Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for participating and letting us know what is going on in the gentleman's district. I wish the gentleman the best in his first term and new term as a Member of Congress.
Mr. Speaker, just in quick review once again here, in passing the budget resolution this week, H. Con. Res. 14, it is a 60-page document, I invite people to look it up for themselves and reconcile for themselves between what they are hearing and what my colleagues on the other side of the aisle are trying to scare the public with on things that are going to be cut because of it. They are not in there.
Again, Medicaid, no cuts. Medicare, no cuts. Social Security, no cuts. SNAP, none. We even heard a bit ago about veterans. No. We want to make these things better for them. We want to make them more effective.
Our veterans deserve to have the best possible care and the best possible services for them. It isn't going to come from the type of rhetoric of what we are hearing here.
As I mentioned before, Social Security. No one is going to reduce Social Security, but looking forward in the long term, it is going to be in big trouble in 7 or 8 years. Shouldn't we be working together in a bipartisan way to make sure that that program can sustain itself beyond that when the trust fund runs out, at such a point when more money will have to be paid in by workers or having less benefits or things like that because it just flat runs out?
That is not good. Let's have an honest debate on that and how Medicaid is going to go forward, as well. All of these programs need to be looked at in order to keep them on a solid fiscal course. That doesn't happen when lies get told about what we are trying to do here in sight of running $2 trillion budget deficits.
Mr. Speaker, with so many different issues for us to be looking at in Congress, we also have to revitalize our economy. A growing economy will help a lot in solving our deficit problem.
Two big drivers of inflation are overspending by Federal Government and the cost of energy, which is integral to so much of our economy, to every aspect of production and transportation and delivery and what we do in our daily lives. The cost of energy, from electricity in our homes and businesses, manufacturing, and fuel for vehicles, trains, and aircraft. Those are the two main drivers.
As we have seen in the last several years, when the Federal Government has basically put a giant vacuum on the available money supply, prices go up on everything. The energy to produce those things causes higher prices.
I am a farmer in my real life at home. A couple of years ago, I saw the tripling of the cost of fertilizer as an input for our crops and the doubling of the cost of fuel. Where is that going to be made up? It is in the price of food. Everybody is kind of mad about the price of eggs right now. I get it. I understand that.
A couple of points that factor into that is that we have California regulations, especially on how eggs are to be produced and the chickens are to be raised. We have seen all those things that drive inflation affect the egg growers and the poultry folks.
Also, I believe there is an overreaction on the bird flu. The last number I saw was 160 million chickens have been exterminated because of the idea or perception on that. Yes, there is a real deal out there, but I think the Biden administration took it way too far. When you have these things going on, that is going to affect the price of eggs.
The Trump administration is working diligently on that. I spoke with the Secretary of Agriculture just yesterday, and they are looking at remedies for that. We will be soon getting a handle on that and other things that are inflationary if we are allowed to have our economy thrive and be open enough to take care of these things.
I am encouraged by this direction. There is a lot of talk about DOGE and what it is doing. It is, indeed, flipping over rocks and finding a lot of cockroaches scurrying away on some things that the American public cares zero about on what is being spent in foreign areas. At USAID, at the beginning, there were some good aspects of USAID, but it sure turned into something that the public doesn't care about or want. There are effects from these costs and of these actions of government.
Mr. Speaker, we should then look at the regulatory side. We have had so much being expended on climate change, in my home State of California especially. What actually is climate change, and let's look at long-term trends.
There is a lot of science behind that being ignored, I believe. What are the trends on temperatures? What are the trends on CO2? There are so many different aspects that are a lot more scientific than politicians, me included, who are trying to expound upon that.
We have seen very difficult regulations come down the pike on the regulations especially of CO2. My colleagues have probably seen this poster of mine in the past, where I have pointed out the makeup of CO2 in our atmosphere, one of the greenhouse gases that are the main concern by several administrations now.
The main gas is nitrogen, oxygen, and these trace gases. We put right over here, especially carbon dioxide. Look at that very narrow strip which that represents.
