On the recordOctober 25, 2011
I thank the gentleman from Minnesota for his comments. As he was describing the issue about making sure that we clean up our environment, the reason is that this bill pays for those things. We know, for example, that the waterways just in the Great Lakes alone is a $30 billion problem with regard to pollution that has to be cleaned up. We know of our coal-fired power plants that 40 percent of them have inadequate or no scrubbers, and we need to clean them up. The point is that shutting them down is not going to reduce the cost of electricity, and it's not going to clean up the environment when those jobs simply go over to other countries where they do manufacturing with little or no pollution controls because that still comes back over to our Nation. Keep in mind that this bill does not raise taxes, that it doesn't borrow from other countries, that it doesn't buy oil from OPEC, and that it doesn't put us more into debt. I will yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Shuster), but I first want to yield to another gentleman from Pennsylvania, Mr. Pat Meehan, who is one of our new colleagues here, to also comment on this bill.
