations Council of Boy Scouts, which has a camp site adjacent to this land. This campsite hosts 6,500 campers every year and urgently needs the new expansion.

In the 110th Congress, this same bill passed the House by a vote of 370-2 in the form of H.R. 2675. The bill gained even more support in the 111th Congress passing through the House by a vote of 388-0 as H.R. 310. CBO has written that it has no cost, and the U.S. Forest Service testified before the relevant House subcommittee that it does not oppose the bill. Much work has gone into this bill to get it to this point, including hearings and House floor consideration. Senate passage represents final action necessary for its completion.

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

Madam President, we are currently, it is my understanding, on my amendment No. 183 to S. 493, is that correct?

I ask unanimous consent to set the pending amendment aside for the purpose of considering amendment No. 183.

Madam President, I notice we did not have any speakers here so I thought I would come down. We do have a bill in consideration right now, in process for a vote. It is my understanding there will be a vote on amendment No. 183 in the next perhaps hour or so, maybe in a few minutes.

Let me give a little background on what happened on this, where we are today. Back in the early 1990s we had the Kyoto treaty that was up for consideration. That was during the Clinton administration. The Kyoto treaty was one we looked at and studied here in this Senate. One of the concerns about it was it was assuming we have catastrophic global warming that was due to manmade gases, anthropogenic gases-- methane. That assumption everybody thought probably was right, because everybody said it was--until such time as we thought what the cost would be if at that time we would have ratified the Kyoto treaty and lived by its emissions restrictions. The cost would be somewhere between $300 and $400 billion. That actually came from the Wharton School.

We looked at that and thought we better look at that pretty closely. Over some debate we decided, if this treaty came back--which President Clinton signed but had to come to the Senate for ratification--if it came to the Senate for ratification we would not ratify any treaty that had either one of two things--No. 1, would be devastating to our economy and, No. 2, it would not treat developing countries the same as developed countries.

As it turned out, it did both. It is one that only affected the developed countries and, of course, with the reports we had on the cost, it would be very expensive. But that was back in the 1990s.

Starting around the year 2000 and specifically 2003, this was called to our attention at that time. I say to you, Madam President, I was the chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee that had jurisdiction. We looked at this and evaluated the science that was behind it as well as we could. The science on which this is predicated came from the United Nations. Actually, in 1988 the IPCC, the International Panel on Climate Change, was formed. This came in the United Nations and the science behind it was pretty much confined to recommendations from the IPCC.

We started getting phone calls from well-respected scientists all over the country and these scientists would say to us that the IPCC is a closed society. They would not let anyone in to offer their judgment unless they agreed that in fact anthropogenic gases were causing catastrophic global warming.

These scientists started piling up until, I believe it was around 2003, we had a couple of hundred of them. I remember standing at this podium and talking on the floor about all the scientists who disagreed with the science of the IPCC. At that time I made a statement that became quite an irritant to a lot of people when I said: The notion that we are having catastrophic global warming due to anthropogenic gases could be the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.

I remember going to one of the meetings. Every year the United Nations throws a big party. We just had our 15th, I would add. Everyone remembers a year ago it was Copenhagen. This year it was Cancun. Back then, in 2003, it happened to be in Milan, Italy. I was kind of detested by everyone there because everyone else there was saying we have to do something about this catastrophe that was about to hit us.

As the years went by we had bills. We had the bill in 2003, the bill in 2005, the bill in 2007, in 2009, the last one was the Markey- Waxman--Waxman-Markey bill. Each time those who were behind this, seeking to pass some kind of cap-and-trade bill, were fewer every time we voted. The last count there were a total of 30 Members of the Senate who would say they would vote for the last cap-and-trade bill.

The interesting thing about the bill coming up now is that they were unable to pass it legislatively, which is what we should be doing. We should be

handling this through legislation. We tried. We considered it and it went through the process and it failed. Now they are trying to do it through regulations. It has been speculated that the cost to the American people would be even greater if done through the Environmental Protection Agency than if it were done legislatively.

It was not long ago we had a hearing. I have a great deal of respect for President Obama's Director of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa Jackson. She testified before our committee live on TV, and I asked the question. I said if we were to pass this--it might have been the Waxman-Markey bill--it doesn't matter, they are all the same. Cap- and-trade is cap-and-trade--it would have cost between $300 and $400 billion if we ratified Kyoto and the same would be true of any of the five or six cap-and-trade bills we have defeated since then.

