W. Akin

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to join you this evening here in the Chamber and talk for a while about what I think a very interesting subject to many, many Americans. If they're not interested in it now, they will be rapidly as this issue develops here in Washington, D.C. What we're talking about is, most specifically, the background on a thing that's called cap-and-trade or cap-and-tax. And ``cap-and-tax'' is probably a better name for it because what we're talking about is a very, very large tax increase that is to be justified because of the great danger, the imminent peril that is created by global warming-- although that has now been called sometimes ``climate change,'' or global warming, or other various names. And soon the Legislature is going to actually be doing the debating and the voting on this very, very large tax increase. Now, the President promised people that there would be no one making $250,000 or less who is going to get any tax increases. But, unfortunately, this tax increase hits all Americans; even the average household will be paying thousands of dollars more. The President promised that nobody making $250,000 or less was going to get any tax increases. Well, we have seen that is not true, and particularly with this cap-and-tax situation, the tax on all kinds of people in the country. In fact, every time you turn a light switch on, you would be paying a tax. So I don't think we can take the President seriously on that promise. Now, the justification for this very large tax increase is the popular subject of global warming, or climate change, or whatever. And that is the general idea that mankind is making CO2--that's the product of burning something. When you burn something, the oxygen in the atmosphere combines with the fuel and it makes CO2. It's the bubbles in soda pop. So we drink CO2, as a matter of fact. And in a sense, the soda pop manufacturer is sequestering the CO2 in bottles of soda pop and you are letting it loose when you open the can. Anyway, the theory is that CO2 is the culprit, and therefore we have to reduce the amount of CO2. And so this tax is being justified to reduce CO2 so the planet won't burn up. That's the fast version of it. So what I thought I would do this evening is to give just a little bit of a historic perspective because sometimes when you go into one of these debates, it's interesting to take a look and see, you know, are we the first people that have ever been talking about this, or is there a historic perspective of some kind on it? And I found that the historic perspective here is somewhat amusing and kind of interesting. So I'm going to take you back to the year 1920. At that time, in 1920, the newspapers were filled with scientific warnings of a fast- approaching glacial age. So in 1920, the scientists were saying that the planet was going to get really cold, there was going to be glaciers running around all over, so we need to be prepared for very wintry weather because there are glaciers that are going to blow around. So that is 1920. 1930s; the predominant scientists at the time reversed themselves to the fact that in the near future there is going to be what they called ``serious global warming.'' So from the twenties to the thirties, the scientists changed. In 1972, Time magazine cited numerous scientific reports of imminent ``run-away glacial activities.'' So now we've gone from global warming to glacial activities again in 1972. In 1975, Newsweek says, Scientific evidence of a great ice age, and we were being called to stockpile food, that maybe what we should be considering doing was melting the ice packs, the icecaps at the North and South Poles to try to stop this tremendous ice age that was coming in 1972 and 1975. But in 1976, the U.S. Government says the Earth is headed into some sort of mini-ice age. So this was continued through the seventies, and now we've gone back to global warming. So over a period of the last hundred years or so, the major scientists--at least the ones that were talking out on this subject-- have reversed themselves three times. I think it gives us some cause to be a little cautious before we jump into a massive tax increase to deal with a problem that has been coming around for the last 100 years, either getting too hot or too cold. Now there were statements made today that say that there is complete agreement that we have global warming and all of the major scientists all agree and the time for debate is over. Particularly, I'm quoting, in 1992, going back to '92, Al Gore made this statement, quote, Only an insignificant fraction of scientists deny the global warming crisis. The time for debate is over. Let's do this quote again. 1992, Al Gore says, ``Only an insignificant fraction of scientists deny the global warming crisis. The time for debate is over.'' Yet in that same year a Gallup poll said that 53 percent of scientists involved--these are the scientists that are involved in the climate change debates and questions--only 53 percent of them didn't agree that there was going to be global warming, 30 percent weren't sure, and only 17 percent believed that global warming had begun in the year 1992. Moving closer to our own time period, just last year you have in The Wall Street Journal a report by an MIT professor, Richard Lindzen, says--this is his quote, There is no consensus on global warming. Now when he made that statement, boy, did he get beat up. All the media and all kinds of people were all over him saying, that was a reckless thing to say that there's no consensus on the subject, which led him, after he'd taken a tremendous amount of political flak, to say that it seems that global warming is more of a political issue than it is a scientific or technical one. And that was the professor from MIT's opinion in that regard. So that's just to try to give us a little bit of an introduction to obviously what is a controversial question. Even if global warming were widely believed to be true by scientists, then there are a whole series of other questions that have to be asked. Can we do anything about it? Should we pass a huge and massive tax increase? Is that necessary? So that's what we're going to talk about. We're joined, as usual, by some really capable people that have taken some time to look into this issue, and I am absolutely delighted to introduce one of those to you now, and that is Congressman Latta from Ohio.

