| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
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Democracy in real time. | |
| This is your government at work. | ||
| This is C-SPAN, giving you your democracy unfiltered. | ||
| Next, a debate on U.S. Trade and Energy Strategy with Senators Ruben Gallego, Sheldon Whitehouse, and Texas Republican Congressman Craig Goldman. | ||
| The discussion held in Sedona, Arizona was hosted by the McCain Institute. | ||
| It's about 40 minutes. | ||
| Well, thank you, everybody. | ||
| That was a great video. | ||
| That is so special. | ||
| It makes us aware of how special John McCain was and how important this event is and how important he still remains to the state of Arizona and to the McCain Institute. | ||
| So I'm so glad that we were able to come out just right after that video appeared. | ||
| Makes me actually want to tell you a John McCain story, and I'm going to put you on the spot too, Congressman, at Telling McCain's story because you have such a good relationship with him going back so many years. | ||
| I interviewed Senator John McCain for a book that I wrote called Great Dads back in 1999. | ||
| And I interviewed well-known Americans about lessons they learned from their fathers. | ||
| I interviewed John McCain and Donald Trump even is in that book. | ||
| But I think back to the 2008 campaign that I covered. | ||
| And after Senator McCain won the New Hampshire primary, it was on to Michigan. | ||
| And Michigan was a state in which if he won Michigan, he essentially would have killed Romney's candidacy. | ||
| That was the plan. | ||
| Win Michigan and on to the nomination. | ||
| And he did an event that he did so often, those town hall events when you take a question literally from everybody there. | ||
| Wouldn't leave until he was finished taking questions from anybody. | ||
| And afterwards, we were told he was going to do a media availability. | ||
| So we all gathered semicircle around Senator McCain. | ||
| And I asked the senator a question about his status in the state in terms of polling. | ||
| And polling showed that he was not doing well. | ||
| He was trailing Governor Romney. | ||
| And I asked him the question, how can you win given that you're trailing in every poll that I've seen? | ||
| And he looked at me, he sized me up. | ||
| And if you can imagine John McCain doing this, he sized me up and he says, he begins his answer by saying, well, my well-quathed friend. | ||
| That's John McCain. | ||
| And from there, I laugh just like you did. | ||
| Such a great person. | ||
| Congressman, do you want to follow up by telling a nice story about your times with the senator? | ||
| Where do I start? | ||
| Many, many, many years, three years, and very odd for me to be here, especially as a former staffer with all former staffers here. | ||
| What Senator McCain is saying right now is one senator makes sense, another senator makes sense. | ||
| Goldman, what's that jerk doing there? | ||
| Definitely, he would be saying that. | ||
| And by the way, Dupree, he's the one who won New Hampshire for Senator McCain. | ||
| No, just, I mean, we can go into many, many stories, but I mean, let's get on with the panel. | ||
| That's terrific. | ||
| Yeah, we have such a broad topic. | ||
| I mean, we're talking about trade. | ||
| We're talking about energy. | ||
| And I thought I'd divide it up. | ||
| Speaking first about trade, we have such a nice panel, such a great panel. | ||
| Senator Gallego, of course, new to the U.S. Senate, but not new to Congress, served his district in the Phoenix area. | ||
| Of course, we have a freshman U.S. Congressman in Craig Goldman and the senior senator from Rhode Island in Senator Whitehouse. | ||
| And I can't think of a better panel for us. | ||
| So let me start by asking you, Senator Whitehouse, about tariffs, because that has just gotten so much attention. | ||
| No matter where you are, I hear it just from the populace at large, because they realize, I think they acknowledge that this is going to be an issue that could impact them in a very everyday way in terms of the things that they purchase at the supermarket, maybe even filling up their gas tank. | ||
| President Trump says that tariffs are necessary because the U.S. has been treated unfairly. | ||
| They've been treated unfairly by our trading partners. | ||
| Do you subscribe to that point of view? | ||
| And why isn't the idea of imposing tariffs the right way to respond to that? | ||
| Well, I'll talk about one tariff that I'm a big supporter of, and that's the, and it's very relevant to energy because it's the carbon border tariff. | ||
| The EU already has one. | ||
| It's called the CBAM Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism. | ||
| The new government just elected in Australia is likely to join. | ||
| I would not be the least bit surprised if Canada were to join. | ||
| The EU and the UK are already finalizing their joinder. | ||
| So you'd have a combined market of EU, UK, Australia, and Canada where you would be tariffed on all your imports if you were more carbon intense than those economies and didn't have the requisite internal measures to bring down carbon pollution. | ||