But I said let's say we pass this and have it signed into law. Would this reduce CO2 emissions? That is the whole idea. CO2 emissions were supposed to be causing all this. I was very proud of her, because it took a lot of courage to give the response she did. She said in response: No, it wouldn't, because it would only affect the United States of America.

Then I would take it one step further. What would happen if we have cap-and-trade--whether it is by legislation or by regulation, it doesn't matter--what they are going to do is regulate everything that is out there in our society. As I say, the cost would be between $300 and $400 billion.

What I do, since I am not as smart as the rest of them around here, when I hear the billions and trillions of dollars, I try to see what does this cost my people in Oklahoma. I did the math, and in Oklahoma, if we take the total number of people who have filed tax returns, and divide it into the amount of taxes this would cost, it would be about $3,100 per family in my State of Oklahoma.

What do you get if you get it? You get something even the EPA Director said is not going to lower worldwide CO2 emissions, so you don't get anything for it.

The big vote coming up in a few minutes is on a bill I have introduced, and we have now introduced this as an amendment to this small business bill, that would say to the EPA: You no longer have jurisdiction--which they should not have, and I questioned that they have it in the first place--over the regulation of CO2.

There is a lot of talk about the Clean Air Act. I was a very strong supporter of the Clean Air Act. Several people who take a different position from me on the vote that is coming up talk about the Clean Air Act and all the wonderful things it has done--and I agree. It has. So I feel strongly about it. We have cleaner air now than we have had in a long period of time. The thing is, it was designed to take care of six known pollutants. CO2 was not one, it was not a pollutant. The Court said you do not have to count it as a pollutant but if you want to you can do it. So it was optional to the Environmental Protection Agency and to the government of our country.

They elected to do that. In order to do that they have to have an endangerment finding. An endangerment finding is something that says CO2 is an endangerment to public health. When the same administrator, Administrator Jackson, was before our committee--and this was right before Copenhagen; this would have been a year ago last December--I can remember making a statement to her, again in the same public meeting: Madam Administrator, I have a feeling when I leave for Copenhagen tomorrow you are going to have an endangerment finding.

I could see a few smiles. I said: If that happens, it has to be based on some science, doesn't it?

She said yes, it does.

What science do you base it on?

Well, primarily the IPCC.

Primarily--this was right before all the Climategate stuff came out, where they saw that they were falsifying science. All the things we found during the mid-1990s about scientists coming in, they were correct after all and they had been cooking the science on this thing. So that is another problem we have that we are faced with.

The way to solve the problem, and I think many of my Democratic friends--many of them said they agree this should be a matter of the legislature and not a matter of the EPA making these decisions. This morning I quoted some of them. I have it right here.

Senator Baucus, a Democratic Senator, said:

I mentioned I do not want the EPA writing these

regulations. I think it is too much power in the hands of one

single agency, but rather climate change should be a matter

essentially left to Congress.

I agree with that and it was left to Congress. We considered five or six bills on this.

Senator Ben Nelson, another Democrat from Nebraska, said:

Controlling the levels of carbon emissions is the job of

Congress. We don't need EPA looking over Congress' shoulder

telling us we are not moving fast enough.

I agree with him. In addition to that, we have eight other Democratic Senators who said essentially the same thing, so I think that is pretty well understood.

One reason I wanted to mention this before the vote takes place, my wife thinks the greatest problem facing America is the price of gas at the pump. My wife is not the only wife around here believing that, I know. She was saying for a long period of time, what causes these things? And it is very easy.

Even my grandkids understand supply and demand. That is taught in elementary schools nowadays. So supply and demand is at work here. We have supply in the United States of America. We have--and I am going to show you in just a minute--in fact, I will go ahead and do that now because I want everyone who votes on this to understand anyone, Democrat or Republican, who votes against my amendment is voting to increase dramatically the price of gas at the pumps.

The next time we hear someone say we have--this is something you keep hearing, that we have just 3 percent of the oil in this country. I think that is interesting because they say 3 percent of the proven reserves. Well, proven reserves cannot take place until such time as you drill to prove it.