Mr. AKIN. And that makes how much CO2?

Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming, we didn't do a tax increase, did we?

Mr. AKIN. It was because it seemed to make sense--and Americans did it.

Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, it seems to me that if you're a businessman, the way businessmen think--because I used to be in the business world--you give me the rules and we will play the game. If I have got a chemical cracking facility in America and we're taking oil and we're breaking it into different products and things, and I'm going to get a great big tax, one of the things I might consider doing is just moving that overseas. Because if I move that overseas, the jobs go away here. Then I can sell the same products back into this country at a much lower cost, and anybody left in this country is going to be at a tremendous competitive disadvantage. So you're creating an incentive for companies to close American businesses and move them overseas by what we're doing. Somehow or another do we want the government making policies which manipulate the things that businesses do--not based on what is good for our citizens, but based on some silly set of laws that somebody came up with down here in Washington, D.C.; certainly not something I would vote for. I would like to recognize the gentlelady from Minnesota.

Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, do you know what it sounds like to me? This is just another color version of another bailout deal.

Mr. AKIN. We're going to say, Oh my business can't live with this cap-and-tax. So I need a bailout. And so now we're going to get in the business of trading off bailouts. I wonder who's going to get the deal.

Mr. AKIN. Congressman Bishop, if I could jump in here. What you are saying is tremendously important. First of all, you are saying, we don't have to go this route on this great big huge tax. And what's more you are saying, instead of just taxing people as an excuse for not developing responsible American energy, you are saying, we ought to be developing American energy, getting off of our dependence on foreign energy, and that we should be using a plan that advances a whole broad spectrum of different solutions and let the marketplace start solving this problem instead of just depending on taxing everybody unequally but with a tremendous tax. The thing that's unique to me, and sad, someone explained to me the other day that we created a Department of Energy years ago. And do you know why it was created and what its mission was? The interesting thing is it was created so that we could become not so dependent on foreign energy. Now they have increased many, many, many times the number of employees in the Department of Energy, and their whole mission was so that we would not be dependent on foreign energy. And look where we are today. It's gotten worse and worse and worse. So you kind of ask yourself maybe Ronald Reagan was right when he said we ought to get rid of them because we are more dependent on foreign energy. Please proceed, though, Congressman Bishop.

Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, let's take a look. I have got a chart here. It was prepared along the lines of what you're saying. And this is the annual increase of electric costs under the Obama cap-and-tax plan. So this is not specific to your congressional district, but it is specific to your State, Ohio.