| So since we're on energy, that's the one I'll focus on. | ||
| It's happening right now. | ||
| It's vitally important. | ||
| You can't talk about energy without talking about climate. | ||
| And you can't talk about climate without understanding that we are heading into a financial calamity unlike anything since the Great Depression. | ||
| And we see it coming. | ||
| It's going to be the most predicted financial cataclysm in financial history. | ||
| It's like seeing the iceberg and the Titanic not changing course. | ||
| And the way it plays out, according to the chief economist for Freddie Mac, is that the weather becomes worse and more dangerous and more unpredictable, which makes the insurance model impossible to deploy in a lot of different areas, which then closes down real estate because you can't get mortgages where you can't get insurance. | ||
| And when you can't get mortgages, property values fall dramatically. | ||
| And according to the chief economist for Freddie Mac, that takes you into a 2008-style new recession. | ||
| That was just on coastal property values. | ||
| Now wildfires are even more perhaps significant. | ||
| So we're looking at a very, very dangerous proposition. | ||
| And it's not just the chief economist for Freddie Mac making the warnings. | ||
| The head of the Federal Reserve was in the other day in the banking committee and said, 10 to 15 years, regions of the United States, no more mortgages. | ||
| Economist Magazine, $25 trillion hit expected to the world's largest asset class, the global real estate market. | ||
| The International Financial Stability Board warning the world's banking system that with the loss of mortgage revenue and with the loss of property values changing LTV ratios and creating insolvencies, banks have to buckle up and get ready for the storm ahead. | ||
| So the tariffs create an immediate storm. | ||
| They go straight through to consumer prices. | ||
| They hit people in their pocketbooks. | ||
| They're ill-advised as a general rash act, but they can also be focused intelligently. | ||
| And I think the carbon border adjustment mechanism is now really the remaining narrow avenue we have for a pathway to climate safety. | ||
| So getting behind that is important. | ||
| And big kudos to Bill Cassidy, who sat on the stage with me before here, and Lindsey Graham, who has been at this place innumerable times for doing their own Republican carbon border tariff bill, which we begin negotiations on with my carbon border tariff bill to get something done that's bipartisan and effective. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Senator Gallego, let me ask you a question that picks up on Senator Whitehouse's answer. | |
| Tariffs, did they, in your view, level the playing field? | ||
| I think, I mean, back to the question, what is he even really saying? | ||
| Unfair versus fair. | ||
| That's not how we decide any type of tariff policy or any type of economic policy. | ||
| So the fact that we're trying to rationalize the stupidity is the first problem. | ||
| Let's be honest, what's what he's doing? | ||
| It's utter chaos out there. | ||
| I was just in Germany meeting with our ministers out there, their finance minister. | ||
| They feel like we basically have just stabbed them in the back. | ||
| For years, the United States policy has been telling Germany, like, hey, we don't want you to be entirely dependent on China. | ||
| We don't want you to be your major expert to be China. | ||
| We want you to be close to us. | ||
| For many years, I would travel actually to Europe, encouraging our European allies and friends to not integrate their communication system with Huawei and a bunch of other very intensely government-run Chinese companies. | ||
| And they, to be good friends of ours, they did it. | ||
| Now they're telling me, and this European minister was telling me, like, I have CEOs in Germany who are telling me that we're dying. | ||
| I'm going to have to lay off people. | ||
| And why won't I go and now do work with China when your best friend, the United States, has now turned this around? | ||
| There is no logic to this whatsoever. | ||
| You know, when we have to fight in certain areas with tariff policy, we have to do it in a smart way. | ||
| Because right now, this is dumb. | ||
| And when it comes to the everyday person, they're going to feel it right away. | ||
| So I have a child come in June 12th. | ||
| So right now, I'm in nesting mode. | ||
| More importantly, my wife is in nesting mode. | ||
| And so we are buying everything right now. | ||
| And as I'm putting together that nursery, it all says made in China. | ||
| And already, I've already seen some of those prices go up. | ||
| I was talking to the store that we get our carriages, we get our kids from. | ||
| And she's already told me, Ruben, once I'm out, everything the storm is out, you better go to Amazon. | ||
| Once they're out, we're done. | ||
| So the American public is going to feel it much sooner than people think. | ||
| And I don't think Donald Trump understands it. | ||
| I don't think Donald Trump has ever put a freaking nursery together in his whole life. | ||
