{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://mcclintock.house.gov/newsroom/press-releases/special-order-speech-on-cap-and-trade", "Special Order Speech on Cap and Trade", "2009-06-26", "2009", "2009-06", "Republican", "House", "CA", "Tom McClintock", "M001177", "mcclintock.house.gov", "mcclintock", "https://mcclintock.house.gov/newsroom/press-releases", "scraper", "I had a strange sense of Deja Vu as I watched the self-congratulatory rhetoric on the house floor tonight, and I feel compelled to offer this warning from the Left Coast.\n\nThree years ago, I stood on the floor of the California Senate and watched a similar celebration over a similar bill, AB 32. And I have spent the last three years watching as that law has dangerously deepened California\u2019s recession. It uses a different mechanism than Cap and Trade, but the objective is the same: to force a dramatic reduction in carbon dioxide emissions.\n\nUp until that bill took effect, California\u2019s unemployment numbers tracked very closely with the national unemployment rate. But then in January of 2007, California\u2019s unemployment rate began a steady upward divergence from the national jobless figures. Today, California\u2019s unemployment rate is more than two points above the national rate, and at its highest point since 1941.\n\nWhat is it that happened in January of 2007? AB 32 took effect and began shutting down entire segments of California\u2019s economy. Let me give you one example from my district. The City of Truckee, California was about to sign a long-term power contract to get its electricity from a new, EPA-approved coal-fired electricity plant in Utah. AB 32 and companion legislation caused them to abandon that contract. The replacement power they acquired literally doubled their electricity costs.\n\nSo when economists warn that we can expect electricity prices to double under the cap and trade bill, I can tell you from bitter experience that in my district, that\u2019s not a future prediction, that is an historical fact.\n\nGov. Schwarzenegger assured us that AB 32 would mean an explosion of new, green jobs -- exactly the same promises we\u2019re hearing from cap and trade supporters. In California, exactly the opposite has happened. We have lost so many jobs that the UCSB economic forecast is now using the D-word \u2013 Depression \u2013 to discuss California\u2019s job market.\n\nM. Speaker, the Cap and Trade bill proposes what amounts to endlessly increasing taxes on any enterprises that produce carbon dioxide or other so-called greenhouse gas emissions. We need to understand what that means. It has profound implications for agriculture, construction, cargo and passenger transportation, energy production, baking and brewing \u2013 all of which produce enormous quantities of this innocuous and ubiquitous compound. In fact, every human being produces 2.2 pounds of carbon dioxide every day \u2013 just by breathing.\n\nSo applying a tax to the economy designed to radically constrict carbon dioxide emissions means radically constricting the economy.\n\nAnd this brings us to the fine point of it.\n\nWhen you discuss the folly of the Hoover Administration \u2013 how it turned the recession of 1929 into the depression of the 1930\u2019s, the first thing that economists point to is the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act that imposed new taxes on over 20,000 imported products.\n\nWaxman Markey is our generation\u2019s Smoot Hawley. In fact, it\u2019s worse because it imposes new taxes on an infinitely larger number of domestic products on a scale that utterly dwarfs Smoot-Hawley.\n\nLet\u2019s ignore for the moment the fact that the planet\u2019s climate is constantly changing and that long term global warming has been going on since the last ice age. Let\u2019s ignore the fact that within recorded history we know of periods when the earth\u2019s climate has been much warmer than it is today and others when it has been much cooler. Let\u2019s ignore the thousands of climate scientists and meteorologists who have concluded that human-produced greenhouse gases are a negligible factor in global warming or climate change.\n\nIgnore all of that and still we are left with one lousy sense of timing. In the most serious recession since the Great Depression \u2013 why would members of this house want to repeat the same mistakes that produced that Great Depression? Watching how California has just wrecked its economy and destroyed its finances, why would they want to do the same thing to our nation?\n\nM. Speaker, this is deadly serious stuff. It transcends ideology and politics. This House has just made the biggest economic mistake since the days of Herbert Hoover.\n\nIf this measure becomes law, two things are certain.\n\nFirst, our planet will continue to warm and cool as it has been doing for billions of years.\n\nSecond: Congress will have delivered a staggering blow to our nation\u2019s economy at precisely that moment when that economy was the most vulnerable.", 1, "2026-03-30T01:40:41Z", "2026-04-06T21:15:00Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["https://mcclintock.house.gov/newsroom/press-releases/special-order-speech-on-cap-and-trade"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 0.9179869666695595, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}