We have Members of the majority, along with the White House, the majority of the Members of the Senate have disallowed us to go out and drill. So if you cannot drill--something like 83 percent of our public lands where we could be drilling for oil, we cannot do it because they will not let us do it. So if they will not let us do it, then there cannot be proven reserves.

But they do have recoverable reserves. Our recoverable reserves right now in America are 135 billion barrels. All we have to do, in order to do that, is go out and take advantage of that and use these recoverable reserves.

With the CRS report that came out--the CRS is something that is recognized as an impartial, bipartisan or nonpartisan study group. They study these things. They said that, as of 1 year ago, the United States of America--now this is very important because the United States of America has the largest recoverable reserves in coal, gas, and oil of any of the nations. There they are right there. These are the reserves of coal--this is all three, isn't it? Fossil fuels. Yes, coal, gas, and oil. There it is. This is the United States of America.

If you add this up, we have more than Saudi Arabia, China, Canada, and Iraq combined. That is what we have. But the problem is, politically, they will not let us drill for it.

I know--and I regret to say this because I was just challenged, but it was true because I was there--21 years ago we had the Exxon Valdez. It was a disaster. It took place up in Prince William Sound. Most people here remember that now. It was an accident where you had a deficient ship that had leaked in that beautiful, pristine water up there.

I went up there. Quite frankly, there are a bunch of the far left who were celebrating that it happened. Why would they celebrate a disaster such as that? They celebrated because they said: We are going to parlay this into stopping oil production on ANWR or on the North Slopes of Alaska.

Well, that is kind of interesting that they are going to parlay that into that. I said: How do you figure that? Because Prince William Sound, the Exxon Valdez, that was a transportation accident. That hit something causing it to break.

Then, I said: If you do away with drilling in America, that means we are going to have to transport it in from foreign countries, and the likelihood of it happening again is far greater. Nonetheless, they said: We are going to use that.

I hate to say this also, but when we had our spill in the gulf not too long ago, a lot of people were saying: Aha, now we are going to stop all drilling, deepwater drilling in the Gulf.

We have tremendous reserves down there in the gulf. While the moratorium was lifted, the administration has only issued one deepwater drilling permit since that happened.

What I am saying is, we have all these reserves out there, and we can do it. I am talking about gas and oil and coal. It is not just the oil and gas, but we have another opportunity out there.

We have talked about oil. We have talked about gas. In oil, if we would just export our own resources, that is what we know is there, the reserves that we have in oil and in gas, it would run this country, in oil and gas, for 90 years. That is our own stuff. That is not from Saudi Arabia. It is not from the Middle East. It is not even from Mexico. That is our stuff.

The same is true with the coal reserves. There is the United States, 28 percent of all the coal reserves. Right now, 50 percent of the power generated in the United States is generated with coal-fired generation, and they are trying to do away with that. So that is a target.

But again, we have these tremendous reserves in the United States-- let's not forget--so we can run this country for 100 years on just what we have, except the politicians will not let us go in and recover our own reserves.

Let's not forget about oil shale. Right now oil shale is something-- yes, there are several pilot projects to prove the shale's commercial viability. The Green River Formation, located in Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah, contains the equivalent of 6 trillion barrels of oil. Let me say that again, 6 trillion barrels of oil. The Department of Energy estimates that of the 6 trillion, approximately 1.38 trillion barrels are potentially recoverable. That is the equivalent of more than five times the oil reserves in Saudi Arabia.

When I made this statement about having all these reserves, more than any other country, I was not counting shale because that is not quite here yet--almost but not quite. Another domestic energy source that could lessen our dependence is methane hydrates. I think everybody knows that. But I did not count that either.

So all these things that we could have counted are not there. But the point is this: We have enough reserves to take care of all the problems we have in this country for the years to come. I look at--some people will come in, and they are well-meaning people, they will say: Well, we have to go to green energy. I am for green energy.

But if you have something that is under development, and it might be 1 year, it might be 20 years or 30 years before it comes, you have to continue to run this machine called America in the meantime. What do we know works and what is available? It is oil, gas, and coal.

Just for a minute, I am going to deviate over there to what has happened in Japan. We just came from a hearing. I am very proud that not just our administration, the President and the Secretary of Energy, but also the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has said that should not affect what we are doing right now. We currently have 12 applications pending. Two of them are pending for almost immediate consideration for nuclear reactors, so that we will get into nuclear. Right now, we only develop about 20 percent of our energy from nuclear. France, for example, does 80 percent. So that is something that is out there.