When I actually show them this stuff, people are astounded at how little CO2 is in the atmosphere because they have been scared and had so much fear instilled in them by media, by politicians, and by regulatory agencies who say that CO2 is going to be the end of mankind. It is an existential threat. It is the biggest threat we have according to John Kerry and others. It is not the actions of China and others in the promoting of war and terrorism around the world.
Let me show my updated chart here. This one points out the same one I just showed here. This is currently in 2025. This is what it looked like back in 1970, back when I was a kid in school and they were instilling fear in us that we were going to have an ice age. Those are the days of the ice age. Those are the days of global cooling.
Look at the two charts. They are a bit smaller than the first poster here, but they are the same ratios. There is CO2 once again, that little, skinny, purple piece of pie in that chart here. There it is right here. It is the same ratios. Yes, CO2 is bumped up a little bit over that time, but that can be defined by so many things besides human activity.
Mr. Speaker, the credit that we would get as a nation isn't very often forthcoming that we have actually already done a lot of good things in this timeline. There is the Paris climate accord. Only the U.S. and one other country have actually seen their CO2 numbers go down in that period of time and leading up to it. Everyone else's is going up.
When efforts are being made to so dramatically regulate carbon dioxide, it is killing our economy. It is killing people's choices.
Look at my home State of California, where they want to ban vehicles that are gas or diesel powered by 2035. They are coming after locomotives. More and more, they have forced aircraft into using different types of fuels.
That is fine. If you can develop the fuel and it is a better fuel, let's look at it, but is it really going to produce? Instead of where the rubber meets the road, I guess where the wing meets the air, are we going to see dramatic savings in the different pollutants that are being focused on, or is it going to be offset by such tremendously high costs that it is never worth doing it?
When you look at the CO2, so many things are being done to try and avoid CO2, such as, again, vehicles. They want to take away gas stoves and gas water heaters. We have had legislation recently to address that, no, this isn't something that should just be done by whim, by the stroke of a pen in executive orders by EPA or others.
We have had CRAs, referring to the Congressional Review Act, to say, no, we are going to let people keep what they have because it really hasn't been shown that there is going to be a dramatic positive effect by taking away people's appliances, their gas stoves, vehicles, what have you.
Let's go back a little bit. I want to talk about greenhouse gas and the efforts by the EPA in different administrations.
In 2003, under the Bush administration, there was a petition submitted to the EPA for the agency to regulate greenhouse gases and CO2 under the Clean Air Act. It led to litigation that went all the way up to the Supreme
Once the Supreme Court made that ruling in 2007, 2 years later, the Obama administration, under their EPA, jumped to issue a 2009 finding that CO2 greenhouse gas endangered public health and that these emissions from new motor vehicles contribute to that endangerment. That is the endangerment clause that we talked about.
With these actions, the EPA is now required to establish CO2 standards for new motor vehicles for upcoming years. Up until that 2007 ruling, EPA generally did not regulate CO2 and greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles. We saw that, in '09, as I mentioned, the Obama administration moved in that direction, and we have been hearing about CO2 as a pollutant ever since.
Let's go back to basic school chemistry and science on that. CO2 is an important element in the atmosphere, even though it is only this tiny fraction at 0.04 percent. It is enough to sustain plant life. It is an important element, a key element.
We breathe oxygen, basically. We breathe all this, but oxygen is what we carry in our bloodstreams. CO2 is basically the same oxygen for plant life, tree life, all of it.
Interestingly, if we are too successful at reducing CO2 below the 0.02 percent level, you will see plant life starting to die off. You will see, with certain agricultural and horticultural operations, some will put up greenhouses in order to get the new developed plants to grow faster. Maybe for retail sales, so you can buy your tomatoes at the market to plant in your garden, they will inject extra CO2 into that to boost the speed of the plants. That shows right there firsthand that CO2 is essential to plant life and tree life.
