Washington, D.C. – Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) today spoke on the Senate floor on President Trump and Congressional Republicans’ “Big, Ugly Bill”, which would decimate America’s clean energy economy, causing Americans’ energy prices to skyrocket and 800,000 jobs to be lost. Below are Senator Schumer’s remarks, which can also be viewed here:
Donald Trump’s so-called “Big, Beautiful bill” should really be called one “Big, Ugly, Energy-Killer.”
With this monstrosity of a bill, Donald Trump and Republicans seem ready to kill clean energy in its tracks and raise people’s energy costs in the process.
The only people celebrating the Republicans’ bill’s energy policies are the fossil fuel industry, because it will be the fossil fuel industry whose pockets are lined.
The fossil fuel industry simply has blind hatred of clean energy. You know why? They know it’s the future. They know it’s cheaper. They know it's where we're going – that America needs clean energy in order to meet our demands moving forward.
We all know America has a huge and growing demand for new energy.
We are going to need ten times as much electricity to continue powering breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, which isn’t going away anytime soon.
But with their bill, Republicans want to cut off one of the major ways—the newest, cheapest, and fastest growing way—to produce new energy. They want to tax new, clean electricity, stifling the supply of new energy putting us at risk of falling behind in AI to countries like China.
And what would the Republican plan mean for the average American family or small business? Simple: higher energy costs.
To the American people, I say: if this bill passes, your electricity costs are going up.
Look at the facts: the Republican plan will increase average national electricity prices by about 10%.
The Republican plan will increase total household energy costs by $32 billion. That means American families will pay $32 billion more, all to please the ideological blindness of the fossil fuel industry.
And that’s not to mention that the Republican plan would cost America about 800,000 jobs by 2030, all across America, in red states and blue states.
What a terrible price to pay just to lower taxes for the ultra-rich, just to line the pockets of the fossil fuel industry, to satisfy the ideological hatred that fossil fuel industry has for clean energy, and to lose out on American energy dominance.
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