Democrats are chasing bad policy and bad politics in their short-sighted effort to thwart President Donald Trump’s American energy renaissance, Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) explained to Breitbart News on Tuesday.
Senate Democrats are moving Wednesday to block Trump’s national energy emergency in a gesture of opposition to the president’s actions to lower energy prices and deliver on a key campaign pledge.
“During his campaign, President Trump emphasized the connection between a robust energy economy and getting inflation under control further,” Lummis told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview. “It creates jobs, it creates energy in the country that is best able to produce clean energy, and that’s the United States.”
On his first day in office, Trump declared a national energy emergency to unleash American energy production after energy prices skyrocketed under former President Joe Biden. Biden moved to halt oil and natural gas leases, banned offshore drilling, and sought to require a majority of new cars sold in the U.S. to be electric vehicles or hybrids by 2032, Breitbart News’ Sean Moran reported.
The burden hit all Americans, especially those in Lummis’s home state – “Wyoming exports 12 times more energy than it consumes,” Lummis emphasized. But Trump’s designation of a national energy emergency is both increasing energy availability and lowering costs as well as furthering clean energy efforts.
“Now that President Trump has correctly opened opportunities for energy production – and I mean energy production of all kinds in this country – it helps us achieve a cleaner environment worldwide, because we can produce it so much cleaner than China, Russia and other countries on the other side of the planet,” she explained.
“It is going to have benefits all over the country, including the Northeast, the West Coast and areas that tend to be dominated by Democrat voters,” Lummis expounded, adding “it will give us a chance to show them that we can have less expensive, more abundant clean energy in this country, that we can protect our environment at the same time that we make ourselves not only energy independent, but energy dominant.”
Democrats’ resolution to revoke Trump’s order is privileged, therefore, the Senate has to schedule a vote on the legislation. Lummis believes their effort is doomed to fail on the Senate floor and with voters weary of paying high energy prices.
“They’re going to get shot down in a big way,” she said of Democrats. “And it gives us, those of us who are for producing more clean American energy and the attendant jobs that go along with that, an opportunity to explain that… when we produce energy in the United States is actually cleaning up the global environment.”
China is building dozens of coal plants, yet Democrats, including Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) have argued that America is in a clean energy “arms race” with China.
Lummis, who saw firsthand the Chinese pollution emitted across the globe during a visit to South Korea, believes Democrats’ crusade to promote alternative energy sources regardless of the consequences is short-sighted.
“Modern coal fired power plants that use Yankee ingenuity and American technology and are extremely clean, and so I would tell my friend, Sen. Wyden, we should be building more clean coal-fired power plants here in the United States, and in fact, as a gesture of environmental goodwill around the world, we should teach China how to do their coal-fired power plants in a cleaner way,” she said.
The Senate is expected to vote on the Democrats’ resolution Wednesday.
Lummis is a member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.
Bradley Jaye is Deputy Political Editor for Breitbart News. Follow him on X/Twitter and Instagram @BradleyAJaye