In Support of H.R. 1

Washington, DC – Congressman Tom McClintock (CA-05) delivered remarks on the House floor in support of H.R. 1.

Madam Speaker:

Everything around us that makes our lives possible is either mined or it’s grown.  Everything.  

Above the Speaker’s chair is inscribed a plea from Daniel Webster to those who serve in this house: "Let us develop the resources of our land, call forth its powers … and see whether we also, in our day and generation, may not perform something worthy to be remembered."

Yet for fifty years, the environmental left has slowly strangled our nation’s ability to do just that and in the process, it is impoverishing the American people.  One of its most powerful weapons is the National Environmental Policy Act, imposed in 1969 with the promise it would protect the environment.

It has done exactly the opposite.  It has made it endlessly time consuming and ultimately cost prohibitive to manage our forests, to provide abundant water for our people, and to prosper from our vast energy and mineral resources.  

My district comprises the forests of the Sierra Nevada and the agricultural heartland of California’s Central Valley. The Left promised us that NEPA would PROTECT our forests and water resources.  Come to my district and you’ll see what a cruel and demonstrable lie that has become.

Excess timber is removed from forests in only two ways.  If we don’t carry it out, nature will burn it out.  Throughout the 20th Century, the U.S. Forest Service marked off surplus timber and auctioned it to logging companies that paid us to remove it.  The result was healthy, resilient and fire-resistant federal forests, a steady revenue source for forest improvements and thriving mountain economies.  

Then came the National Environmental Policy Act.  Simple forest thinning projects now require an average of 4 ½ years of environmental studies, costing millions of dollars – more than the value of the timber.  Instead of making money for the government, removing excess timber COSTS us money.  

As a result, our forests have become morbidly overgrown – carrying four times the timber the land can support.  In that stressed condition, the trees succumb to disease, pestilence, drought and ultimately catastrophic wildfires that we haven’t seen in over a century.  

California is one of the most water-rich regions of the country, and yet, the farms of the Central Valley have had their water systematically choked off because NEPA and other environmental laws make major new reservoirs all but impossible to build.  Record rain-fall this year is being lost to the ocean simply because we have no place to store it.

When the little town of Foresthill tried to add a $2 million spillway gate for additional water storage, they discovered that because of NEPA, they also had to budget $1 million for environmental reviews, and $2 million for environmental mitigations.  After more than a decade, the project has yet to be built.  The last reservoir over a million acre feet constructed in California was completed in 1979.  Meanwhile, the state’s population has nearly doubled.

Madam Speaker, when something is plentiful, it is cheap.  When it is scarce, it is expensive.  NEPA is making everything we depend upon in our lives increasingly scarce and therefore increasingly expensive.

The left obsesses over a one degree rise in temperature over the next century, but couldn’t care less that they’re making it impossible for people to heat their homes in sub-freezing winters.  They promise us they care about the environment, but couldn’t care less that entire human communities and species habitats and millions of acres of forest are being laid waste by preventable mega-fires.  They obsess over the snail darter, but couldn’t care less they’ve destroyed thousands of agricultural jobs, idled a half-million acres of California farmland and sent grocery prices skyrocketing.  They promised us that NEPA would protect the forests.  Instead, it’s destroying them.  

HR 1 begins to dial back the damage NEPA has done both to the environment and to the quality of life of all Americans simply by reducing the time and costs required for these massive bureaucratic studies.      

The question before us is whether our children will grow up in a world of scarcity, poverty and misery or one of abundance, prosperity and optimism.

That is the simple question before us.  We choose prosperity: a future of abundant and affordable energy, water, food, lumber, minerals and all the material comforts and benefits that flow from the resources our country has been blessed with.   

THAT is something worthy to be remembered.  That future can begin with this vote today.