If we are making that an existential threat, then we are really missing an important key to the science. Even though back in '09, in that area, everybody wanted to say that the science was settled. This is a catastrophe waiting to happen, that has been happening ever since, especially in my home State of California, where they are hell-bent on taking away people's choices on their vehicles, gas stoves, gas leaf blowers, and whatever you can think of, even--catch this--generators.
Think of what a generator does during an emergency. Generally, they are pretty portable and are needed when there is no electricity available in an area. A lot of times, this might be up in the hills or in the woods where there is no electricity anyway or in a remote area, maybe out on a farm. Maybe you need to weld something on your farm equipment, so there is a generator on the truck that can hook to the welder. A lot of people have home generators that are fuel powered, frequently gas powered, some diesel powered.
Let's say they get their way and ban fuel-powered generators of all types. Hospitals have backup generators when the power goes out there. Lord knows, in my part of the State here, we have seen plenty of power outages where we have what is called public safety power shutoffs in northern California because we have so many forest fires. Some of them have been started by the interaction of trees and tree branches and such with power lines. You get two bad results when that happens. A tree falling into a power line or a large branch, et cetera, sparks and causes fire.
The two bad outcomes frequently will cause a blackout. The power will be knocked out, but the things that are more dramatic and more noticeable in the long term are the fires that could come from that and then torch tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands and, in one case, a million acres. In my district, a perfectly healthy-looking tree that had been inspected and deemed to be okay fell into a power line. That is how the Dixie fire started and burned 1 million acres.
What are the effects of that fire on CO2, air quality, and all that? It is really bad.
The Dixie fire, for example, was, as I mentioned, 1 million acres of such concentrated smoke that that smoke plume got up into the atmosphere in such density that it made it up into the jet stream that comes across west to east in this country and affected the East Coast.
People in New York, Philadelphia, and even here in D.C. were advised for a several-day period to not go out and do physical athletic activities outside because the smoke was seen as above healthy levels.
This isn't just in my backyard, where it happens so often that people are almost used to having brown skies because of burning forests. Our fire is affecting the East Coast.
You noticed it a year or two ago with the Canadian fires, where it was coming down from either Ontario or Quebec, much more close by, and suffering those effects, too. That came all the way from back there. That is a result of regulations not allowing us to manage the forest in such a way that you can put fire out much more simply and sooner.
You are always going to have fires. You are always going to have burning forests. The last 50 years or so, because of the way they have not been managed, the forests are now so dense, so full of burnable material, burnable fuels, that it is extremely difficult to put a fire out.
We need what is called shaded fuel breaks, which in plain English means thinning areas of the forest. We should prioritize around towns and cities, of course, but any area that you can do that means that you are going to have a lower density of trees per acre. A lot of the brush and other material that gathers on the bottom of the forest, that biomaterial can actually be used for positive things.
There are folks talking to us even more about expanding the use of that for pellets to export, positive export, positive for our economy and our trade deficit, but also for cleaning up our forests and putting jobs back in our forests.
For some reason, we are the number one importer of wood products of the Western countries. Let's get some wins on that. Let's get some wins for everybody on the management of the forest and the negative environmental effects you have on air quality as well as water quality. You have all the ash that is left behind on these catastrophic fires that basically leave you a moonscape that is washed into the streams, brooks, and rivers, and eventually the lakes, such as lakes in northern California that store mass amounts of water--4.5 million acre-feet in Lake Shasta, 3.5 million acre-feet in Lake Oroville, when they are allowed to be full. That is the water supply for most of the rest of California. It is the drinking water for L.A. It is important.
What do you do with that water quality with all that stuff flowing in there because we are not managing the forest lands? When we harm ourselves with CO2 information that really isn't accurate or proportional, we hamper our ability to do much of anything.
I am excited to see that our new EPA Administrator, Lee Zeldin, is taking a look at this again. We are not just accepting that, back in 2009, the Obama administration was able to just say that the science is settled.
What do you know about science? Science is never settled. Science is constantly evolving at some level or another as new information is found. I don't know how many things you can really decide are the final word in the area of science, biology, or what have you. We are always learning more, so how you can have the whole equation on whether it is mankind's involvement or what nature does with forests and trees--in the rain forest, for example, as plant life grows and dies, as it absorbs oxygen doing so, it releases CO2 when it dies off.
