TRANSCRIPT: Leader Schumer Remarks At Press Conference On Republicans’ Efforts To Kill Clean Energy Investments And Jobs, In Complete Capitulation To Big Oil And Gas

Washington, D.C. – Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) today spoke at a press conference regarding actions taken by Republicans to gut clean energy provisions and investments in their tax bill. Below are Senator Schumer’s remarks, which can also be viewed here:

Leader Schumer: Now, let me just say this, it's no wonder the Republicans passed their bill in the dark of night, because they don't want anyone to know what's in it. And there are so many bad things in this bill, but they made it overnight, it went from terrible to even more terrible. And let me just say, what the House just passed last night makes it significantly easier for us to take back the Senate. And one of the main reasons for that is clean energy. If you look at where the credits are, these great credits that employ so many people, that create green energy, that help us compete with China in the field—oh, we have the chart. This is the chart that was from the front page of the New York Times, and the red dots are Republican districts and similar Republican states, and the blue dots are Democratic.

According to this New York Times chart, it's like $680 billion in red states and $187 billion in blue states. And last night, what they did is kill the program, plain and simple. It's sort of like Social Security. They didn't want to say they want to kill Social Security, so they strangled it. Bad phone lines, bad emails, fewer offices, fewer people. Same thing here. They didn't want to say they killed it, but then they said, if you don't have a project with shovel in the ground 60 days after this bill passes, the credits disappear. That is killing the program. Make no mistake about it. And then, of course, any project that's not finished, that's already going by 2028, also loses its credits. So they're preventing any programs from starting, any new clean energy investments from starting, and they're killing the ones that are already going. It's just an outrage. And here, we have the cheapest form, the administration is so damn hypocritical. They say they want to produce more energy. And at the same time, they cut off the cleanest, quickest, easiest, and cheapest form of new energy we could produce, which is solar. Plain and simple.

So they're a bunch of hypocrites, total hypocrites. We need more energy. But why are they doing this? Why are they so hypocritical, and why are they so nasty to clean energy? Because they're controlled by a small group of oil and gas barons who became billionaires by striking it rich in the Permian Basin or the Anadarko Basin, and those guys know that clean energy is the future, that oil and gas has limited future, and so they want to kill it. Kill clean energy so they're the only ones. This is going to hurt not just us. I wonder about my children and grandchildren who are going to pay so much more for energy.

And China, the third point, we want to make sure China doesn't dominate. This bill makes sure that China will dominate the world on clean energy and affect your grandchildren, your cousins and nephews and nieces, and my grandchildren. So it's a goddamn outrage what they have done here. And we're going to fight it tooth and nail.

We believe there are a whole lot of Republicans who are in these nice red states, who know the damage, the thousands and thousands of jobs that are lost, the higher cost of energy their constituents will pay. So we want the whole, we want everyone in the country, call up your senator, particularly if it's a Republican senator, and say save this. And one more point. We know that climate, that global warming is increasing. We know the climate crisis is getting greater and greater and greater. We see it in all of the weather changes. We have seen, New York State had 40 tornadoes, 30 years ago we had none. That's New York State, not in the tornado belt. And insurance costs are going through the roof in many of the coastal areas. You can't buy a home because you can't get insurance, you can't sell a home because the buyer can't get insurance. It's affecting us all over.

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