I would say, in my opinion, as one Member of the Senate, in order to stop, not reduce but stop, our dependance upon the Middle East altogether, all we have to do is keep working on all of the above. I want wind, I want solar, and all that. But I also want those things that are developed and available today--coal, gas, and oil.

You may wonder what I am getting around to with these charts. It is the fact that we have a--everyone admits that the goal of this administration--I am looking for it right now--is to get prices so high, oil and gas so high that we will have to be dependent upon other things.

President Obama said, not long ago: Under this cap and trade--we are talking about it could either be legislative or it could be regulations--``electricity prices would necessarily skyrocket.'' Notice he said, ``necessarily skyrocket.'' His administrator, or the Secretary of Energy, to give you an idea of what is behind this, the high price of gas at the pumps, said--now this is Steven Chu, Secretary of Energy for the Obama administration. He said: ``Somehow we have to figure out a way to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.''

Let me repeat that. ``Somehow we have to figure out a way to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.''

What are the levels in Europe? The United Kingdom, $7.87 per gallon; Italy, $7.54; France, $7.50; Germany, $7.41. That is the motivation out there to do this. I think we have many others whom we could quote from the administration, but I do not want this to turn into something that gives the appearance that we are just criticizing the administration.

The fact is, we have to do something about developing our own resources. If we do that, we are going to be able to bring down the price--do two things. First of all, for our national security, quit worrying about depending upon the Middle East for our oil. We can stop that just by developing our own resources. Secondly, go right back to elementary supply and demand. If we can supply the oil and gas and coal, then we will lower the price and lower it dramatically.

Everybody knows that. That is why this vote that is coming up is so important. Because the vote is not just to try to keep us from having between a $300 and $400 billion tax increase on the American people that will not accomplish anything. Remember what I said the Administrator of the EPA said--not only that we would stop that kind of a tax increase but also that we can stop the rise of gas at the pump.

So if somebody votes against this amendment, all it does is say that the--which many Democrats, all Republicans and many Democrats agree--we are going to find out how many--the Congress should be the one to address these issues, not the Environmental Protection Agency. So that is what the amendment is all about. Anyone who is going to be voting against the amendment is saying we do not want to develop our own resources. That is one of the most serious problems we are dealing with right now.

We have other problems that have to do with the EPA right now with all the regulations. They have this minimum achievable technology on emissions, on other things such as boilers and other things that would end up increasing the cost to do business. Ultimately, it is the consumer who pays. I actually have a quote I cannot seem to find right now, since I am not using notes, that says we do have the technology to do all these things. Yet we are going to allow this to happen, even though it is not necessary. So we have a big vote coming up. That vote is: Do you think the EPA should regulate the emissions of CO2 in America or do you think Congress should do it?

If you think the EPA should do it, get ready for a tax increase, because I can assure you, the President is just waiting to sign something that will allow them to continue down the road of overregulating. There is a cost to regulation. I think we all know that. It is one that is huge.

If you look at the regulations we have, I have already mentioned the $300 to $400 billion and how that relates to everybody in my State of Oklahoma who files a tax return. The boiler regulation that is coming out right now--the same EPA--that would affect 800,000 jobs in America. The utility MACT--that is something the Director of the EPA just had a news conference on today. The minimum achievable reduction in utilities would cost about $100 billion. The ozone and the PM would be about $90 billion.

As I say, we would be talking about a pretty big jobs bill but only on this. I wish to make sure everyone understands. My very good friend, John Barrasso, a Senator from Wyoming, has a bill that is going to go a lot further than this. I am a strong supporter

of his legislation. It will go into the--keeping the EPA from using CO2 to change the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act. That is very good. That is not what this is.

I heard something this morning that I want to make sure to clarify because it is important because there are all kinds of things out there people are saying will happen if we pass this amendment.

They are saying that is going to somehow affect--in fact, they said I respectfully asked the members of the committee to keep in mind that EPA's implementation of the Clean Air Act saves millions of American adults and children from debilitating and expensive illnesses that occur when smokestacks and tailpipes release unrestricted amounts of pollution. Yes, I agree with that. But let's keep in mind, I was a strong supporter when the Clean Air Act came out and when the amendments came out.