What is happening in the ocean? There are a lot of sources where CO2 could be happening. That is under the assumption that we think CO2 is bad, but ask a tree. CO2 is good. Pretty much everything is carbon-based anyway in our world and our lives.
If we are going to eliminate CO2, which I don't know that we can eliminate that much, down to 0.02 percent, that would be really dangerous to do so.
I am pleased that under the executive order that President Trump put out, the EPA Administrator is going to look at recommendations on the 2009 endangerment finding as it was called
Remember, I talked about the main cost drivers of inflation and why everything is so expensive now, including eggs and fuel. Our fuel in California is about $1.25 or $1.50 a gallon higher than the national average. That is another thing we get to enjoy under the regime in California.
Taking a look at this endangerment finding and saying the science isn't settled is going to be extremely important. We can actually get some more science involved back in how we are going to look at CO2.
The other greenhouse gases, I think we need to continue to look at methane and NOX, nitrogen oxide. Those are still issues we need to look at, and I think certainly that Mr. Zeldin over there at EPA is going to be responsible in that area.
I also am very glad that we are asking the question once again, because if you watch this floor very much, you might see me pretty often talking about this chart because so many people have been scared into believing that CO2 is this giant existential danger.
I ask people frequently when we have gatherings or meetings and sway into this topic a little bit. Most people on the street believe the atmosphere is somewhere between, typically, 20 to 50 percent of CO2. Again, they are dumbfounded when they find out that it is 0.04 percent.
We are exporting our jobs to the Pacific Rim, Mexico, or other places because we don't want to do it here. Part of the findings is that when you look at the whole equation, we are not helping overall global emissions. The finding itself states that even if the U.S. cut its emissions to zero, global emissions would keep increasing because of countries like China, India, and others in that neighborhood. They would keep going up.
Remember the Olympics that were held in China just a few years ago? The air is so nasty there in those large cities that they actually shut down their industries for about a couple of weeks leading up to the Olympics and during the Olympics so they could try to have blue skies and cleaner air for the athletes participating back then.
We don't have to do that stuff here, except when we have forest fires. Of course, no one wants to go outside if the forest fire is affecting them. That gets down to a forest management thing I will talk about on a different day.
We have achieved so much, and we have achieved good things with regulations in this Nation here going back to '66 and '68. A lot of those rules came in on car emissions, devices, and such that have helped.
The L.A. Basin is a lot cleaner than it was in the late sixties and earlier seventies and probably before that, as well. We have done so much. The technology with engines these days, with the internal combustion engines, called ICE, is so tremendously much cleaner-burning now than it used to be. Credit doesn't seem to be given to industry for doing that. Truck engines and tractor engines are up to Tier 4 now. They burn pretty darn clean.
We can still do more to improve, but if industry is allowed to improve on its own as technology is done organically instead of being forced by a regulation that is taking it in the wrong direction, away from improving what we have, we are not going to get there.
We are going to have these electric vehicles that nobody can afford and nobody really wants, other than the elitists and what have you. They are being forced upon people, and they are forced upon the industry that is trying to develop a way to make it better.
Battery technology, I am sorry, has not caught up to the desire to have battery-powered vehicles. Storage batteries, it takes so much area, so many resources to build the batteries, so many metals, metals that we are not allowed to mine in this country due to EPA and other regulations.
In one case, a copper mine took 29 years to permit. Copper is going to be dramatically needed as more and more AI technology; AI centers are built. The amount of electricity to run them is going to be tremendous as well.
Where are we going to get the energy to do all this? Well, we have these clean forms of energy that have been shunned for a long time. One form is hydroelectric power. In my own district, just recently, they took four hydroelectric dams down that generated CO2-free power. Hydroelectric creates zero CO2 in making that electricity. Nuclear power creates zero CO2.
