Peter Welch: “I thank my colleagues for their support, the former chairman of the committee and now chair of the Subcommittee on…”

“I thank my colleagues for their support, the former chairman of the committee and now chair of the Subcommittee on Energy. He is a very important person over there, and there are no words I could convey that would meet the reputation of Mr. Upton. I thank him and Ms. DeGette very much. They have said a lot of the specific content of this bill. This is a situation where Congress passed a good law. There was a provision in it that needed to be corrected, and, lo and behold, Congress is correcting that provision. It is about these security devices that obviously can't operate on no-power mode. They have got to be on. When the bad guys come in, we have got to be watching. That is really what this is all about. It is a combination of the bipartisan commitment that we have had to energy efficiency, especially last year. I do give Mr. Upton a lot of credit for this. We have had a lot of debates in this Congress about climate change, about the science, and aside from--we don't need to get into that--to embrace as we have in a bipartisan way, there are enormous benefits to efficiency every single place we can find it. This efficiency bill originally was applying to all these devices to put them in no-load mode. That was cutting down on use of electricity. It was cutting down on carbon emissions. It was saving people money. But the no-load obviously couldn't apply to security devices. Last year, Mr.…”