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Floor Speech
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Mr. MANCHIN. Mr. President, I rise today to talk about how the current process that we are in right now with the energy challenges we have, not just in our country but around the world, and how the committee process, the committee process that we are working on, can help relieve the challenges that the American public have right now with high prices at the gas pump, high prices they are receiving in their homes for heating and all the necessities they have.
What is at risk right now--and I want people to understand. What is at risk is the energy independence and energy security of the United States of America. If we are going to remain the superpower of the world, if we are one country that has it all, you better have energy independence. If you can't produce your own energy and you are going to ask other people around the world to do what you won't do for yourself but you have the ability to do it and the resources to do it, God help us all. That is what we are dealing with.
So I am going to talk about how Congress can provide some relief here.
The 2022 Energy Independence and Security Act we have been working on is going to be paramount to maintaining what we have. That means that we have to focus on not blaming each other. This has become a personal thing back and forth, back and forth.
Some people on the extreme left--liberals--don't like it because they want many changes. We have some people in the conference over here, my Republican friends, who have always been for it, but now the leadership has made it personal to be against it. But let me tell you who suffers--it is all the people. All the American citizens are going to suffer if we don't do something.
We are all citizens of this great country, and we are all so grateful for having the opportunities we have by living here. But we have an abundant amount of energy--an abundant amount of energy that we can produce cleaner than anywhere else in the world.
I have always said let's do decarbonization. We all should be committed to decarbonize to help the atmosphere and to help the climate. That is our responsibility as human beings and especially in a developed nation in the developing world.
Decarbonizing means two things, however you intend to interpret it. Some people want to decarbonize by basically eliminating anything that has fossil. Well, guess what. Our friends in Europe tried that. Our European friends tried that. Look where they are.
Then there are those of us who want to basically say: We can decarbonize by producing more fossil, which is cleaner in the United States of America, and basically dispersing the dirty fossils produced around the world. That is all we are saying.
When you have oil and gas coming from Venezuela, which is produced with no oversight whatsoever--dirtier than any place in the world--we were going to go to them and remove sanctions to help us? That makes no sense. We were going to ask Iran, which is the most prolific terrorist supporter in the world, which made no sense whatsoever. When we are asking Saudi Arabia to please produce more oil to help us--no support-- it makes no sense at all.
So this is what we are talking about. I have this item here that kind of spells out what we are confirming. Here is the common permitting timelines for energy and minerals projects. The timeline for the United States is a minimum of 5 to 10 years--a minimum of 5 to 10 years; Canada, 1 to 3 years; Australia, 1 to 3 years, and they haven't deleted any of their oversight for review. They haven't deleted any of that.
Now let me tell you the extremes that are going on in the world today. The European Union, which has had a pretty stringent oversight on environment, they are considering emergency bypassing all environmental reviews because it is critical to them. Energy has been weaponized by Putin. Energy has been weaponized, and we in America can offset that. We can.
No matter what you want to build, whether it is transmission, pipelines, hydropower dams, more often than not, it takes too long. It drives up cost. You can double your cost within a 5- to 6-, 7-year period, double from what the original cost may be in projected cost. Today's energy and mineral projects, as I have said before, take too long.
Then you come over here, look basically at what the U.S. citizens-- all 330 million people--are subjected to. Natural gas, up 200 percent. The cost of natural gas, 200 percent. The cost of natural gas in Europe, 1,100-percent increase--1,100 percent. Predicted by next year, some utility--homes will be paying $7,000 a month. They are going to be subsidized by the government; they can't do that forever. Can you imagine those types of outrageous costs? Gasoline. Gasoline is up 67 percent, under both this administration and previous administration--67 percent. Electricity is up 15 percent and climbing and climbing.
When you have countries, such as Australia and Canada, that are doing it and doing it in a clean fashion but also doing it in an accelerated fashion, that is something we should be looking at. We have talked about permitting for years and years and years. If you are on the renewable side and you want all renewable, no fossil whatsoever, you can't get a transmission line done. If you are going to build a wind farm or a solar farm in the middle of the desert where there are no people and you have got a build to take the electrons, take that electricity back into the marketplace, you have got to cross a multitude of State lines.
You have got to have permitting reform to get it done. You are not going to be able to deliver the energy that people need. Look at our friends, whether it be in California or look at what has happened in Texas--all this. It is very, very fragile what is going on.