| And I think he's going to end up, there's going to be a huge, huge backlash from the actual voter because they expect low-priced goods on demand, and they're not going to understand this big macro idea that if it is a macro idea that Trump wants, because it's just not going to happen. | ||
| And this overall idea, by the way, they're like, somehow we're going to get these businesses back. | ||
| Who's going to work those jobs? | ||
| I'm a first-generation Latino. | ||
| My dad was born in Mexico. | ||
| My mom was born in Colombia. | ||
| Growing up, I worked all the factory jobs. | ||
| I worked in construction. | ||
| I worked everything else like that. | ||
| And I know how hard those jobs are. | ||
| Even if we were able to get those jobs back by the time you build a factory, get the workers, and especially with this immigration, by the way, non-immigration program that we have, we're not even going to have the capability to actually meet the demand. | ||
| So all we're doing is increasing the cost on working class people without any thought to how this is going to affect them. | ||
| And when it will finally affect is when your first TG Max closes down, your targets start closing down, when you start seeing single parent women with children being fired first because they're the first ones to go when retail goes down. | ||
| And that's when you're going to actually start hearing a lot of complaints from the voter. | ||
| And they're not going to care about this idea that we're trying to bring something back that I don't think is actually able to be brought back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Congressman Goldman, you come from a district, Fort Worth, Texas, supportive of President Trump. | |
| President Trump says there will be short-term pain. | ||
| He calls it interruptions. | ||
| And the big question is, how patient is the American public? | ||
| What's your view on that? | ||
| Well, I mean, first of all, I think we need to be very clear that, one, I'm a former Phil Graham staffer as well. | ||
| And those of you that thought Phil Graham went away, you now see that he's alive and well still, riding an op-ed on tariffs in the Wall Street Journal. | ||
| He's speaking out publicly that he's a free trader. | ||
| And so I grew up understanding that as well. | ||
| I think we also need to realize that we're talking about the man who wrote the art of the deal. | ||
| And President Trump is a deal maker. | ||
| And I think he's brought awareness to a lot of countries that have taken advantage of us, frankly. | ||
| And while we are free traders, we also want fair trade. | ||
| And I think that's hopefully where we are in that this is a short-term thing and we get more fair trade as well as free trade. | ||
| Now, China is America's third largest trading partner, Senator Whitehouse. | ||
| As it relates to the trade war that we see now playing out with China, in your view, who has the upper hand? | ||
| Well, I think Xi probably thinks that he does. | ||
| I don't know whether that's accurate or not, but I think they're exuding a fair amount of confidence. | ||
| I think they believe that their population can't hold their breath longer than ours in terms of dealing with the immediate dislocations and cost increases and disruptions that are going to be caused. | ||
| And I think they probably look at the trade war in the context of extending China's reach globally in a whole bunch of different ways. | ||
| So it's not just between the two of us. | ||
| They're going to look to this issue to find leverage in all the areas where they have markets. | ||
| And frankly, as Ruben pointed out, we kind of look like jerks now. | ||
| And so it gives China, to a lesser degree, Russia, because of their appalling behavior in Ukraine, but it gives our rivals a chance to move into areas and say, actually, we're the nice guys here. | ||
| The Chinese were the sensible voices at the meeting about the next climate cop in Brazil with all of the heads of state involved. | ||
| The United States was not even invited. | ||
| That's not a good place for us to be. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What are the long-term implications, Senator Gallego, of a trade war with China? | |
| Well, the long-term implications is that in terms of our geopolitical alliances, they start breaking down. | ||
| And here's why. | ||
| If we wanted to have this fight, first of all, look, I'm a 5'7 guy. | ||
| I try not to fight everyone at the same time. | ||
| If I have to fight somebody, I pick one fight. | ||
| And I'm a Marine, so I bring friends, right? | ||
| If we were going to go against China, we want to have a trade war against China. | ||
| Why not align ourselves with people that we have same values with and make sure we are copacetic so that way we can go to China and say, listen, we really don't like that you're dumping steel in our country. | ||
| We don't like your wages are artificially low and the working class is hard to behind that. | ||
| And when we would have the European Union economy, North American economy together, then we have more leverage. | ||
| Instead, what we decided to do, we decided to be the drunk guy at the bar, just start punching everybody, and then we're surprised that this is coming back to us. | ||
| So, in the long run, I think we end up losing a lot of trust and alliances, not just obviously with China. | ||