The type of power they make is 24-hour, 7-day a week availability of power. You don't have to wait for the Sun to come up, the rain and clouds to go away, or for the wind to blow, as is necessary for a windmill or solar plant to become effective. I am not against those forms of power, but I am just looking at what is the efficiency of them versus what we know has worked for a long time.
The country has moved away from coal. Coal is still a very important component. Coal could still be a win if we would redesign the power plants and allow them to be retrofitted. Maybe it is a good backup plan. I am not sure. That is a tougher debate.
Natural gas plants are very, very clean running plants. We need more of them, as we have so much natural gas available after the miracle of hydraulic fracturing was invented and is being perfected more each day. There is so much potential there. It is important that we up the production of natural gas and the export of it, as well.
Look at Europe, where Russia built the giant pipeline to bring gas into Germany, and other areas I suppose. When you look at the history of that area of the world there, I am astounded that Europe would want to be dependent upon Russia for natural gas. They could take that 90- degree valve and shut it off anytime if they didn't like what Germany or others were doing politically or what have you.
We have a much stronger relationship with Europe. We are in NATO together, which we need to maintain that relationship. I am glad to see President Trump is also requiring stronger participation by NATO folks to pay for more of their own way. Why should that be on the American taxpayer? They seem to be getting it. Germany was talking more recently about participating at a stronger level. That is all good. We are still their friends. We are still allies together. There is nothing wrong with that.
Why would they want to be dependent on the Russian bear for their natural gas?
What if there was actually not a political crisis but just some kind of hiccup anyway?
The U.S. has tremendous ability to develop more natural gas and export it via those big ships to Europe. We should be doing a lot more of that as a good ally and a good trading partner. It will help with trade.
We were talking about trade in agriculture a little bit earlier today. We are not having a lot of great results on that trade. Dairy, for example, is really suffering in this country as there is a tremendous amount of imports coming in, kind of undercutting our dairies. Why is that?
Why are we seeing so much Canadian lumber and wheat coming down? I see it as I sit at the railroad crossings in northern California when a train goes by. Why are we importing all that, especially the lumber? We burn hundreds of thousands, millions of acres each year that are not being managed by the Forest Service or by allowing those contracts to be let out for the lumber, the timber that needs to be taken from those areas.
The first thing you will hear from the environmental groups: Oh, you want to clear-cut. You are just in it for big lumber, big timber companies.
That is not what it is at all. We are managing these lands. We will be much more successful. The forests will be healthier, and it is better for the wildlife. Nothing is good for the wildlife when you burn a million acres. The habitats of the spotted owl, cougar, and raccoon, and everything else goes up with them, and the water quality, on and on and on.
It comes back to these choking regulations that don't allow us to do what we need to do. I am getting back to the CO2 and the work the EPA will be looking at.
As I mentioned, the U.S. has cut emissions in absolute terms as a share of global emissions since really the 1990s. Despite our increasing population, larger economy, we have been able to accomplish that.
An important thing to note about the ruling by the 2009 Obama EPA is that Congress has not directly given the EPA the authority to regulate these emissions. It was by the sweep of a pen in the Supreme Court.
Well, isn't Congress the most responsive, the closest to the people, especially this House, as each of us represents about 750,000 people?
We have the most opportunity to interact most directly with our constituents and hear from them. That is the model that was set up by the Founders. The U.S. House is the one most directly responsive to the people and has 2-year election cycles so that if they get tired of us they can throw the bums out.
There has to be a responsiveness. It has a responsibility in that it really should be leading the way on how regulations are going to affect those same people that send us here.
That is why we have, thankfully, for the EPA and others, the Congressional Review Act where if a regulation is put in and it seems to be overreaching, overbearing, we have the opportunity in the House to hear those. We have passed a couple lately that say, no, we are going to put you back in your more reasonable role as a regulatory agency.
What we are hearing from the people is they don't want their light bulbs taken away. They don't want their cars taken away. They don't want all these things to happen to them when the science is unsettled about if it is really helping anything. They know it is driving costs up. They know they have fewer choices.
