Washington, D.C. - Representative Dave Min (CA-47), a member of the House Natural Resources Committee, spoke out against House Republicans' "Environmental Liquidation for Billionaires Act."

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"If we have people in our lives that we love, that we think are going to be around in 2050 or 2070 or 2100, we owe an obligation to them to act right now," said Rep. Min."And this [bill] is the opposite of that. We need to be moving forward, not backward. We need to be weaning ourselves off of fossil fuels, not moving aggressively back into what is an outdated technology."

Additionally, Rep. Min offered four amendments to the legislation:

• An amendment to ensure no offshore oil and gas lease sales be awarded to companies that have overdue decommissioning liabilities on pre-existing leases, lacks the financial resources to mitigate and address environmental liabilities, or has previously failed to comply with oil and gas extraction federal law and regulations on federal lands and waters;
• An amendment to prohibit funds from this legislation to be used for existing contracts with companies in which Elon Musk has a full or partial ownership stake until the inspectors general of the Department of Interior, the Department of Commerce, and the Department of Agriculture determine whether any actions taken by Elon Musk since November 6, 2024 have violated personal financial interest law for special government employees (18 USC 208(a));
• An amendment to prevent the reduction of onshore and offshore oil and gas royalty rates until the Comptroller General certifies that the Secretary of the Interior has finalized regulations to incorporate full environmental liabilities into financial assurance requirements;
• And, an amendment to require the Trump administration to adopt an "all of the above" energy strategy, by prohibiting the Secretary of the Interior from conducting lease sales until certifying that the administration's national energy policy includes wind and solar, among other energy sources.

Rep. Min's transcribed remarks are below:

"Thank you, Mr. Chair. When I was elected, I didn't imagine that four months into my tenure, I'd be voting on what I think is very clearly the most destructive legislation in U.S. history when it comes to our environment and public spaces.

This is a huge giveaway to big oil. And I know that a number of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle have made a lot about the fact that this ostensibly will raise $18 billion, but it gives away many more dollars to the big oil companies that primarily benefit the mining companies out there.

We've heard the different ways in which it does that, through the reductions in royalties, through a lot of the giveaways, the lowest bidder provisions.

This is a bill that is just packed with giveaway after giveaway. And I think it's important for us to recognize the context in which this is taking place, because climate change is happening right now, regardless of what we think of it.

In districts like mine, we worry all the time now about the threat of wildfires. We know that with the drier foliage that we have, with the harder blowing Santa Ana winds, which reached 100 miles an hour this past year, we are going to face that threat.

We're facing rising temperatures throughout the world. India just hit 140 degrees last year. We've seen disasters arise throughout the world right now, and we are starting to face biblical level temperature and climate right now.

And the sad thing about this all is that when we look back in 100 years, we are going to say that the temperatures that we experienced right now, the extreme weather events, these were extremely benign, that these were the most benign and coolest temperatures that we experienced in the last hundred years.

And so if we have people in our lives that we love, that we think are going to be around in 2050 or 2070 or 2100, we owe an obligation to them to act right now.

And this is the opposite of that. We need to be moving forward, not backward. We need to be weaning ourselves off of fossil fuels, not moving aggressively back into what is an outdated technology at this point.

We have a moral and economic imperative to do this.And yes, an economic one, because the dollars we're talking about, even if we ignore the fact that most of this bill is geared towards giving tons and tons to big oil companies, the economic impacts that we're facing from climate change are accelerating right now. Many, many billions of dollars, hundreds of billions of dollars in losses from the California wildfires just last year. We see natural disasters resulting in huge losses over and over and over.

And these are going to accelerate. Any economist out there that's looking ahead has estimated that we're going to be facing many trillions of dollars in cost from climate change. So we need to be thinking about that.

We need to be thinking about what it means when we talk about the American dream in this country, because the American dream is, yes, it's about economic opportunity.

It's also about allowing our children to grow up in clean spaces, to breathe clean air, to have access to our beautiful public lands in this country, to have access to clean water. And again, this bill does the opposite of that. And it does it by again, investing in a retrograde past technology. When you look around the world right now, China, Germany, France, Canada, advanced economies are not investing backwards in more oil. They're investing in clean energy because they know that's where the future is. They're not investing in the horse and buggy. They're not investing in past technologies. They're moving in the future.

Right now, we are aligning ourselves once again with countries like North Korea and Iran and investing in oil so heavily, like Russia. So again, I would just urge you all - we have a moral imperative to act right now, to act in a way that stewards our environment, that pays it forward to the children and unborn children that are out there. And so I urge my colleagues to think carefully about this bill, because it really is devastating to our economy, to our environment, but also to our future. I yield back."

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