| I think that is something we need to fight. | ||
| We need to fight smartly. | ||
| And look, I'm hearing it not just from there. | ||
| In Latin America, speaking to some of our trading partners in Latin America, they're not looking at China for their major markets or other countries because they wanted to be with the United States. | ||
| They felt comfortable with the United States. | ||
| But now their businessmen are saying that they can't actually stand the volatility of our relationship. | ||
| They're basically calling us toxic X right now, right? | ||
| And if that continues, we're going to see ourselves not be a trusted partner, both on the economic side, but on the national security side. | ||
| You know, one of the scariest things I heard about a month ago was the Prime Minister of Singapore questioning whether they should realign themselves closer to China. | ||
| You know, this is a country that is very, very strategically placed that we share a lot of very, very sophisticated and trusted intelligence with because we are part of our idea of our capacity to defend ourselves in the Asian Pacific theater. | ||
| And right now, they are questioning about whether it was worthwhile to stay with us. | ||
| This is all interconnected. | ||
| And if we don't handle this well, and if we don't pivot well against China and end up somehow winning this war, this trade war, I think it's going to deteriorate our capability to have strong allies, strong friends, and really set the rules of the road of economic order across the globe. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What about that, Congressman? | |
| I don't know if you look at the calendar like I do. | ||
| It's been a month and a day since Liberation Day. | ||
| I was in the Rose Garden when the president made that big announcement of reciprocal tariffs. | ||
| They're on a 90-day hold. | ||
| Today, tariffs went into effect for auto parts. | ||
| Now there's a 25% tariff on foreign auto parts being implemented. | ||
| And picking up on what Senator Gallego just said, why not partner with our allies in going up against China? | ||
| And let me ask you another question, and that is what the senator also mentioned about China. | ||
| Do they fill the void? | ||
| You know, after Liberation Day, President Xi, he did a tour of Asia, and he, in that tour, went to all of these countries that are our trading partners and made the pitch: you're going to get tariffed by the U.S. Why don't you have more trade with China and we won't implement those tariffs? | ||
| Well, let's be very clear also. | ||
| Everything moving forward is speculation, right? | ||
| All these so-called experts who are speculating what will happen a month from now, six months from now, a year from now, if we're still in this trade war. | ||
| I don't believe we will be. | ||
| Again, it's nothing that President Trump didn't say in the campaign as far as taking action currently. | ||
| Again, I'll reiterate that you're talking about the man who wrote the art of the deal. | ||
| So I don't think we'll be in this situation, again, speculating. | ||
| Look, I want President Trump to succeed. | ||
| Hopefully, everybody in this room does. | ||
| It's good for America. | ||
| It's good for the country. | ||
| I want free and fair trade. | ||
| We obviously don't have it now. | ||
| We've shed the light on that that we don't. | ||
| And hopefully, here in the future, in the very short term, we do. | ||
| Can I just like say that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| He wrote, co-wrote the art of the deal. | ||
| Number two, it's not like it's the wealth of nations, okay? | ||
| Like, come on. | ||
| He's literally talking about like land swaps in like Manhattan versus the Queens. | ||
| We're talking about a economic stabilizer that has existed in Bretton Woods that has brought billions of people out of poverty, billions of people out of poverty, stabilize, stabilized the world to the point where we have such less conflicts that we have ever seen in modern civilization. | ||
| But none of that is going to be found in the art of the deal co-written by somebody else. | ||
| Come on, let's be Donald Trump does not write anything. | ||
| Donald Trump does not read. | ||
| Do we really think he wrote the art of the deal? | ||
| And if that's the case, if you don't believe that, then why are we saying like everything that we understand about a modern economic system, trust the fact that he wrote this book and therefore he is smart enough to deal with the intricacies of this that could unravel and hurt billions of people? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| That's a problem. | ||
| Has he not been a dealmaker his entire life? | ||
| He bankrupted casinos. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Has he been a deal maker his entire life? | |
| A bad dealmaker. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He bankrupted casinos. | |
| Let me stop. | ||
| Let me pick up our copy. | ||
| I'll be more subtle. | ||
| It's okay. | ||
| Now, the other day, the president, he's in the Oval Office, and he's essentially saying that the tariffs are having their intended effect. | ||