Mr. AKIN. And it is specific to other States across the country. I don't know whether or not it's that clear because there's different shades of green here, but this is increase per capita. These are the States that are the darkest green, and it's an increase of over $1,500. That is a whale of a lot of money for somebody to be picking up in an increase in electric costs. Where is that coming out? Well, it's coming in these States here and also, as you mentioned, Indiana, next door to you, and over this way. You can see some of the States, and you've got the ones that are over $1,000 per capita. So this is a very big tax increase, and you can see a whole portion of the Midwest is in that category. We've got quite a lot of them that are over $50. Now people may say, oh, my goodness. Now Congressman Akin, you are a Republican, and you're just trying to scare people about the talk about, this is going to be a big tax increase. But here you have the words of our President at a meeting of the editorial board at the San Francisco Chronicle. This is January 2008. He is very direct in what he is saying, Under my plan of a cap-and-trade or a cap-and-tax system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket. That's just what you're saying, gentleman. It's going to skyrocket in Ohio, but it's going to skyrocket in a lot of other States too. That will cost money. They will pass that money on to consumers. Now a guy from MIT took a look at what they thought that would be per household, and they were looking at $3,000. There is a lot of speculation as to how much it would be. But $3,000 for every household in America, that is really an incredible number and especially when the President has said, I'm not going to raise taxes on people over $250,000. And now we're talking about, you flip the light switch, and you are already getting taxed at an increasing rate. What that does, of course, is makes us uncompetitive. Now there's two ways to deal with jobs that are fleeing overseas. One of them is to tax all the imports coming in, which is a very blunt instrument. It makes the cost to everybody in America go up, and we reward people that are inefficient producers. The other thing is to create a set of laws in our country that allow us to compete competitively with other countries. This is the exact opposite because when you tax electricity and energy production, that's a major part of all of manufacturing, and now we can't compete. So just to your point, we're basically taking those jobs right out of the country at a time where we're concerned about unemployment. I'm just thankful for your joining us. We're joined also by another good friend of ours, a gentleman from Utah (Mr. Bishop), highly respected, and he also agreed to talk a little bit about where we are in this entire situation.

Mr. AKIN. Sears and Roebuck was delighted with that, I'm sure.

Mr. AKIN. Just reclaiming my time, as you take a look at the technology even now that's out there, maybe I suffer as one of the few people here in Congress trained as an engineer, but you start looking at what the possibilities are here. And one of the things that is particularly interesting, and I wonder because I take a look at what Europe is doing and it raises this question and we ought to talk about this a little bit too, and that is, is there a genuine interest in reducing CO2 or is this just a big excuse to levy a big tax on people? Because you go over to Spain and they have a very aggressive antiglobal warming policy there and they closed their nuclear reactors. Now, that makes you kind of wonder because that's one source of energy that we have in America that we have developed that doesn't make any CO2 and it makes very, very clean energy. But just taking a look at what you're saying, take the innovation, first of all, the nuclear power plant. And some people may be fanatics. I like going over to Home Depot or Lowe's or something and looking at their tool section, and they've got all these nifty new tools that run on batteries, and these batteries are getting better and better. They're getting smaller and they're getting much more powerful. So if you put together an improvement in battery technology with nuclear energy and use the nuclear energy to charge up people's batteries in their cars and all, we're talking about a completely different way. And that's just one possibility. But I wanted to get back to my good friend from Utah. You said you wanted to develop one specific area. Please jump right into that.

Mr. AKIN. They call it subprime; is that right?

Mr. AKIN. That is American ingenuity, I suppose.

Mr. AKIN. Just reclaiming my time, you're getting me excited. What you're talking about is a word that my constituents love. It's called ``freedom.'' The idea of freedom, the idea of challenging people's innovation and saying, okay, the first one to do this, this, or this, we're going to give you a prize. I didn't have all of those great examples that you gave us, but people the world over love a chance to win a prize. Plus it gives people a chance to start thinking: I bet you I can win that thing. I've got an idea of how to do that. What a great illustration of a freedom-based solution as opposed to a totalitarian top-down, government-knows-all-the-answers kind of thing and we are going to solve every problem in the world with more taxes and more spending. I like the freedom approach. I think that's a great idea. I want to take my hat off for this American Energy Innovation Act that you're talking about. Sometimes people say that the Republicans don't have solutions. Our solution is called freedom. It's called innovation. It's called imagination. It's called turning the smarts of the American people loose on a problem and see what kind of wonderful things can happen. I'm going to yield to the gentleman from Utah again.

