Chip Roy to Biden: You want to kill Texas' energy jobs? 'Come and take it'

Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) on Friday delivered an impassioned speech on the House floor slamming Democrats and the Biden administration for waging war by executive fiat on the oil and natural gas industries.

Among the flurry of executive actions President Joe Biden has taken in the weeks since he took office, Biden signed several orders on climate change, directing the secretary of the interior to pause granting new permits for oil and natural gas leases on public lands or offshore waters. Biden also canceled the Keystone XL oil pipeline project on his first day as president, a move that eliminated an estimated tens of thousands of jobs related to the completion of the pipeline.

In his remarks, Roy accused Democrats of attacking the natural resources that are "the very great strength that the United States of America has to set us apart from the rest of the world to be independent."

Noting that CO2 levels in the U.S. have decreased in recent years and as of 2018 were at levels not seen since the mid-1990s, Roy argued that new technology like fracking and natural gas, which Democrats oppose, is responsible for lowering emissions, which Democrats claim to support.

"We have vastly exceeded what my leftist friends on the other side of the aisle want to follow, the social welfare state of Europeans down the road of fancy gatherings in Davos," Roy said. "They fly on their expensive jets to go preach to the world about global warming. Spare me your preaching as you're riding around in these jets, spewing out CO2, when we, through innovation in the great state of Texas and in our country, are creating clean-burning natural gas and are creating jobs powering the world."

Roy slammed the Biden administration, accusing the president's policies of "want[ing] to come in and destroy jobs, destroy our leadership in the world, turn us over to Russia and Iran, and oh by the way, empower China to roll right over us while they spew out whatever they want to spew out because darn if they're going to actually do anything like agree to whatever is in the Paris agreement."

"It is an absolute joke, it's a laughingstock what the Democratic Party is doing saying they're standing up for the little guy in this country, when you're going to drive up the price of energy, increase CO2, empower China, empower Iran, empower Russia, and harm jobs," Roy roared.

"You're going to kill hundreds of thousands of jobs in this country even as we're coming out of the negative effect of the pandemic."

He ended his remarks with a declaration to his Democratic colleagues: "You roll in here thinking that we're going to just fundamentally alter our entire economy through executive order?

"We're gonna say no. We're gonna say come and take it."

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