Chairman Rouda, Ranking Member Green, and other Members of the subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to testify about the economic effects of climate change. My name is Kevin Dayaratna. I am the Principal Statistician, Data Scientist, and Research Fellow at The Heritage Foundation. The views I express in this testimony are my own
and should not be construed as representing any official position of The Heritage Foundation.

From turning on a light switch, to starting up our cars, to enabling this very hearing to operate, energy is one of the most fundamental aspects of civilization. Unfortunately, however, many people take energy for granted. Over the course of the past decade, it has been a fundamental goal of policymakers in Washington to expand regulations across the energy sector of the economy to address climate change. As a result, it is important to quantify the impacts of this fundamental building block both in terms of the economy as well as in terms of the climate. Over the course of my work at The Heritage Foundation, my colleagues and I have used the same models that the federal government has used to quantify these impacts ourselves. We have found in our work published both at Heritage and in the peer-reviewed literature that these policies aimed at decarbonization are predicated on user-manipulated models. Moreover, we have found that these policies will result in devastating economic impacts along with negligible impacts on the climate. Policies aimed at taking advantage of our vast oil and gas supply, on the other hand, will grow the economy for years to come.

The full testimony appears on the U. S. House of Representatives Oversight Committee website at https://oversight.house.gov/sites/democrats.oversight.house.gov/files/Dayaratna%20Testimony%2C%20updated%20for%20Sept%2024%20hearing.pdf

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