Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I think it is important to clarify some of the numbers that we are hearing from the Republicans. The chairman keeps mentioning a 94-year payback period for one of the products impacted by the rule, and he claims that this number comes from the DOE's rule. However, this is really a total misunderstanding of what happened. There may have been some analysis of this 95 years, but the DOE did not propose or adopt efficiency levels like that for the product mentioned. In fact, for that particular product that he is mentioning, the final rule made no changes to the existing standards. Now, I am not surprised that my friends across the aisle are throwing this number around, this 94 years, even though it has nothing to do with the final rule. They are not interested in a good-faith debate on the merits of these standards. If they were, as I said, we would have had hearings on this resolution so Members could better understand the details. The truth is that the actual payback period for this particular class of products, since there were no updates to the standards, is zero because it wasn't changed. The average payback period for the other products impacted by the rule, as I mentioned earlier, is close to 3.5 years. So this 94-year analysis was not in the rule, it was not made for the product, and it wasn't proposed for the product. For everything else, it is about 3.5 years.…”