This week, Rep. Curtis shared his remarks during a hearing in the Energy & Commerce Committee to celebrate America’s energy and environmental leadership:
On the energy path forward:
When you make these decisions, it matters. Reliability matters. Clean matters. Right. I think it’s been a mistake historically to only talk about affordability and reliability and ignore clean. I think it’s been a mistake to talk about clean and ignore affordable and reliability.
Every source of energy has what I would call a fatal flaw. In renewables, it’s storage. I think we’ll get there, but today, that’s a fatal flaw. For nuclear, I love nuclear, but today it’s cost and timing. For fossil fuels, you’ve got these issues of emissions. With carbon sequestration, direct air capture and if you talk to everybody that I know in the fossil fuel industry, they’ll commit to a net neutral by 2050. I think it’s important that we include them as part of the solution.
On the role of fossil fuels:
I represent oil, gas and coal in my district…If I talk to them about affordable, reliable, clean, they say, “We’re on it…we get it. We understand that, we’ll innovate, and we’ll find our path there.”
On the role of the United States:
We should herald our successes and not hide them. I actually think that in all the major sectors, we lead in cleanliness around the world, and not perfectly, but in a lot of sectors. I actually think that there’s some things coming at us, CBAM from Europe, where it’s going to be important for us to say from the Department of Energy, “this is what we’re doing.”
On legislation to account for emissions:
I’m pleased to be working with Representative Peters on what we call the Prove It Act, which would be a government study that would actually demonstrate in all of these sectors where we are leading, maybe where we’re weaker in a couple of areas, but where we’re leading so that we have actual facts when we’re sitting with China and talking about the discrepancy that we’re putting on U.S. businesses and when the CBAM is put into effect, we’re not using Europe’s numbers. We’re using our numbers.
‘The goal at COP should be to reduce global emissions, not energy choices,’ GOP Rep Curtis tells Fox News Digital