But then the good news is, next week, we are going to have an opportunity to help accelerate these energy projects clear across the country and the needs that we all have, if we don't let politics get in the way. If we basically look at what the United States of America needs, what the people in this country need, and what they want to make sure that we have the energy independence to do it ourselves and not rely on foreign supply chains, that is what it is about.
I have always said, if I can go home and explain it, if I can talk to all of you and explain it, I can vote for it; I can explain what we are doing. I truly can--whether it be from the IRA, a bill that basically gives us a pathway to walk and chew gum, provide the energy we need for today but also invest in the energy we need in the future. We are doing both, but you can't do them unless you have permitting reform.
Now, everyone thinks this is a side deal. There is no side deal. We talked about all of this at one time. We put this project together under one auspice of energy independence and the security this Nation needs and the relief the citizens need from high inflation--that is what--and also the support that we need for our allies in Europe that are having a difficult time.
So let me lay out the facts and explain why voting for energy permitting reform is something that should make sense to each and every one of my colleagues on both my Republican side and Democrat side. Put plainly, with the state of energy prices, our constituents across the country, they can't afford for the politics to stand in the way of a long overdue, bipartisan action on energy permitting reform.
Domestically, American families and businesses are feeling the pain. This is Putin's energy war. I won't acknowledge this as a Russian war. This is one demagogue who basically has brought the havoc and the unrest that we have in the world--one man, Putin--and he has basically weaponized energy like we have never seen and never thought would be done, and this must be answered. We have the infrastructure, and we have the resources. I have said that before.
American natural gas prices average around $9 per million of Btu--$9 per million. I mean, most of this energy comes from my State of West Virginia--a lot of the gas does--because we have the Marcellus and Utica shale, which are probably the richest deposits of natural gas that we have ever seen in this country, let alone the world. But with that, those prices were in the $2.50 to $3 range. It balances out pretty well to $5, but at $9 it does not.
Look at what the Europeans are paying. The Europeans are paying an astronomical $60 and $70 equivalent to the same MCF--$60 to $70 versus our $9, which we think is outrageous. This is the crunch that we are in.
Even with the cost savings that we have achieved by energy efficiency, electricity and home energy costs are up, and Americans are concerned about reliability after watching things that are taking a heck of a hit right now.
The changing energy mix has not yielded affordability for American families evenly, in part, because we haven't been able to knit together the widespread resources with transmission and the delivery of this energy. That is the hardest thing we have. You can only do that by building more infrastructure. You can't do it by hoping one skips over another to get you what you need. You have got to have infrastructure for this transmission to pipelines to get you the energy you need.
The consumer price index tells the story. Consumers paid 16 percent more for their electricity service and 33 percent more for their gas services, and it is only going to get worse, not better. Absolutely.
I am grateful that we have made progress addressing the price at the pump. As we said, a gallon of gasoline remains 67 percent higher than it did 5 years ago. These are the type of pocketbook issues--they truly are--that are impacting day-to-day decisions Americans make. People are making decisions on how they are going to get from one day to the next, one month to the next, and what will happen next year. They are making those decisions. They are making them when the gas prices are still too high, when the energy prices are absolutely too high, and the unrest from supply chains is making it almost impossible to do the things or have the things you need or that you want.
I have heard my colleagues on both sides of the aisle propose a variety of solutions to address the rising costs of energy for American consumers, whether it be through more oil or gas, a switch to electric vehicles. Let me ask you, Mr. President, where do they think the electricity comes from if they buy an electric vehicle? It has got to be produced. It has got to be produced. You have got California, I am understanding they are saying they want all-electric vehicles by a certain date; yet they are telling people you can't charge your car at certain times of the day. Something doesn't make sense. We have to be realistic, be practical about this, pragmatic. All those things are going to take Federal permits for us to make sure they have the energy they need. We are going to have to face this sooner or later.
It is only possible if you can build it. If you can build it, then you can make sure that we have the changes that consumers are going to demand in America. If we can make those, then, fine; we can supply it. If we can't, I guarantee the chaos will be unbelievable for all of us who represent these great people.
Our producers are handcuffed by an arduous permitting process that doesn't allow us to meet the supply problems that we are facing, and it is not getting any better.
Let me kind of throw the political process that we have out. My Republican friends have always been very supportive, always; and I have a lot of my Democrat friends who understand that we need permitting reform. But we have never gotten it done, whether we have had all Democrats in charge, whether it be the President being a Democrat, the House and Senate being Democrat controlled, or whether it was 4 years ago when you had the Republicans who basically had a Republican President and Senate and the House and they couldn't get it done. You can only get it done if we work together. We can only get this done if our Republican colleagues and our Democrat colleagues work together. It won't happen. And if we don't do it now, in my lifetime and a lot of my colleagues' lifetimes, it is not going to happen in our lifetime. It is not.
