I appreciate the honor of being an honorary Texan here tonight because in Indiana we're still unusual. I mean we still make things. We don't have the mountains like they have out West or beaches. What we have are hardworking Americans who…
I appreciate the honor of being an honorary Texan here tonight because in Indiana we're still unusual. I mean we still make things. We don't have the mountains like they have out West or beaches. What we have are hardworking Americans who are still competing worldwide in manufacturing.
And if you go into any of the types of plants--earlier I was talking about our steel mills in addition to the two SDI mini-mills with recycled steel. Everything they use, they recycle and use recycled materials, as does NuCor. I have a Valbruna steel mill. One of the interesting things that Valbruna has done is they built an additional facility because they're the number one provider of steel to the refinery industry in Texas and Louisiana. So in my district we're making the things still in America. Your options are basically Korea, Brazil, China, or Indiana steel in many of these cases.
But these factories take an incredible amount of energy. Some of our factories, we have 85 percent coal, 15 percent nuclear in our basic provision of things. And basically this bill doesn't like things that we can use in Indiana. It doesn't like coal. They really aren't too fond of nuclear. I think that a lot of the question of what to do with waste, I used to think it was driven by Jane Fonda in ``The China Syndrome'' movie, but that's us old people. I think the younger people are thinking of Homer Simpson coming in and kind of blowing up the city of Springfield all the time, and they think of that as nuclear energy. There are 13 or 15 or more plants on the drawing board right now, but it may take 20 years to get there.
What do I do if I don't have coal? Well, I could use gas and oil, but, boy, those are kind of bad. We tried to get the BP Refinery done in Indiana to handle Canadian tar sands. There's another one over by Detroit. But they're going to be tied up for 10, 15 years. They were half of EPA discharge. But Rahm Emanuel and others are saying, Oh, no, we can't build that refinery. We don't want any refineries in America. Well, we make 58 percent of the RVs.
What are you going to do, put a little fan up on the roof to try to make these RVs go? International designs--800 people to design the big trucks in my district. How are we going to deliver goods to market? The rail is already jammed, the canals are jammed, the rivers are jammed. If we can't use trucks, which take up about 40 percent of the energy on our roads, how are we going to move around?
The foundries take this--it was the biggest ice cream plant in the world, an Edy's ice cream plant until they built one additional. But when you go in an ice cream plant, how do you think ice cream is made? You have got to deliver it there, the milk in, then you have got to process it and you have all these electrical machines powering this. You know, they can't do that with a couple of solar panels.
I have Kraft Caramels in my district, all sorts of things, not just kind of windshields and axles and stuff. How do you power these kinds of things? I am not against alternative energy at all. I worked hard.
In my district, in fact, Guardian windshields has learned that their process of windshields, if you think about it, took solar heat for a long time. And these solar panels in Nevada and other places are cracking. By going with Guardian, they are learning that they can make these panels more efficient, get 20 percent or more energy, and they don't crack. Spain is using them. The new model projects in the U.S. are using them, and they are going to have possibly hundreds of jobs making the windshields for the solar panel industry.
Of course, they had near a thousand jobs making windshields for SUVs, pickups and things that are now kind of on the bad list, so we will get green jobs, maybe half as many as we had before in that category.
I have Parker-Hannifin in New Haven. We have had an earmark to help them, to try to get the heat down inside of everything from your handheld, your BlackBerry, to wind turbines, and could possibly make the wind turbines 20 percent more efficient. We may have, at some point here, 200 people doing windmill turbines and other things, but that plant had 1,200 supplying traditional energy industries.
I have worked with people who are coming, trying to come up with alternative car engines.
One of my friends and supporters is putting in a huge wind farm. In Indiana, we have two basic areas that we can put wind farms. We might get to 4 percent, but we can't reach the targets in these bills. It's not that we are not committed to alternative energy, but we don't have as much wind and solar. We have to have traditional forms of energy: oil, gas, nuclear, coal, not just the alternative form, especially if they are going to put limitations on ethanol and biodiesel. So this is a critical time, really, where we are trying to decide in America, are we going to have manufacturing or aren't we going to have manufacturing?