It was designed for the six criteria pollutants at the heart of the Clean Air Act: lead, ozone, nitrogen oxide, sulphur dioxide, carbon monoxide, and particulate matter. These are real pollutants, not imaginary pollutants such as CO2. But that is what was targeted by the Clean Air Act.

Of course, it has nothing to do with anything else. So those things are still going to be restricted. We have had some people say--and I have heard this several times today--this amendment would block the administration's announced plan to follow up with the Clean Air Act standards for cars and light trucks. This is not at all true. That is all done by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. That is not within the jurisdiction of the EPA. That is NHTSA, they call it.

It has nothing do with mileage on cars, nothing do with the whole effort to increase mileage.

EPA is contributing practically nothing to the administration's global warming car deal--about 4 percent of the joint EPA-NHTSA program's emissions reductions. Dropping EPA would, therefore, have a meaningless effect on oil consumption. According to the EPA, its greenhouse gas car standards would mean that ``global mean temperature'' is reduced by ``0.006 to 0.0015 [Celsius] by 2100.''

That is not even measurable. Don't let anyone use the argument that this has anything to do with CAFE standards. It doesn't affect anything that is harmful for people to breathe.

The amendment will be coming up soon. We are going to find out who wants to keep us from developing our own resources. It should be a very interesting vote.

I yield the floor.

Would the Senator from Nebraska yield for a question?

I ask the Senator from Nebraska--the minority leader has just introduced an amendment that is pending right now, and I was going to speak on that amendment. Rather than going to another one, would the Senator yield for 3 or 4 minutes so I can at least weigh in on this amendment?

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that at the conclusion of the Senator's remarks I be recognized next.

Mr. President, first I thank the Senator from Nebraska for allowing me to come in immediately following his remarks.

Amendment No. 183

An amendment was just offered by the minority leader. Let me explain what this is. As the former chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, and now the ranking member, we have been very much concerned for a long period of time over what they are trying to do with cap-and-trade. All the way back to the Kyoto treaty and then through the five different bills that were debated on the Senate floor, we recognized the incredible cost to the American people if we were to pass cap-and-trade legislation.

The interesting thing about this is the most votes that were in the Senate at any one time in order to pass cap-and-trade were about 30. Obviously it takes a lot more than that. So what this administration did was say: All right, if you are not going to pass cap-and-trade regulation--keep in mind what that is; that would end up being the largest tax increase in the history of America on the American people-- if you are not going to do it through legislation, we will do it through our regulations, through the Environmental Protection Agency.

There was an endangerment finding. The Administrator of the EPA had the endangerment finding and it was based on the IPCC flawed science, but nonetheless it was there. So they started on a route to regulate CO2 through regulations. Let's stop and think about what that would be. The costs we have determined, over a period of 10-years, to take over the regulation and have in fact a type of cap-and-trade through regulation--or by regulation--would be about $300 billion to $400 billion a year. I did a calculation as to what that would cost the average family in the State of Oklahoma and it was about $3,000 for each family who actually files a tax return.

You have to ask the question, what do you get if you pass this. First of all, I think most people right now are concerned with the price of gasoline at the pump. It is going up again. I suggest it is not market forces that are forcing the price up. It is nothing less than regulation. We have an administration that is doing all it can to kill fossil fuels in America. This is a chart showing--and this all happened in the last year--in the United States we have the largest recovery reserves in oil, coal, and gas of any other country. In fact, our research is right there. You can see recovery reserves are astronomical compared to China, Iran, Canada, and some of the other countries.

The problem we have is a political problem. We are not allowed to go ahead and exploit our own reserves. It is simple supply and demand. I think there is not a person listening to us now who has not studied supply-and-demand basics back in school. If we have all this supply here, why can't we exploit the supply?

To give another illustration of what we have--this is coal reserves. We have 28 percent of all the world's coal reserves. We are exploiting right now clean coal technology, being very successful. We have, in addition to this, oil and gas reserves. But the problem we have is a political problem.

It was the Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu, who made the statement in the Wall Street Journal:

[S]omehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of

gasoline in Europe.