The Supreme Court has already had another recent ruling where the EPA has tried to move even more aggressively to regulate emissions and they have found that some of these rulings were illegal in their overreach, so it comes back to us to legislate on it.
Let's take credit for what we have done. Let industry take credit for having done the research and development to make cleaner running vehicles, more efficient vehicles, cleaner power plants, more efficient appliances than ever. Just over time, by attrition, when more and more of these are replaced with the newer stuff, you are going to see improvements in that, even with the increased population and more things going on with the economy.
As I mentioned AI a minute ago, the amount of need for electricity is going to grow dramatically just for that. If we did have all these electrify-everything mandates, electricity needs to be grown as well.
How are we going to do that if we are not building more power plants, like nuclear power, natural gas, hydroelectric?
They are after more hydroelectric plants in northern California, Washington, and Oregon. It is all about tearing dams out right now. We are seeing some of the negative effects.
Let's talk about the Klamath River. As soon as they tore the dams out, millions of cubic yards of silt flushed right down the Klamath River. I have the pictures in the other room--I have shown them to you enough times probably--of dead fish, dead wildlife, and the muck that has been moving down the Klamath River. That is a pretty negative effect from all the hype of what it was going to do to help that.
With all this happening, we still have a pretty amazing, strong economy in this country. I am very, very pleased that President Trump is trying to restore that after the 4 dark years of the Biden administration not really paying attention to much of what we need, especially in the rural sector with the economies we used to have in timber, mining and agriculture as well.
Due to the timber industry being devastated for most of the last 50 years, we have to resort to something called the Secure Rural Schools Act that myself and Mr. Neguse from Colorado are putting forward. It is a fund that comes from the U.S. Treasury to make sure that the schools and roads in local areas have some of the money they need that they used to get from timber receipts.
When you cut timber in those areas, they had this fee upon that timber that went to the local roads, local schools and counties, et cetera. With the sweeping away of the timber industry and so many mills that we have lost in the West, the negative effect it has had on those local funds has been required to be replaced by the Secure Rural Schools Act that we are again putting forward.
We have enjoyed pretty good bipartisan support in the past on that, but it does have a budget effect, so we have to fight for it every year. Wouldn't we rather fight for the timber receipts and not have to come hat in hand to Congress, to the American people and say, yeah, we need this fund for something that got taken away by a regulatory act?
It is something we need anyway. It would be better for these wood and paper products to come from American forests instead of us being the number one importer of wood products, as I mentioned.
Why are we doing that? We are not forced to take these products by any type of trade agreement.
Certainly, President Trump is looking at how we are going to even the score with other countries via tariffs. Tariffs are controversial, I get it. I have long believed, just personally--this is as a nonpolitician, when I was much younger--you know, our policy with other countries ought to just be a mirror. You treat us how we will treat you or vice versa. That is what our trade policy is going to be. If you are going to tariff us, then I guess we should tariff you back until we get to the point where we can just get rid of the tariffs and whoever can build the best product or compete the best is going to be able to trade with each other. India has been pretty bad on that. Even some of our best trading partners we have these tariffs. I hope that ultimately, if that has to be a stick until we can get to the carrot--and I hope we get to the carrot soon--then that is something we have to look at.
I am encouraged that under this administration we are looking at things in a different way, maybe more scientifically than we have in a long time, but the greenhouse gas thing is going to be very detrimental long term to our economy and the things that we do well unnecessarily.
I mean, in California, they are still pushing forward on this high- speed rail project. You have heard me talk about this maybe a few times. What started as an idea back in 2008 and put before the California voters was a $33 billion fast train from S.F. to L.A.
Well, this is 2025. That is 17 years, and not a single mile of track has been laid yet. There have been kids born and graduated high school during the amount of time that this hasn't been done.
This fast train from S.F. to L.A. was projected to be finished by 2020. That is what the voters were told when they approved the bonds by a narrow 52 to 48 percent. Okay. We will put forth $9 billion of bonds to kick-start the investment.
I love that word ``investment'' around here, meaning we are going to spend your dollars, we are going to invest.
