On the recordSeptember 23, 2011
I have great admiration for the gentleman from Florida, who is always eloquent in his remarks. {time} 1030 He started off his support of his amendment by saying that we are trying to dismantle any regulation. I would like to remind everyone, once again, that this bill applies to 14 EPA regulations and we do not delay in any way 12 of them. And on the other two, we delay one of them, both of them, 6 months after the final report is due. Now, he had mentioned that Exelon supported the new EPA regulations. Exelon is a company that we all admire and respect, but it's a nuclear energy company, so there's nothing in these regulations that has any impact on them, as far as I know. But all of these regulations are trying to drive the coal industry out of business, that still provides 50 percent of all the electricity in America. Now, in the TRAIN Act, we simply ask this independent government agency, composed of Obama administration appointees, to examine the cumulative impact of all of these rules, because EPA has never been quite this aggressive. And I might add that the two rules that we asked to delay for further analysis, an independent research group said that the annualized cost would be almost $18 billion that utilities would have to spend to buy equipment that may not be able to even then achieve the standards because the technology is not available. The issue is not about mercury. The utilities do a great job of cleaning up mercury.…