If we continue to strap the American people with the highest cost of delivery of the products they need because of our infrastructure and the cost of infrastructure, we end up doubling and tripling the price because of the owner's position we put them in to go through a process of permitting, and they know that going in, up front, that cost is passed on. They don't absorb that cost.
So if a pipeline costs $3 billion--which you anticipate to build a pipeline, to deliver the energy you have, whether it be hydrogen or whether it be natural gas, and that ends up costing you $6 billion or $7 billion--you and I pay that price. Every one of our constituents in our States pays that price.
We are suffering from self-inflicted shortages. We are anticipating shortages right now. The next 5 years, basically, our gas supplies, our gas deposits are down--natural gas. Natural gas is down. And we can change that. We can change that because the energy we have under our feet right now, if we can just get it to the market, it will not only fulfill the surpluses that we have, it will basically be able to help our allies across the globe here that need it most.
The worst scenario is if the Ukraine war and the pressure that that war is putting on energy that goes into Europe--and the Europeans are facing some absolutely astronomical hardships--and those hardships reflect to where they are putting pressure on Ukraine to make a deal with Putin, God help the world. God help us all if Putin walks away and can say he had a victory. He has a propaganda machine that he can say anything he wants, no matter the devastating losses that he has taken with his troops and the economic challenges he has in his country, but the unbelievable carnage and pain he has put on Ukraine; and they are going to be forced because of energy to make a decision. We can help that and prevent that from every happening. That is what we should be doing. That is basically the challenge that we have.
So you either rise to the challenge or you don't. You either put your politics aside, forget about your personal vendettas and your personal arguments, whatever--look at the contents of the bill. Look at what we are going to have in front of us that you can vote on; that you can make a difference. I have often said, if you can go home and explain it, you can vote for it; and I truly believe this piece of legislation will do that.
We are putting people to make hard choices; they shouldn't be put in that position. I tell Americans every day I speak to them, I say: Don't let Washington make you believe you are divided. You are not divided; we are divided here.
We are forcing the constituents of our States to pick a side. What side are you on? There is only one side; that is the American side. There is not another side.
We have Republican friends and Democratic friends; we might have different ideas. But when the country is challenged, we have one problem to solve, and that is what we are working on right now. You can come with different ideas, and we can go through the whole process, but we should come together. You shouldn't say: Well, my side is right, and we are against that; my side is right because we are for it. Well, we both have to be.
If this doesn't pass, nothing moves on permitting unless we work together. If all the Democrats vote for it, it is not enough. If all the Republicans voted for it, it is not enough. The Senate is unique; it takes 60. So it is going to take 10 or more from one side or the other, and right now I would say our Republican friends and colleagues are going to have to look deeply at something that they have always wanted and have a chance in their hands to grab but let politics come between us. I hope not; I don't think so. I am still betting on the right thing will be done at the right time.
I understand that the political process we are in is highly charged. I am hoping that the American public basically says: Enough is enough. Come on. It is for the country. It is not for you. It is not to make your party stronger or to make the other one look bad. It is not to give one an advantage over the other.
This process is to fix the problems to keep this country the strongest country on Earth, keep us basically the superpower of the world, and we only have one way to do it. We are doing everything we can for ourselves. I guarantee, when you are able to do that, you are able to draw your allies closer to you. The people want to be associated with the winner; they want to be associated with an economy that you can't stop and with a quality of life that is next to none. That is what they want to be associated with. And the American dream can be alive. It can only be alive if we do everything to keep it vibrant. So that is what we are working on.
Less than a year ago, we acted--Congress did--in a bipartisan way to accelerate public works permitting in the infrastructure bill. Now, we did it for infrastructure. We finally came together and said, for the last 30 years, we have known that our roads and bridges and our pipelines and our internet service, everything needed to be improved, and we voted in a bipartisan way. And do you know what we did? We changed how we did the permitting to get those things to fruition, to build a road or a bridge. But yet we can't do it for energy. It doesn't make any sense to me at all why we can't do it for energy, but we were able to do it for infrastructure.