``To boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.'' Right now the levels in Europe are around $8 a gallon. That is what the administration wants us to pay. Why do they want that? They want that so we will be priced out of using fossil fuels. We are talking about oil, gas, and coal.

Right now we are faced with this. Frankly, as we speak, in this very moment over in the House of Representatives they are taking up what they call the Upton-Inhofe bill. That is the same amendment the minority leader just filed. What that does is propose the content of the Inhofe-Upton bill, which says the EPA does not have jurisdiction over controlling CO2. That should be a legislative matter. You say, Who would agree with that?

Max Baucus, Democrat from Montana, said:

I do not want the EPA writing those regulations. I think

it's too much power in the hands of one single agency, but

rather climate change should be a matter that's essentially

left to the Congress.

The Senator from Nebraska who just walked off the floor:

Controlling the levels of carbon emissions is the job of

Congress. We don't need the EPA looking over Congress'

shoulder telling us we're not moving fast enough.

He went on further to say:

Because the EPA regulations would be a government-directed

command-and-control regime, they would raise the price of

energy--

. . . in his State and for all the other States.

This is something I think we have talked about but there is one thing that seems to keep getting overlooked. Somebody asked me the other day, they said: Inhofe, what if you are wrong, in terms of how CO2--they are talking about catastrophic global warming. I said: It is very simple. I have a great deal of respect for the Director of the Environmental Protection Agency. She actually said-- Lisa Jackson--in response to my question, live on TV, in our committee. I said:

Let's say we pass a cap-and-trade either by regulation or

legislation. What do you think that is going to do in terms

of the overall emissions of CO2?

Her response was, well, it wouldn't really affect them because that would only affect the United States.

I go on further and say: If we were to restrict these, and stop us from producing oil, gas, and coal in the United States, necessarily our power would be reduced. That would move it to China, to India, to Mexico, to places where they do not have these regulations and do not have restrictions on emissions. It would have the effect of actually increasing, not decreasing, CO2. Even if we are wrong on that we have to keep in mind it would not make any difference.

I know there are several others who want to talk about this. I am very excited we now have this as a pending amendment, to adopt what I refer to as the Inhofe-Upton bill. He referred to it as the Upton- Inhofe bill. It would merely take out the jurisdiction of the EPA to regulate CO2.

I would say also in the case of the Director, Lisa Jackson, when I asked the question--and this was a year ago in October, I say to my good friend from Louisiana--I said: If you are going to try to have an endangerment finding so that would allow the EPA to regulate the same as the cap-and-trade would, it has to be based on science. What science would you base it on? Her response was the United Nations IPCC. What is that? It was Climategate IPC. It happened about a year ago. It was cooked science. I remember standing at this podium in this Senate many times, talking about how they have tried to falsify the science to make people believe catastrophic global warming is going to come in as a result of CO2 emissions.

I am glad this has come up. Right now we are looking at gasoline approaching $4 a gallon. It is a supply-and-demand situation. My friend from Louisiana has a lot of gas and oil in her State. We do in my State of Oklahoma. We need to get the regulators, who are the politicians, to allow us to go ahead and exploit our own resources. Eighty-three percent right now of the Federal lands where we could be producing oil and gas is off limits.

The last thing I will say before yielding the floor is that if we were to take the recoverable oil and the recoverable gas and take away the political obstacles that are in the way, we would have enough to run this country for 90 years, in terms of the supply of oil, and for 90 years in the supply of gas, all produced here in the United States. That would mean we would not have to be reliant upon the Middle East to run this machine called America.

Let's pull away those. The way to do that is to vote in favor of this amendment and I am very excited we will have the opportunity to do that shortly.

Mr. President, reserving the right to object----

If the Senator amends his request that at the conclusion of his remarks we return to amendment No. 183.

Mr. President, I think the Senator was distracted over there. If the Senator would amend his unanimous consent request so that we would return to amendment No. 183 at the conclusion of his remarks.

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

Mr. President, I yield the floor to the Senator from Maryland.

Mr. President, will the Senator yield?

The pending amendment is No. 183. I ask unanimous consent that it be temporarily set aside for the purpose of introducing amendment No. 161.

Why not recognize Senator Vitter for his amendment, set aside our amendment temporarily, and then we will get to the Johanns amendment after that.

I thank the Senator from Louisiana.