| He said the Chinese container ships, they're turning around. | ||
| And from the President's perspective, that's a good thing that the Chinese container ships are turning around. | ||
| Senator Whitehouse, is that a good thing when they're turning around, those goods are not getting to U.S. ports, and there's no tariffs that we can derive if those container ships actually make it to U.S. ports? | ||
| Yeah, there was an economist the other day who said, you know, the confusion and upheaval around tariffs is actually a tariff itself. | ||
| It's just the stupidest of tariffs because you get no revenue from it. | ||
| And turning around ships that never come here means, A, you don't get the tariff revenue. | ||
| It also means that there's a gap somewhere on the shelf of the Walmart or the Target or wherever those goods were destined to be. | ||
| Or there's a shop in Rhode Island that is waiting for a part for a machine that they need to run their process and that part doesn't come. | ||
| And those gaps applied wildly and randomly throughout the economy then I think begin to cascade. | ||
| So I don't think it's a good thing that they're turning around at all. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Congressman, I wanted to ask you about the president and his pledge to bring manufacturing jobs back to America. | |
| I was in about two weeks ago. | ||
| I was in the Roosevelt room at the White House and there was a big announcement that the President made. | ||
| It was the CEO of Hyundai that had come to the White House and Hyundai was announcing that it's going to build a steel mill in southern Louisiana. | ||
| It will create 1,500 new jobs, but those jobs and that steel mill won't actually be operating until 2029. | ||
| That's a long way away for this deal that he's trying to put in place. | ||
| What's your view about the president's pledge to bring those manufacturing jobs back to the U.S.? | ||
| We're building major manufacturing in Texas, too, as a result of it as well. | ||
| So I'm all for it. | ||
| Look, the more jobs we can develop here in America, the more jobs we can develop in Texas, I'm all for it. | ||
| And what, yeah, they're not short term. | ||
| They're not six months a year from now. | ||
| But again, long term is going to benefit our country, not just for the short term, but for the long term as well. | ||
| Well, a lot of the jobs that we're looking at came out of the Inflation Reduction Act and the infrastructure bill. | ||
| That's actually happening now in real time. | ||
| We also saw last year 95% of the new additions to the grid were solar, wind, and battery, 95% of everything that went on the American grid. | ||
| So when you take on the Inflation Reduction Act, when you take on those tax credits and when you attack renewable energy, pretending that solar and wind energy aren't even energy, you're taking a direct hit at very immediate things that are going on in the economy that are American construction, that are American manufacturing, that are supporting the American economy. | ||
| So you might say that you'll have some jobs in a factory maybe nine years from now, but what's happening right now is that the leading additions to the energy sector are all being cut down by Trump deliberately. | ||
| And a lot of the construction and factory and so forth that's been developed is being attacked through his attacks on the spending and that was authorized during Biden's term. | ||
| So, you know, it's kind of, I'll kick you in the face right now, but don't worry, nine years from now, if somebody else will get a job, that's not a good strategy politically. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Senator Gallego, you mentioned your trip to Germany. | |
| How have the president's trade policies impacted our relationships with the European Union, with Canada, with Mexico? | ||
| So talking to Mexico, a lot of countries of the European Union, UK also, not so much the Canadians, the Taiwanese, and then the individual businesses there, they really feel betrayed, right? | ||
| You know, I'll start point by point. | ||
| You know, in Germany, you know, we've asked them to do a couple of things just prior to Donald Trump here about investing in manufacturing in the United States. | ||
| We've also asked them to step up in Ukraine, which they have. | ||
| You know, we asked them to make sure that they aren't doing too much co-production and co-mingling with China. | ||
| They did that. | ||
| You know, if you look at South America and Latin America, we've also asked them to make sure that we're their major importer. | ||
| A good example, Colombia, imports most of their equipment from the United States, John Deere, tractors, everything else of that nature, same with Mexico. | ||
| Colombia, biggest import from us is soy. | ||
| They're right next to Brazil. | ||
| There's no reason why they can't just get it from Brazil. | ||
| They get it from us because we tell them to do it. | ||
| Now, talking to Colombian businessmen, they're saying that I don't know if I want to deal with this every year, every time the president feels like he's got something in his system that he's going to just arbitrarily put a tariff on. | ||
| And so now they're looking at other markets. | ||
