In an absolutely wild, and quite fun to watch, incident that occurred on the floor of a Congressional committee hearing, Western Energy Alliance President Kathleen Sgamma utterly destroyed Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortes over a claim that Rep. AOC made about “greenhouse gas” emissions in the United States.

President Sgamma’s obliteration of Rep. AOC was sparked by a claim that AOC made in her opening statement during the House Committee on Natural Resources, Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources Oversight Hearing on “Examining the Biden Administration’s Mismanagement of the Federal Onshore Oil and Gas Program,”

AOC had claimed, incorrectly, that oil and gas production on federal land in the United States accounts for a quarter of “greenhouse gas” emissions in the United States. The study she was referencing for her claim was one by the United States Geological Survey. It found that oil and gas production accounted for 23.7% of carbon dioxide emissions over a decade-long period, with the numbers for other greenhouse gases being much lower.

President Sgamma, sounding off, began by restating AOC’s claim and noting that she would be addressing it first. She said, “I just want to start off by correcting something the ranking member said in her opening statement. She claimed that oil and gas production on federal lands is responsible for about a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions,”

Continuing, President Sgamma noted, “That’s a complete falsehood.” She then went on to describe how AOC, in arriving at the “nearly a quarter” claim, had entirely misread the actual study, which found that it was just carbon dioxide emissions that are caused by oil and gas extraction to about 25%, and that the total figure when all gases are included is much lower.

She said, torching Rep. AOC’s claim and commenting on what the truth of the matter is. “That’s based on a misreading of a USGS study of greenhouse gas emissions. And if you actually look at the numbers, production on federal lands and waters accounts for 0.6% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, not ‘nearly a quarter.’”

Emphasizing her point, she noted that the Interior Department itself stopped pushing a similar claim to the one AOC made once it had been corrected by her and shown the real numbers. She said, “Even the Interior Department stopped using that number after I simply pointed out the numbers from the USGS report.”

Watch her here:

Also during her speech before the committee, President Sgamma said, “Chairman Stauber, Ranking Member Ocasio-Cortez, and Committee Members, thank you for the opportunity to testify today. The Administration is moving forward with a whole-of-government approach to stopping American oil and natural gas. The level of regulation coming at my industry is astounding, with practically every single agency, not just oil and natural gas regulators, getting into the action in the name of climate change. Financial regulators, transportation, labor, every agency is attempting to prevent American production of the oil, natural gas, and coal that provides 80% of the energy to power our economy and enable the healthy, safe, and environmentally protective modern lifestyle that Americans enjoy.”

She continued, “And to what end? We have an administration that has consistently begged Saudi Arabia and before the invasion, Russia, to increase their oil production to relieve high prices. We are once again in a cycle of higher gasoline prices, yet the president continues to announce plans to curtail yet more American oil production, the most recent being the cancelation of leases in Alaska and the locking away of 13 million acres in the Alaskan Petroleum Reserve even though Congress mandated leasing as recently as 2017. The president has let OPEC raise energy prices by blocking my industry from doing what we did just a few short years ago in making OPEC irrelevant.”

She then said, “We could be producing between two and three million more barrels of oil per day if the president wasn’t blocking us at every step, more than enough to cover the production declines of OPEC and Russia and keep prices low for consumers the world over.1 There are those who say that we must make these sacrifices in the name of climate change. People must not be allowed to drive when they want, eat what they want, use air conditioning, or heat their homes. But as John Kerry has said several times, we could take all American greenhouse gas emissions to zero and it would make no difference.”

She then added, “If you run each of the policies of scarcity, energy inflation, and control through the models the government relies on, you get negligible impact.3 The only way to justify any of these policies is by using a Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases that inflates the benefits on paper, but not in reality.”