First of all, we are currently on, it is my understanding, amendment No. 183. I ask unanimous consent to set aside the current amendment for consideration of amendment No. 161 by Senator Johanns and ask for its consideration.

I ask unanimous consent that the reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to return to the pending amendment, amendment No. 183.

Thank you. Again, I thank the Senator from Louisiana.

This is an amendment to the underlying bill. It is a very significant one.

To give a little background, for the last 9 years, I have had an effort to stop legislation called cap-and-trade legislation. It is one that I think everyone now--no one used to hear about it, but everyone is familiar with it now after all these 9 years. It goes all the way back to the Kyoto treaty, when people realized, under the Clinton administration, that we were not going to ratify that treaty. In fact, President Clinton never even brought it up for ratification. But people realized this would be something very, very expensive to America.

So after that, in 2003, 2005, 2008, and on up, there were about seven different times that Members of the Senate brought up different cap- and-trade legislation. It was in 2003 that MIT and the Wharton School came out with analyses of what it would cost to do a cap-and-trade bill. The amount always ranged between $300 billion and $400 billion a year. I quite often say, when we are talking about billions and billions of dollars, you have to bring this home so people understand what we are talking about. In this case, in my State of Oklahoma, this would equate to something a little bit over $3,000 for every family that files a tax return.

The reason I am bringing this up at this time is that they tried to pass this all throughout the years. I think the last one was the Waxman-Markey bill over in the House. It came over to the Senate, and, of course, they didn't have near the votes to pass it over here. I think the most votes they could have gotten at any time in the Senate to pass a cap-and-trade bill was about 30 votes. Obviously, that is not enough.

So this administration decided: Since they won't do it legislatively, we will do what they wouldn't do legislatively through regulations. That is where the Environmental Protection Agency came along and--of course, back when the Republicans were in the majority, I was the chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee. Now it is Senator Boxer from California, and I am the ranking member. So we have jurisdiction over the Environmental Protection Agency.

I think it is very important that we draw this in and make an attempt to connect the dots and make people realize what we are talking about now. There is great concern in this country about the price of gas at the pumps. It is approaching $4 a gallon, and this is something of great concern to my wallet and to everybody else I know in the State of Oklahoma.

The problem we have is a bureaucratic problem. It is a problem of this administration not allowing us to exploit the reserves we have in this country.

We hear over and over--or we did; we have not heard it recently--that we have only 28 billion barrels of proven

reserves and that is not enough to provide for our own consumption in this country. I ask us now to go to the CRS report. Less than 1 year ago, Senator Murkowski and I requested a CRS, Congressional Research Service, report. They said, right now, the United States of America has more oil, gas, and coal reserves than any other country in the world.

Let's take first the oil reserves. These are the proven reserves. The problem with using the word ``proven'' instead of ``recoverable'' is that proven has to be the result of drilling. We have to drill and know it is there. Obviously, if we have obstacles so that a majority of people, along with the administration, do not want us to drill offshore, do not want us to drill on public lands, and we cannot get in there and prove it, then we have to go back and take the recoverable oil.

This is what the geologists say we have in this country. No one has refuted this, I might add. Instead of being 28 billion barrels, it is 135 billion barrels of oil. If we carry that further, we realize this report is one that shows clearly we could have these huge reserves.

Let's go to natural gas and see what this same CRS report says about natural gas. This chart shows a combination of the fossil fuels; that is, gas, coal, and oil. First is the United States of America. Second is Russia. It shows the United States has greater recoverable reserves than Saudi Arabia, China, Iraq, and these countries combined. There is a huge reserve out there. In fact, the reserves of oil we are talking about, we have the equivalent to replace our imports from the Persian Gulf for more than 90 years. In other words, if we lift the restrictions we currently have in place on drilling for oil, it will be 90 years.

Gas turns out to be about the same. Based on the CRS report, it says the 2009 assessment of the Potential Gas Committee states that America's future supply of natural gas is 2,000 trillion. At today's rate of use, this would be enough natural gas to meet America's demand for 90 years.

The report also reveals the number of coal reserves. The coal reserves are 28 percent of the world's coal. CRS cites America's recoverable coal reserves to be 262 billion short tons. For perspective, the United States consumes 1.2 billion short tons of coal per year. That is a major export opportunity for us, as well as for jobs.