That said, they narrowly agreed to that because private investment was going to come along as well. They would be attracted to it. This will be a great project, a money maker. It will be a great thing. Private investment has stayed away in droves. Nobody wants to come in on this unless they can have guarantees that they will make money.
However, in that bond initiative specifically, in order to pass it, because people would be warning against that, it specifically outlined that no subsidies of train tickets, what have you, are allowed. Now they are going to try to find ways around that, which is another lie told to the voters on that proposition. Still, they forge ahead. Many years later, not a single mile of track has been laid.
They have these bridges and causeways built, which one day will be monuments to the idiocy of this project. Still, they forge ahead.
You can only identify between that $9 billion--and then right back in 2009 there are kids in junior high school that saw that happen--or still in high school, I mean, that saw during that timeline when the Obama administration had the ARRA funds, which was
How many years can you do a project and have it still be deemed shovel-ready when we are 17 years in on high-speed rail?
Shovel-ready projects, they had a component for high-speed rail around the country. Three other States wanted a piece of that. After a while, looking at the cost, they gave it back, so it all went into one pile. California said: We will take that $3.5 billion. Here we are 17 years later without having a mile of track even laid.
We are having an investigation into that, too. I appreciate that Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy came out to L.A. a little over a week ago and announced that they are going to be auditing that, reviewing that, and seeing if the American taxpayers are getting a bang for the buck for the money that had been, not really asked for, but had put in there, that original $3.5 billion in 2009, and then right at the end of the Biden era another approximately $4 billion.
As I started to mention, you can only identify between all this money, the $9 billion, the two chunks from Federal, and then California has implemented a cap-and-trade act to tax people's ability to make CO2, as in manufacturing. If you are a certain size or larger manufacturer, you have to go buy the right to do what you have always done if that produces CO2, you know, 0.04 percent of the atmosphere in that.
Mr. Speaker, they have created their own phony currency. They just had the auction for it. They have an auction where people have to go bid for this. They had it sometime in February and raised some money for the State government to spend. About a billion of that is dedicated each year since then to the high-speed rail.
If all of these numbers are added up and if they are somehow allowed to keep the $3.5 to $4 billion that Secretary Duffy is looking at--that I hope to claw back--adding all that up, it is about $18 billion or $19 billion. The price of that rail project has quadrupled since its inception in 2008 from the $33 billion to now about $130 billion.
Let's look at these numbers for a bit. The $130 billion, after all this trouble, after all this battle to get Federal money--two chunks of a little over $3 billion, the $9 billion from the voters, and this $1 billion at a time for the CO2 cap-and-trade money generated in California with that fake currency they are taxing people that produce--$18 billion to $19 billion, they are about $110 billion to $112 billion short of the $130 billion that is commonly accepted to be the total price.
They have extracted maybe seven or eight out of the Federal Government. They want another $110 billion, and the private sector is not coming forward to finance this thing because they know it is a loser. They can recognize that.
Are they going to hit the people of California with another bond? Instead of just $9 billion, it is a bond of $110 billion which takes 30 years to pay back once they have doubled the price of that. Where are they going to get the $110 billion?
Secretary Duffy of the Department of Transportation is right. He is smart to look at the $4 billion still hanging right now just recently given by the Biden administration. Let's claw that back now and let them figure it out in California, my home State. Let them figure it out. Why should the other 49 States pay for something that isn't working at all and that is so late?
They promised--back when this came along in 2008, 2009, 2010--it will probably provide a million jobs for California. Are we kidding ourselves? People up there on that dais were promising that number.
It turns out, after review a couple of years later in a State senate hearing, they said we meant a million job years. Job years is a different terminology than what they had been telling people.
Currently, they claim there are 14,000 jobs involved in building whatever the portions of high-speed rail they are doing. When we do the math on that, 14,000 divided into that million job years, that means that at about 70 years of 14,000 people at a million job years, it will take about 70 years to make that math work, which they are right on track. It is going to take about 70 years to build this rail if they actually got the financing. I don't know that anybody wants to come forward with $110 billion to continue this.
