Mike Conaway

The government really doesn't have any money that it doesn't take from taxpayers or borrow from somebody else.

Bridging the broadband divide can send American jobs to rural America, not overseas.

The current economic climate places new and acute burdens on rural America.

EPA cannot be trusted with agricultural carbon offsets.

EPA is not farmer friendly or even farmer neutral. It has consistently made determinations that harm producers.

Anything less is an abdication of our responsibility as elected officials and the constituents that we care so much about.

Common sense demands that we defeat this bill on the House floor.

Midwestern states like my own of Kansas will bear the brunt of the economic blow because of the inequality in the way that carbon allowances are allocated.

H.R. 2454 is cap-and-tax. It is a tax bill that will be forced not only on agriculture in rural America but our entire country.

But the issue, though, is, who presumes that that glide path is right, that that is where we ought to go?

The broad, 10,000 foot statement is, it looks like everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die to get there.

I represent those people first, not the rest of the world.

I will do my best to present as strong a case--if I feel strongly about something, I can guarantee you, you would know it, the EPA Administrator would know it, and rural America would know it.

I have a book here that has a list of almost 32,000 American scientists who disagree vehemently with that particular position.

I think the point of this is, it is not a contest, it is not a competition. I think this is serious business, and it requires us to work cooperatively.

This situation puts rural Hoosier rate payers at a massive disadvantage while delivering windfalls to those who don't need them.

I am particularly concerned that farm cooperative-owned businesses could be subject to emissions caps and would feel their effects more severely than other segments of capped industries.

Without an explicit exemption from an emissions cap for agriculture, it is not in my opinion a matter of IF production agriculture will be regulated but WHEN.

This is too steep a price to pay for a plan that cannot even begin to guarantee that it will be able to meet its objectives.

The Waxman-Markey bill is expected to hit agricultural producers particularly hard.

Although I remain highly skeptical of the science underlying this debate and dispute the fundamental need for this legislation, today's hearing is not about computer modeling and variables or formulas and graphs; it is about the very real…

I believe that the bill, as it stands, fails to recognize the important contributions the agriculture community can and must play in energy legislation if we have any hope of curbing climate change and achieving true energy independence.

I fear that agriculture's unique opportunities to combat climate change are being overlooked.

Farmers and ranchers were the first environmentalist in this country, and remain some of the strongest.

We need to take this legislation and completely redo it in a completely different fashion and offer a competing version that people on both sides of the aisle can join together, in a bipartisan fashion and path, to promote a sound energy…