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Senator on Senate floor urges support for Kaine resolution, calls Trump's energy-emergency order a giveaway to oil
Summary
An unidentified senator urged colleagues on the Senate floor to back a resolution by Senator Kaine challenging the Trump administration's February energy-emergency declaration, arguing it favors fossil-fuel interests, undermines clean-energy tax credits and has led to project cancellations and job losses.
An unidentified senator addressed the Senate floor, urging colleagues to support a resolution introduced by Senator Kaine challenging the administration's February executive order declaring an "energy emergency" and criticizing recent Republican budget moves as favoring fossil-fuel interests over clean energy.
The senator said he and Senator Schumer "led the development of the clean energy tax credits," calling the policy a catalyst for "hundreds of billions of dollars of investment in clean energy" and for new U.S. factories and hundreds of thousands of jobs. "The tax credits help to kick off a manufacturing boom in America," the senator said.
The speech centered on the claim that the administration's emergency declaration "has nothing to do with energy dominance, but it has got everything to do with giveaways for big oil." The senator accused Republicans of using a budget bill to "gut" tax credits for wind and solar and said the result has been canceled manufacturing projects, lost jobs and higher utility bills.
"Last week, the administration announced plans to cancel over $7,000,000,000 in funding for clean energy," the senator said, adding that "almost every one of those projects" was in Democratic-led states and citing Oregon as losing about $400,000,000. The transcript attributes these figures to the speaker; they are reported here as stated in debate and have not been independently verified in this article.
The senator also recalled testimony to an energy committee he once chaired, saying natural-gas industry representatives told the committee they supported gas but also needed solar and wind to meet growing demand from technologies such as artificial intelligence. He urged a return to "technological neutrality," arguing that clean energy and good-paying jobs are not mutually exclusive.
The floor remarks concluded with a direct appeal: the senator urged colleagues to "strongly support senator Kane's resolution" (transcript spelling) and yielded the floor. The transcript records the appeal and the expectation of an upcoming vote; no vote outcome is recorded in the provided transcript.
What happens next: the senator said the Senate is scheduled to vote on the resolution; the result and any formal amendments or roll-call are not included in the transcript provided.