| In the UK, talking to a lot of parliamentarians, they're just confused. | ||
| We're like your cousins. | ||
| We would have worked with you. | ||
| We would have figured this out together. | ||
| You share all your special intelligence with us, but yet you didn't want to give us a heads up of how we could work together. | ||
| And it's creating a situation where they first don't believe us and trust us when it comes to our economic alliances. | ||
| Then it's moving on to the kind of security alliances. | ||
| And again, back to the bigger, grander things, like it's a multipolar world, right? | ||
| And in that multipolar world, I think it's the autocrats, which is you're going to see kind of like with Russia and China and the little minions around them. | ||
| And then it's the United States and what I would call our traditional Western economic values, us, the EU, North American countries, South American countries that are democratic. | ||
| And no matter what, China still has a big population pool. | ||
| We need to be aligned and supportive of each other in order for us to really have good leverage on China going forward. | ||
| Because if we don't, in the long run, they have the numbers. | ||
| They have the numbers. | ||
| The only way we can actually beat that Chinese economy is with the North American economy plus the EU economy and friends. | ||
| And that's how we win in the long run. | ||
| Because if not, you know, we just don't have the mass to do it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
As I said, this is a really broad topic that we have here. | |
| Let's turn to energy. | ||
| Senator Whitehouse, you are the ranking member of the EPW committee in the U.S. Senate. | ||
| You're one of the Senate's environmental champions. | ||
| What's wrong from your perspective with the president's priority of pursuing increases in domestic energy production, focusing on oil, on natural gas, on coal? | ||
| Well, there's a lot that's wrong with it. | ||
| First of all, if you don't combine that with pollution controls, then you're feeding into the climate disaster that turns into the insurance disaster, that turns into the real estate disaster, that turns into major recession. | ||
| I mean, even the Home Mortgage Association that lobbies in Washington is giving warnings about where we're headed. | ||
| So you don't want to feed into that. | ||
| You are also, again, hitting in the face the industries that are really performing right now when 95% of what goes onto the grid new is solar, wind, and battery. | ||
| And you go and punch those industries, you end up punching yourself. | ||
| It's a dumb thing to do. | ||
| And third, there's the very long-standing warning about the carbon bubble bursting. | ||
| And when suddenly, let's say OPEC nations decide they're going to take a run for the exits and just sell at cost plus a penny and get their product out while there's still a market for their product. | ||
| What happens to the U.S. fossil fuel industry? | ||
| It gets wiped out. | ||
| There's no circumstances under which we can compete on price with low-cost nations like Saudi. | ||
| So it's a highly vulnerable market sector for us to be in in the first place with a well-predicted prospect of a rush for the exits down to marginal cost plus a penny, wiping out our entire sector. | ||
| And that's where you get into all the issues about lost infrastructure and massive financial upheaval. | ||
| So is that going to happen? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Is it a real risk that it happens? | ||
| Yes, because it has been widely, widely, widely predicted. | ||
| So you're leading into a very dangerous place. | ||
| And it's very hard to believe that these are decisions that are being made in good faith when you look at the back and forth with political funding and political wheeler dealering between the industry and Trump himself and the Trump administration. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Congressman from Texas, I gather you disagree with that. | |
| I don't disagree, but can I ask a question? | ||
| Senator, do you think we're cleaner and greener in the United States than we ever have been in the history of our country? | ||
| Yeah, I agree. | ||
| But the problem is that that's not the test. | ||
| That's not the test. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm kidding. | |
| That's not the test. | ||
| The test is we've got to leave a livable planet for our children, our grandchildren, and everybody knows how that works. | ||
|
unidentified
|
100%. | |
| I believe we're cleaner and greener than we ever have been in our country's history. | ||
| The problem is China and India, who are opening a coal plant every single day, is not helping the climate. | ||
| Which is where that carbon border tariff becomes so important because China will pay a considerably higher tariff to the EU, to the UK, than we will. | ||
| Frankly, if that CBAM goes into effect and we continue to sit on our rear ends and do nothing serious to solve the climate problem, we still win economically. | ||
| Because the margin between the tariff to China and the tariff to us is sufficient to actually move manufacturing and industrial activity back to the United States. | ||
