Jim Inhofe: “Thank you. Again, I thank the Senator from Louisiana. This is an amendment to the underlying bill. It is a very…”

“Thank you. Again, I thank the Senator from Louisiana. This is an amendment to the underlying bill. It is a very significant one. To give a little background, for the last 9 years, I have had an effort to stop legislation called cap-and-trade legislation. It is one that I think everyone now--no one used to hear about it, but everyone is familiar with it now after all these 9 years. It goes all the way back to the Kyoto treaty, when people realized, under the Clinton administration, that we were not going to ratify that treaty. In fact, President Clinton never even brought it up for ratification. But people realized this would be something very, very expensive to America. So after that, in 2003, 2005, 2008, and on up, there were about seven different times that Members of the Senate brought up different cap- and-trade legislation. It was in 2003 that MIT and the Wharton School came out with analyses of what it would cost to do a cap-and-trade bill. The amount always ranged between $300 billion and $400 billion a year. I quite often say, when we are talking about billions and billions of dollars, you have to bring this home so people understand what we are talking about. In this case, in my State of Oklahoma, this would equate to something a little bit over $3,000 for every family that files a tax return. The reason I am bringing this up at this time is that they tried to pass this all throughout the years. I think the last one was the Waxman-Markey bill over in the House.…”