I thank Secretary Sean Duffy for looking at this. I thank EPA Director Lee Zeldin for looking at the CO2 side of it here because most of the premise of the high-speed rail in California is that it will be a CO2 saver. We have this electric train. Where does electricity come from? How many trains can they actually run on that track from northern California to southern California to displace Southwest Airlines and all the other airlines that have a heck of a lot of traffic?
How much is the ticket going to cost to ride this since it is not allowed to be subsidized? It will probably be in the rage of $300. They say it will be cheaper than airlines. How will it be cheaper with these rates? It can't be. It can't possibly be. People will ride it for the novelty.
Even at one point they said, in order technically for it to be the high-speed rail going from San Francisco to L.A. in 2\1/2\ hours, they only have to run one train as an express each day to do that. Other trains can stop in little burbs along the way, which means it won't be a high-speed rail anymore except in between the cities.
It will probably end up being a 4-hour train anyway by the time they do that. What have they gained? What have they gained for all that money? What have they gained for all that pain--from the ag land, the farmland, a rendering plant that is in the way of it?
Rendering plants are very essential, where they take discarded farm animals that have died: dairy, horses, whatever. To resite a rendering plant isn't popular. No one wants to be next to one of those, especially in this day and age where people don't understand rural issues and rural needs. They ask: What is all this dust? What is all this noise? What are all these tractors going slowly down the road? It is making our food is what it is doing, but we will worry about all that later. Maybe we can import all that.
It brings back this old poster I always use here. We are not growing the food in California if we are not growing these crops. Somewhere between 90 and 100 percent of these crops listed here are grown in California. If we don't grow them, then we have to import them or do without them. We have to pay higher prices.
We won't have the stability of where they come from, all because it is being regulated out of business. The water is being taken away for these growers. The land is being taken away in some cases like this debacle going on at the Point Reyes National Seashore Park where farmers for dairy and beef ranches are being kicked off right now because the national parks have muscled them off, along with environmental organizations. They are muscling them off because of phony NEPA stuff that they have made up to move them out of the way.
They say the Tule elk will now thrive there because of that. Cattle and Tule elk get along just fine on these lands. Cattle are very essential for helping maintain the landscape, grazing at a level that helps with keeping it healthy. In areas where it is dry, it keeps it safe from fire.
That is more government regulation muscling people out there. That is what we see. That is why we have the Congressional Review Act. That is why we have what we are looking at here with DOGE flipping things over, finding these phony-baloney contracts, and giving it even to some of the media here, to buy subscriptions to the media to keep them pumped up.
We see how many people are getting laid off from some of the higher levels of media and some of the programs that are closing because maybe they are not getting these hidden subsidies anymore from things like USAID.
It is disgusting when a lot of people see what is going on and what this Federal Government has been getting away with behind the scenes. It is exciting to see the rocks flipped over and watch the cockroaches run away on this.
There is criticism about how some of it is coming about, and I think that is being looked at and refined. To throw away the process of making government accountable is a giant mistake if that is allowed to happen. The rhetoric flying out of here on that is just amazing. People are defending basically this massive government waste and these
I understand. Tax dollars aren't contributions. People don't have the option of making these contributions for these investments. These are mandatory. If people don't pay their taxes, bad stuff happens to them. Wages are garnished. Stuff is taken away and auctioned. A person might even find himself in handcuffs and prosecuted if they think it is a high enough level.
I think the American people need to be optimistic about the direction things are going and not fall for all the scary stories. Again, we have been hearing it all week long. They are going to cut Social Security. They are going to cut billions and billions from Medicaid. Nope. We need to look at how these programs can be made better, but there is nothing in the budget resolution this week that said we are going to do that.
Ongoing, the President has pledged that. We, in Congress, should look at it. How can we make them better? It is by not taking a single benefit away from anybody. Don't buy the lies. Read H. Con. Res. 14 on the budget resolution. It is not even listed in there. Don't buy the lies flying out of this place and that the media keeps pushing.
Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the time and the ability to get some of these ideas across to the American public and our colleagues here.
Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