| So I'm a huge fan of the CBAM. | ||
| Everybody in America should know that word. | ||
| We cannot afford to lose that. | ||
| And frankly, we should be a part of it. | ||
| And if Cassidy and Graham and myself and others are successful, we will be. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Let me ask you a question that I hope you can answer relatively quickly because our time is running down. | |
| And it has to do with Russia, the Russia energy sector. | ||
| How can the U.S. put more pressure on Russia's energy sector, which of course funds the war in Ukraine? | ||
| I'll start with you, Senator. | ||
| Well, two things. | ||
| Number one, we need to export as much LNG as we can to Europe. | ||
| Look, there's Europe, Germany specifically screwed up by closing down all of their nuclear power plants. | ||
| In the meantime, I would rather them be buying LNG from us than from Russia, right? | ||
| So this is like either or. | ||
| Secondarily, we need to do massive investments in nuclear, both domestically and internationally. | ||
| When I was in Slovakia talking to the prime minister, one of the things I was trying to convince the prime minister to do is to buy U.S.-made SMRs from Westinghouse instead of Russians. | ||
| And, you know, the prime minister seemed to be more akin to staying with us, but he made it very clear. | ||
| He's like, I have nine, is that them? | ||
|
unidentified
|
They're marching in. | |
| He's like, I have nine nuclear power plants that are Russian-based. | ||
| I have workers that know how to work Russian power plants. | ||
| Why would I buy this? | ||
| And I said, well, look, I think we're going to have a more integrated future between the European Union and the United States. | ||
| And this is one of those steps. | ||
| If we can use our power of innovation to export SMR small module reactors, we can really make Europe independent from Russian carbon. | ||
| And if you make Europe, Western Europe, independent from Russian carbon, Russia is poor. | ||
| If they're poor, they can't wage these wars. | ||
| And for going back to China and India, I mean, the one thing that we aren't doing, we could have this conversation about coal versus not coal or whatever it is. | ||
| We're going to hit a problem with the growth of AI in this country that it doesn't matter how much coal you can bring in. | ||
| It's just not going to meet the demand. | ||
| And same with all those other countries. | ||
| So we should be trying to share as much U.S. innovation technology across the globe so we could employ our engineers, employ as many workers all around the world, and at the same time, be able to bring down the cost of energy as well as reducing the carbon footprint. | ||
| Because if you look at the numbers, and I see a couple of APS and SRP guys around here, I see you hiding out. | ||
| They'll tell you, I mean, even in Arizona, we're going to hit a bubble because we have the trifecta here since it's Derby Day. | ||
| We have, number one, a growth of population. | ||
| We have 500 people moving here a day, and they all like air conditioning. | ||
| Number two, we have high-end manufacturing, such as our chips plants. | ||
| And number three, we have AI data warehouses. | ||
| In order for us to meet all that, we can build as much as we can in terms of gas and everything else like that. | ||
| If we don't go nuclear, we're going to have big problems here and across the country and potentially across the world. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Two big topics that we have here in this session. | |
| Who's got a question for this great panel that we have? | ||
| All the questions coming up, I'd give a really short answer to your question, which is go a lot harder at Russian shipping. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| We've allowed them to be able to do that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Can I say we've done a complete 180 in energy policy from one administration to the other? | |
| That's right. | ||
| The Biden administration literally shut down LNG exports. | ||
| Yes, that was stupid. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks for admitting that. | |
| Anyway, do I see a question? | ||
| Anyone have a question? | ||
| Senator Klobuchar is vindicating that we need to go a lot harder. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There you go. | |
| Well, let me wrap it up with this question for each of you. | ||
| We have a Republican, we have two Democratic senators on this panel. | ||
| Where is there room for bipartisan legislation as it relates to energy policy? | ||
| Something that can get through. | ||
| Permitting reform. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go ahead, Senator Whitehouse first. | |
| Permitting reform. | ||
| Senator Capito and I have already detailed our staff directors to sit down with Senator Heinrich and Senator Lee's staff directors and start framing out what a permitting reform bill would look like. | ||
| All four corners are interested and eager to proceed and have it succeed. | ||
| And what I've told Senator Capito is that I want to do this. | ||
| I also want to do a big highway bill. | ||
| I also want to do a big water bill all through EPW. | ||