Mr. AKIN. Yes, I just don't think that taxation is a solution to every problem. I think one of the things that has been held up as a shining example for us to follow is the nation of Spain. And we heard about that last week from a very interesting brief we got. And if you could just share with us a little bit about how that system would work. Because when you hear how the system that is very similar to what's being proposed here works in Spain, you are going to go, Oh, my goodness, I am not so sure we really want to be like Spain and doing all of this stuff. Why don't you just share a little bit of that with us, Congressman.

Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, hit those numbers again because you're not saying it that clearly. I didn't quite catch it. When was the last time we sited a new nuclear power plant?

Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, that sort of gets your dander up a little bit to be told you're going to get charged $600 billion and that's going to be the tax because you don't know how to solve this problem and the government can do it for you. The funny thing is we've passed a lot of laws and they have these unintended consequences. And I can tell you right now what's going to happen. You tax the good old boys from Missouri, you tax them on their electricity and on their natural gas or their propane that they're heating their gas with in order to try to get CO2 down, and you know what's going to happen? They're going to get those steel chainsaws out and they're going to be chopping firewood and they're going to be heating with firewood. That's what is going to happen. And it's going to have the effect of creating more CO2 than if you just left the thing alone and not taxed them at $3,000 per household a year. We are joined by other Members of Congress. I did want to be able to get back, though, to Congressman Latta from Ohio so you have a rejoinder in this, and then we have got another fantastic Member joining us tonight as well.

Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, that gets right back to your point. We are basically shipping jobs overseas when we do it because we can't be competitive that way. We have got another fantastic Congressman who has come to the floor, Michele Bachmann from Minnesota. And she is just such a sweet, wonderful lady, but she also is extremely articulate. It's a treat to have you, Congresswoman Bachmann. I yield.

Mr. AKIN. None. So we're all worried about CO2, and yet we have not sited another nuclear plant since 1977. That seems like such an odd thing. I recall when we had the Speaker come into the Science Committee, I think at the beginning of this year or the end of last year, and she was talking about wanting to deal with the global warming thing and all because Al Gore was coming in also and there was going to be this great big pow-wow on the subject. And I asked her, If we're very worried about CO2 and nuclear power plants don't generate any CO2 and we have hundreds of them floating around in ships in the Navy and they have never been a problem technically to us, what's your thought on that, because it sounded to me like you were becoming a little more open minded? Oh, yes, we're becoming more open minded. And yet legislatively you get no credit at all for generating energy that makes no CO2. Now, what's the logic of this? Please help me because I don't get it. I yield.

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. I really appreciate having you here just to clarify and give us the detail on some of these points, Congressman Franks. Congressman Bishop, I thought I remembered that you were a little tight on time, and I would yield to you if you would like to clarify some points that you were making. You were saying that some of these solid rocket motors are actually made in your district and that we're basically losing our industrial base capability to try to continue building some of these things, and that's, of course, worrisome as well. I yield.

Mr. AKIN. So, now, that's the boost phase. But I want to jump over to the gentleman from Colorado here. Congressman Lamborn, I appreciate your work on this and also your concern for our country. Please jump in.

Mr. AKIN. So then if you catch it in boost phase. The other thing is it's really fragile, isn't it? I mean, it's got all of these gadgets and tanks of pressurized fuel. You don't have to do much to it, and it gets it all confused. It just literally blows right over the enemy's territory and they get to do the cleanup.