In the coming days, we are going to have that opportunity to take the action to move the needle on getting types of energy and critical minerals--try getting a permit for a mine in critical minerals. You know we just passed a bill, the IRA bill, that basically says, on the car manufacturing, car manufacturing, we want to get people transitioned; electric vehicles should be desirable. You either like the product or you don't, but you will make those decisions. The only thing about it, the only way you are going to get a credit is if the manufacturers are sourcing the critical minerals from either North America or favored nations, such as Australia and our European friends, not those--and right now, all of it is coming from China. China has a lock on this. So it is time we decide to get off our butts and start doing what we should be doing for ourselves so we don't have to be crippled by a supply chain.
You know, I have told everybody, I said the first time in the history of the United States of America--think about this great country, Henry Ford, the mass production line--we have been able to produce in the United States of America, without any foreign supply chains that were needed, the combustible engine, all the drive trains, and everything else it took for transportation mode. We were able to do that, whether it be for trains, planes, or automobiles. Guess what. Now they have come out and said we are going to VEDS, electric vehicles.
For the first time in the history of the United States, we cannot produce what is needed for that to be a transportation mode.
I refuse to give up and say we can't do it. That is why, in the bill that we pass, you are going to have to source the critical minerals that are needed for the batteries that are going to be supplying the power for these vehicles, and they are going to have to be produced in North America.
We shouldn't be waiting on the foreign supply chains to say: Oh, I am sorry. We don't agree with your geopolitical stance on so many things, so we are not going to agree to give you what you need. We process the anodes and cathodes that make these batteries, but that is all China. It is not us. And we are not going to get caught in that. So that is what we are trying to correct.
In the coming days, we are going to have this opportunity, and I say that again--truly an opportunity. We can keep the costs down. We can make it affordable. We can relieve the pain at the pump. We can relieve the pain when you see your energy bills being mailed to you every month. We can fight all of this.
We can unlock the energy and climate benefits of the Energy Act of 2020. The bipartisan infrastructure law and the inflation reduction--we can do all of that, but you can't do it in a timely fashion to meet the challenges the world has today unless you change permitting, which is something we have all wanted.
It streamlines the electric transmission lines. I don't know what to tell you. As of right now, there are approximately 20 interstate transmission projects in various stages of planning--20. Those take, right now, an average of 10 years. On top of that, a quarter of those-- 25 percent of those--go into litigious extensions, which is even longer--15, 17 years, some of them. There is nobody in the developed world looking at us, saying we are effective and efficient and what we are doing is delivering the most effective and efficient pricing that we can and the most reliable energy that is needed.
In this permitting bill, we do not bypass any of the oversights from environmental review. Whatever we have in place is still there. We are just going to put in guidelines and timetables: You either do it in a sufficient amount of time or we move on. So that is what we are doing. And we are simultaneously going to two or three Agencies at the same time.
All we did is look at what was successful around the world--that is all we did--and we made it applicable to what we are trying to do here so that we can compete on an even playing field, and we are going to continue to do that.
This bill isn't just my idea. Everyone says it is a personal thing; it is my idea. This bill is not my idea. This bill is a combination of everybody in this body.
Also, the challenges we have right now--the war in Europe has accelerated everything. The inflation has accelerated the need to do something quickly. If we don't get off our proverbial hind ends and start acting like Americans and not Republicans or Democrats fighting for our respective sides--you know, I see it. We have spectators here watching what we are doing. We have people watching what we are doing. They have to be sick and tired that all we do is call each other names.
Every Republican over there, I consider them a friend, every one of the 50, and every one of my 49 colleagues I consider a friend. I don't have all the answers, and they are not always wrong. Somewhere in between, we can find an answer to the problems. That is what we are asking for, and I am going to continue to do that. I am not giving up, and I won't give up.
We have an opportunity. Let's take advantage of it. If we don't, then you have to go home and explain why not. I don't have to worry about that because I know why I am for this, and I know why I think it will help every person in my State of West Virginia and every one of my fellow Americans in this country. I really do.
I hope we rise to this occasion. We are going to find out next week. We don't have much time to wait now. We will find out where we stand. If there are people willing to vote to shut down this government because of political reasons--they don't like permitting when it is something they fought for all their life, political life--they have to answer to that.
With that being said, I appreciate very much the opportunity to be able to speak on this subject because I think it is so important. It is coming down to the point to where--we have great legislation. We have done a lot of bipartisan things, worked on good stuff these past 2 years, unbelievable. Now you want to make sure that you take advantage of that and bring it to the market quicker. You want to make sure you get the prices down; you fight inflation; you show the rest of the world that you can depend on the United States of America. That is what it is about today.
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