Are we basically going to basically have service jobs and then high- tech jobs? Yes, at a coffee house at different universities they sit around and go, Oh, this stuff sounds really great. And the others in their beach houses on the coast go, Oh, this stuff really sounds great. But what's missing in America is we are getting increasingly two classes of people, and the blue collar class of people who made things and had a decent living where they could get a house, maybe a boat where they could go on vacation, they are disappearing.
And the knowledge class, often in the liberal upper groups of the Democratic Party, are basically saying goodbye to their working class. And they are saying, You can either basically maybe bring us a drink, grill us a hamburger, or go get a doctorate and teach at a university.
What we are losing is the middle group of blue collar Americans who worked with their hands and worked in their fields, and they are basically knocking them out, and those jobs are going to other countries.
The Heritage study showed that my congressional district is number one is loss. Next to the me is Joe Donnelly in the South Bend district, who was number two. Congressman Latta, who asked for the split out, just to my east in Ohio, is number three. Mike Pence, who is just to my south in that part of Indiana is number four. Congressman Jordan is number five and Congressman Boehner is number six. Because not only do we have manufacturing, we tend to use coal and nuclear because alternative energy is less of an option in these heavy industrials. Then it kind of jumps up to Michigan.
The other thing that's noticeable in that map where the dark red is and the other is that's really where most of the water is in the United States, coming out of the Mississippi, and to manufacture, you need to have water and access to water. You are not going to move--you will see some in the orange States. You can move some steel and manufacturing into those areas, but basically you can't really transfer to those light yellow because that's mostly desert area. And you can't power these big plants with just solar or wind, and they don't have enough water to supplement the traditional that you need in refineries and in steel mills and that type of thing, and they don't really have a plan.
That's why we Republicans, when you look at the actual details--if you could even stomach, by the way, the government making all these decisions rather than market, that's bad enough. I mean, that document basically is page after page of the government telling us how we should live, the government telling us how we should make things.
But the bottom line, when you look at that map, if it goes out of the red zone, it's basically going to Mexico, to China, to Korea, to South America. Because the areas that are lighter, where you conceivably could shift it, it's just not possible to build these plants there.
Yes, I don't mean to monopolize the time, but when you say these things, to illustrate the manufacturing in my district, Michelin bought a U.S.--bought a BFGoodrich tire plant in my district with 1,600 people in it. They have invested $15 million a year if they can become 5 percent more efficient, so they put $120 million into this huge plant, and people don't even realize what they are putting in. And I was just part of a suit to say stop the dumping, because we can compete with China without the dumping, but not if you add 7 percent health care and then add a cap-and-trade and then add the other OSHA and all the types of regulations that are coming back that we had restricted, we can't compete in tires.
I have a lot of the defense industry. I have a BAE plant with 2,500 people working in it. They do a lot for Boeing. One Member just a moment ago referred to Wilbur and Orville Wright and the amazing thing, but, you know, we are going to go back to these kinds of paper airplanes if we are not careful here. Boeing, that's metal. It takes energy to build every part in that plane, and it takes energy to launch the plane. And it's not--let's just say, they don't have windmills on this thing. They don't have solar panels to get a jet up in the air.
I have NASA satellites. The ones that feed into The Weather Channel are made by ITT in Fort Wayne, and they actually are looking at being able to track, as my friend from Texas earlier said about, we don't really have the science on that. Well, that's what one of the companies in my district is looking at; can we get satellites up in the air to track the climate change? Because the truth is, we are doing this bill with no data.
But put a satellite up. You know what, it has aluminum on it. You know what takes an incredible amount of energy to make, aluminum. The electrical systems in a plane and a satellite are copper. You can't get copper if you can't mine for copper. You can't make--the smelting of copper takes an incredible amount of energy. Aluminum and copper take as much or more energy than steel. How do they think we are going to get airplanes? How do they think we are even going to track the climate change?
It is baffling that this bill could have gone through a Congress. I am going to make a flat-out statement. If most of the Members of Congress were businessmen, this would have never passed.
Would the gentleman yield for a question?
If you could put your quote back up, I just want to say that you are just so incredibly not politically correct for this day and age.
Because American electricity rates would go up, but we're world citizens now. Surely you are not claiming that rates would go up in Pakistan, China and other places. We use a disproportionate amount of the energy of the world. So we should be willing to sacrifice so that all the world's citizens can benefit more by taking our jobs and having a better standard of living. Then we can be all more equal. You are just not being politically correct tonight.
You are acting like an American, Congressman.