| We can't do any of that until the Trump administration knocks it off with the fake freezes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's true. | |
| And until we get some assurances that if we do pass a big, beautiful bipartisan bill, the Trump administration will actually faithfully execute the law as we wrote it and not just cherry pick the stuff that his donors like and leave the rest by the wayside. | ||
| And let's start working on the bills in the meantime, but know that the day has to come when we've got to clear the freezes and when we've got to have a proper understanding that faithful execution of the laws in the U.S. Constitution actually means faithfully executing the laws. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And Congressman Goldman, you know, you're from the House. | |
| Give me the perspective of the Republican-led House of Representatives. | ||
| Well, Senator Gallego and I both were house trained, not only in our state houses, but also federally. | ||
| But I'm brand new to the U.S. Congress, so just getting newly house trained at that level. | ||
| Permitting form, thankfully, now is a hot topic, and everybody seems to be agreement on that finally. | ||
| It took some time to get some people there. | ||
| Look, we have to, we'll have an open discussion about whether continuing to subsidize building wind and solar is the right thing to do. | ||
| It is in Texas. | ||
| I'm not saying it's bad. | ||
| We need solar and wind in Texas. | ||
| They're a huge part of our grid. | ||
| For those of you who don't know, we have our own grid in Texas. | ||
| We're not part of FERC. | ||
| The coal plants, as we're shuttering coal plants across this nation, is that the right thing to do as we need more energy when we're not ready and we don't have more energy online right now. | ||
| Nuclear, I think, bipartisan now. | ||
| Everyone's saying that's the way to go. | ||
| The small nuclear modules being built, one in Texas, a joint program between the University of Texas and Texas AM, believe it or not, they actually came together. | ||
| I was bipartisanship. | ||
| Yeah, that's true. | ||
| Bipartisanship. | ||
| I was chair of the energy committee in the Texas State House and the speaker who makes all appointments to all committees. | ||
| But the most progressive, most liberal member on my committee, and I said, Speaker, why do you do that? | ||
| And he goes, just sit there, wait, and watch. | ||
| And sure enough, he was right because I had a nuclear panel. | ||
| And this most progressive liberal member of the Texas State House says, that's the most interesting discussion we've ever had. | ||
| I was anti-nuclear before that panel. | ||
| I'm pro-nuclear now. | ||
| So that, in my opinion, is a future. | ||
| But the small modules. | ||
| I'll agree to that. | ||
| I've been the lead Democrat on all the nuclear reform bills, and there's more room to make more progress there. | ||
| I would say that when you're talking about subsidies, you can't overlook the negative externalities that fossil fuel gets to get away with their pollute-for-free business model, which amount to $700 billion a year in the U.S., according to the International Monetary Fund, which is not exactly a green group. | ||
| So be careful about using the word subsidy when you've got an industry that's sitting on a $700 billion annual subsidy in the form of free negative externalities. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We covered so much ground on this panel. | |
| I thank the panel. | ||
| You're all terrific, and I thank you for listening. | ||
| I appreciate it. | ||
| Great job, guys. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Great job. | |
| Nice job. | ||
| Thank you, Senator. | ||
| Really appreciate it. | ||
| Great job. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| We'll have more on tariffs later today. | ||
| The European Union has announced potential tariffs on the U.S. in excess of $100 billion should trade talks fail between the two countries. | ||
| This afternoon, a discussion on this and other European responses to the Trump administration, hosted by George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs. | ||
| You can see it live at 1230 p.m. Eastern here on C-SPAN. | ||
| Also coming up live this afternoon at 3, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts addresses the graduating class of Georgetown Law School in a conversation with the school's dean. | ||
| All of this on C-SPAN, C-SPAN now, our free mobile app, and online at c-span.org. | ||
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| As Mike said before, I happened to listen to him. | ||
| He was on C-SPAN 1. | ||
| That's a big upgrade, right? | ||
| But I've read about it in the history books. | ||
| I've seen the C-SPAN footage. | ||
| If it's a really good idea, present it in public view on C-SPAN. | ||
| Every single time I tuned in on TikTok or C-SPAN or YouTube or anything, there were tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people watching. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I went home after the speech and I turned on C-SPAN. | |
| I was on C-SPAN just this week. | ||
| To the American people, now is the time to tune in to C-SPAN. |