When we talk about our reserves in oil, gas, and coal, there are a lot more out there. This is just what we know is recoverable. For example, I did not include oil and gas shale. The Green River Formation located in Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah contains the equivalent of 6 trillion barrels of oil. The Department of Energy estimates that of this 6 trillion, approximately 1.38 trillion barrels are potentially recoverable. That is equivalent to more than five times the oil reserves of Saudi Arabia. I did not include these when I said we have enough to sustain us for 90 years.

Another domestic energy source is methane hydrates. That is another one that has tremendous potential. While the estimates vary significantly, the U.S. Geological Survey recently testified that ``the mean in-place gas hydrate resource for the entire United States is estimated to be 320,000 trillion cubic feet of gas.'' For a perspective, if just 3 percent of this resource can be commercialized in the years ahead, at current rates of consumption, that level of supply would be enough to provide America natural gas for more than 400 years. I did not include that. For 400 years, I am only including what is recoverable and what is out there. That is what I call energy security.

We need to also realize it is not just energy we can do. There is nothing more basic than supply and demand. If we are stopping our supply of oil and gas in this country, the demand is going to go up, and we will have to go elsewhere. If we want to become independent--and we could become independent if we were to exploit our own resources.

We have other reports that talk about the number of jobs at stake. Only two deepwater well permits have been issued in the last 11 months. I thought, at the time when we had the oilspill in the gulf, there were going to be people around saying: Aha, we are going to parlay this into stopping production, stopping exploration. Sure enough, they did.

While the moratorium on the gulf has been lifted, only two deepwater well permits have been issued in the last 11 months. Delays and continuation of the current permitting pace could cost 125,000 jobs in 2015, and getting down to the developing of Alaska's offshore, for example, would create 55,000 jobs a year. We are talking about a lot of jobs. We are talking about a lot of reasons we should go ahead and adopt this amendment.

Let's keep in mind what this amendment is. It is an amendment that would take away jurisdiction from the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gases, anthropogenic gases, and leave that as something that should be done by Members of the Senate and the House.

Senator Baucus from Montana said:

I mentioned that I do not want the EPA writing those

regulations. I think it's too much power in the hands of one

single agency, but rather climate change should be a matter

that's essentially left to the Congress.

That is what we are talking about. As we speak, the House is marking up the bill. It is the Upton-Inhofe bill over there, and over here it is the Inhofe-Upton bill. That is to stop EPA from this regulation.

Senator Nelson from Nebraska said:

Controlling the level of carbon emissions is the job of

Congress. We don't need the EPA looking over Congress'

shoulder telling us we're not moving fast enough.

We have some eight Democratic Senators joining them saying that the EPA does not have the authority and should not be doing it. We are talking about Senators such as Senator Mark Begich, Senator Sherrod Brown, Senator Bob Casey, Senator Claire McCaskill, Senator Carl Levin, and Senator Max Baucus.

That is the reason I feel optimistic that if we can call up this amendment for a vote, we are going to have a favorable vote on it. I know all the Republicans are going to vote for it, and I think an awful lot of the Democrats will when we are facing a situation where we have gas going so high it is going to be difficult to not give serious consideration to this amendment.

I go further to say the administration has been of no help. I have a quote I have used several times on the floor. Steven Chu, the Secretary of Energy, told the Wall Street Journal that somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe. That is $8 a gallon. What they are saying is, they want to do away with fossil fuels, and before we can go to other forms of energy, we have to do that. In the meantime, how do we run this machine called America? We cannot do it without oil, gas, and coal.

The bottom line is, we do have enough oil, gas, and coal to run this country. We could be independent from our reliance on the Middle East-- totally--after a short period of time. People say: If we were to open all these places, it would be another 5 or 6 years before we are able to actually produce this oil and gas we so desperately need in this country. In response to that I say: First of all, it will not be that long. Secondly, I heard that same argument 5, 6 years ago, and if we had done it then, we would be there today.

We have a serious problem that is looming out there. I know others want to speak. I know Senator Barrasso--by the way, Senator Barrasso has a different amendment than this amendment, even though he is a cosponsor of this amendment No. 183. This would go into such things as NEPA, the Endangered Species Act, and the other things the EPA is trying to use to regulate greenhouse gases to change our lifestyle in America. That is where we are today.

I yield the floor.