Mr. AKIN. It's a pleasure to be able to join you this nice spring afternoon. On a somewhat different subject than we have talked about in the last several weeks, the subject we're going to be dealing with for the next hour is the subject of missile defense. It's a rather interesting story. It involves some history. It also involves some very interesting sort of political wheeling and dealing between various nations, and it is of particular interest to us because it is the subject of defending our homeland and our lives. The story starts, at least as my memory allows, going back some years, back to a thing called the Antiballistic Missile, the ABM Treaty of 1972. That was an agreement between a number of different nations not to develop a missile defense. Now what does that mean exactly? What it means is different nations were putting together two pieces of technology. The first was the ability to make missiles. That was started at my old alma mater, actually, by a guy by the name of Robert Goddard, who was an experimenter, and he was doing experiments like you might see kids do to make model rockets and things. So people started to realize that you could put a weapon on the end of a missile and could shoot it at your enemy. That idea had been done with skyrockets before that with just black powder. The Chinese did that, to some degree, and they even used them on Fort McHenry. But this was a new development, and this was coupled with the idea of these nuclear warheads. The nuclear warhead put a whole new different meaning on things, because it was such a powerful weapon that if you could put a nuclear warhead onto a missile and then shoot that at your enemy, you didn't even have to be too accurate, even, and it would cause tremendous damage. So as I was just graduating from engineering school, what was going on was that we had negotiated a treaty with the Soviet Union called the ABM treaty in 1972, and what it said was that we were not going to defend ourselves from nuclear missiles. Now, that is kind of a crazy idea in a way, because the job of a nation is to defend their own populace. The main job that we have in Congress, if you were to say, what is your main job? One of the main things needs to be to defend America, to defend our homeland. Yet this treaty said: We agree that we are not going to defend ourselves. In fact, the whole thing was called MAD, and indeed it was mad, Mutually Assured Destruction. If you shoot a nuclear weapon at us, we'll shoot one back at you. Everybody melts down and everybody loses. So the theory is that that will create stability. Well, it was not so clear it was going to create stability, because if one guy could shoot first and take the other guy down, then it was not such a good thing not to be able to defend yourself. And so it was that we went through a number of decades from the early seventies with this philosophy of mutually assured destruction. And it was really challenged in 1983 by Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan started doing some thinking and saying there has got to be a better way to do this thing than to have the Soviets and the Chinese aiming all these missiles at us, and they could melt down our different cities. So he came up with the idea of what was called SDI, Strategic Defense Initiative. He spoke at some length and did a very good job selling the idea that America should be looking at defending ourselves from these weapons. One of the things that most people didn't know and that he educated the American public on was the fact that a foreign nation could shoot a missile from one continent to the other. We could see it on the radar coming in. We would say: New York City, you have half an hour before you're turned into dust, into a nuclear cinder, and there wasn't a thing we could do about it. So Ronald Reagan said, there has got to be a better way to skin the cat than that and so he came up with the Strategic Defense Initiative. His detractors called it Star Wars, which actually didn't hurt from a marketing point of view. So Ronald Reagan talked about the different technologies that could be deployed in order to try to stop one of these incoming missiles. That became kind of a hallmark of one of the things that Republicans stood for was missile defense, and it was one of the things that the Democrats decided they were against. They didn't like missile defense. Well, why was it they didn't like it? They had two reasons: One, it wouldn't work. And, two, it was too expensive. Also, they said it would destabilize relations between the countries, as though they were so stable during the Cold War period. So that is what happened in 1983. Ronald Reagan made that proposal. It wasn't until actually many years later when I got to Congress, in 2002, that President Bush decided that it was time to move forward on this thing and protect our country. So he proposed and actually initiated the changes to give notice to the different countries that were involved in the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and said: You've got your 6 months' notice. We're going to start developing missile defense. Now, that gives us a little bit of the background. I am joined here today and I am greatly honored to be able to have one of the outstanding experts in the U.S. Congress here on missile defense joining me on the floor, and that is my good friend, Trent Franks from Arizona. We are going to hear what Trent has to say and kind of get into this subject. We are going to be joined by other Congressmen talking about something that is so fundamentally simple that it is very hard for me to understand how anybody could be opposed to our government defending our citizens from nuclear weapons. I would now yield time to my friend from Arizona, Congressman Franks. Thank you for joining us.

Mr. AKIN. It is such a treat for me tonight to be able to share this time with my colleagues, people who are patriots, good friends of mine, people who love this country, want to see our cities and our citizens defended, people who continue in the tradition of Ronald Reagan. I am a little bit surprised that we want to be cutting these programs. I don't think it's the right thing to do. I don't think if the American public knew about our vulnerability, knew about the development of North Korea being able to fire missiles from North Korea and actually hit parts of America, this is not something that we want to play around with. We want to have a robust capability, and we need to make that investment, and the idea that we don't have enough money is absolute foolishness.