Will the judge yield for a minute?
You have been making a number of parliamentary points today during the debate and on the floor. You are an experienced judge as well as a Congressman. Is he allowed to use factual science on the floor? I don't know if we're allowed to really debate this stuff. This is mostly an ideological bill, not a factual bill. As Mr. Conaway correctly said, did they come to a conclusion and then make the facts fit the conclusion? It is really disturbing. Much of what's behind us is, in fact, that there's a group of people who feel guilty about us being such a successful Nation and about Western nations being so successful and that we use a disproportionate amount of the energy of the world and that somehow we should not do that. Some of the other western countries, like Australia and New Zealand, as you pointed out, are like, Hey, what's going on here? Do we have to buy into this? What does it exactly mean that we need to sacrifice and go down in our lifestyle? What will we gain? Is the science really there?
Then the developing countries that want to be like the United States, they look at us like a model, and they are going, like Poland, Hey, what is this stuff here? Is this something that you guys came up with at some university or a couple guys smoking some marijuana cigarettes? Or is this real fundamental stuff? And maybe we ought to prove this before we give up our cars, before we give up our SUVs and our station wagons.
I mean, we've had this debate about the Volt and whether GM should go to an electric car that costs $40,000. We talk about gas and oil and how you power these big trucks that I make in my district and how you power the RVs. How exactly are you going to tow a towable with a Smart Car? That the challenge is, how are you going to move around? And one of the questions is, I think they think that electric cars, when you plug them in, that the electricity is in the wall. What is going to make the power to power electric cars? And how many, kind of, regular people are going to be able to afford a $40,000 electric car?
Which gets to the core of this bill. We've had Members on the floor today say, Oh, well, we're going to fix this because low-income people are going to get exemptions, and there's going to be this class that gets an exemption. About 80 to 90 percent of that bill are government preferences to try to fix the problem they are creating.
In fact, one of our colleagues, the Democrat from Oregon, Mr. DeFazio, in his 1-minute this morning made two terrific points. One was, the alternative jobs and alternative energy are being created faster now than they will be under this bill because we're moving in that direction already with the incentives in the market. And with some supplemental funding out of Congress, some tax incentives out of Congress, we're going to get major breakthroughs.
I have a car company in my district that may be able to get 60 miles a gallon out of E85. The test case shows they got 100 in the first test, and it's a new motor. But if we mandate electric cars, it will never come to market. Government doesn't make efficient decisions, that if they protect this class, protect this company, protect the TVA power system but not this power system, you get all these special categories.
But what we know is, as all of you have pointed out, the upper classes will figure that out. They're not going to get damaged much by this; and to some degree, they're going to try to cover and patch up in a mishmash of expensive government regulatory programs. And who gets lost in this? The very people that the other party promised to protect when they ran, the middle class, the forgotten man and woman and young person who is somewhere in the middle, working hard and not, as Mr. DeFazio pointed out in his other point, making money on credit swaps.
We're going through one of the greatest financial messes in the world, and we have just set up a cap-and-trade. What does trade mean? We call it cap-and-tax. Cap and send the jobs to China. A number of different things. Mr. Gohmert a while ago just coined another version of the bill. But the bottom line is, the trade is trading credits and swapping and then securitizing those in markets and encouraging other countries around the world to do this. This will be a boondoggle. How many trees did you plant in Brazil to offset your ethanol plant? How many whatever did you do in damming up a river, which historically the environmentalists were opposed to damming. Now they talk about hydropower. Which is it? You did a hydroplant in Thailand. Therefore, you get to have a credit swap worth $50,000. You put that $50,000 out. A number of people bid on it. That gets leveraged 30 times. We're creating a bigger mess than we have now, based on trying to do all sorts of equalization. This is a disaster, and it cannot happen without basically destroying our country.
We pointed out tonight different angles of this, and this is not--as Mr. Poe goes through his list on July 4 and our Founding Fathers and what they sacrificed for. They sacrificed for freedom, not for government setting up credit swaps, protecting one group of people against another group of people, one region against another group of people. Then when you complain, they make deals on the floor during the debate today. Oh, I didn't realize that. There's such a lack of understanding that it takes that many pages. By the time we get done with the regulations, there will be that stack across that whole top of the table, and they'll still be inventing it as people sue and go to court to judges, like my friend Mr. Gohmert said.