Responsibly and Professionally Invigorating Development Act of 2015
Floor Speech
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Mr. MARINO. Mr. Chairman, by its terms, the amendment brands infeasible--and, thus, barred from further evaluation--project alternatives that do not appear at the outset of the review process to adequately address risks associated with flooding, wildfire, and climate change. With all due respect, that puts the cart before the horse.
The bill is intended to allow the review of alternatives that are technically and economically feasible. It is entirely possible that, during the course of review, a technically and economically feasible alternative that appears initially to be inadequate to address these risks could, on further review, be found to be adequate or to be improved to be adequate. It might even ultimately be found to be the best alternative under review.
Why should we prematurely end the evaluation of alternatives that could ultimately prove adequate with regard to these types of risks?
This does not prevent the review process. What it does prevent is someone waiting to get in at the last moment, which has been 5 or 6 years later, to jam the system up in court, therefore crushing jobs and letting regulation run rampant.
I urge my colleagues to oppose the amendment.
Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.
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Mr. MARINO. Mr. Chairman, among those who suffer most unfairly from poor government decision-making are the communities the gentleman's amendment addresses. For example, growing research shows that the costs of new regulations often have regressive effects on those with lower incomes. When poor government decision-making occurs in the permit review process, similar unfair effects may occur.
The gentleman's amendment guards against this by requiring agencies to identify and reveal the potential adverse effects of project alternatives on low-income communities and communities of color. Once identified and revealed, of course, any such effects may be avoided, minimized, or mitigated.
I urge my colleagues to support the amendment.
Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.
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Mr. MARINO. Mr. Chairman, the American people desperately need new jobs. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, America's labor force participation rate remains mired among historic lows.
Almost 94 million Americans who could work are outside the workforce. That is more than the population of all but 12 of the world's countries and more than every other country in the Western Hemisphere, except for Brazil and Mexico.
We face this historically low rate not because Americans don't want to work, but because so many Americans have despaired of any hope of finding a new full-time job and have abandoned the workforce.
The RAPID Act offers strong help to reverse this tragedy, restore the hope, and produce millions of new jobs. We must pass the bill, not weaken it, to provide these new high-wage jobs.
The gentlewoman's amendment would weaken the bill in one of the worst possible ways. It would remove the clear consequences in the bill for agencies that refuse to follow the bill's deadlines. That consequence is to deem permits approved if agencies refuse to approve or deny them within those deadlines.
Mr. Chairman, the bill provides 4 1/2 years for agencies to complete their environmental reviews for new permit applications and reasonable and additional time for agencies to wrap up final permit approvals or denials after that; 4 1/2 years is more time than it took the United States to fight and win World War II.
If agencies can't wrap up their environmental reviews in that much time and then meet the bill's remaining deadlines, there is something terribly wrong with the agencies.
The prospect of facing a default approval at the end of the substantial time the bill grants is an eminently reasonable way to assure that agencies will conduct full reviews and wrap their work up in time to make up or down decisions on their own.
I urge my colleagues to oppose the amendment.
I reserve the balance of my time
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Mr. MARINO. Mr. Chairman, one of the linchpins of the RAPID Act is its set of provisions that: deem a permit approved if the permitting agency refuses to meet the bill's reasonable deadlines; and, prohibit a court from overturning a permit approval simply because the permit was deemed approved when deadlines expired before action was taken.
If we do not include consequences like these in the bill, how will we ever ensure that recalcitrant, foot-dragging Federal agencies will achieve the bill's goal of streamlined permit decisions?
The amendment, however, removes all consequences for agencies' foot-dragging so long as the projects at issue would either limit access to or opportunities for hunting or fishing or impact an endangered or threatened species. That is in the bill. The amendment's sponsor offers no sound reason to do this.
The bill does not require projects with these kinds of impacts to be approved. It just requires that permitting decisions, up or down, be reached after, at most, 4 1/2 years of environmental review. Surely that is enough time to review all kinds of projects, including those that limit access to or opportunities for hunting or fishing or impact endangered or threatened species.
To make matters worse, the bill would allow agencies to drag their feet without consequences even if a project had a beneficial impact on an endangered or threatened species. Why should we allow delay for that?
I urge my colleagues to oppose the amendment.
Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.
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Mr. MARINO. Mr. Chairman, my colleague forgets to mention the fact that the lead Federal agency in this is responsible for maintaining a schedule, just like we do in private industry, just like we do in our own homes. That agency is responsible for going to the States and to the locals and other Federal agencies to make sure things are being done. Unfortunately, here in D.C., and sometimes at the State level, the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing, and this is making agencies responsible for that. It is just common sense.
Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.
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Mr. MARINO. Mr. Chairman, the amendment seeks to strike the bill's prohibition against agency use in permitting reviews of the Obama administration's pronouncements on the social costs of carbon, but this prohibition was adopted last term for a very good reason.
The administration's social cost of carbon estimate is junk science. To be specific, multiple commentators on the administration's findings about the social cost of carbon argue that carbon's social cost is an unknown quantity, that social cost of carbon analysts can get just about any result they desire by fiddling with nonvalidated climate parameters, made-up damage functions, and below-market discount rates, and that social cost of carbon analysis is computer-aided sophistry, its political function being to make renewable energy look like a bargain at any price and fossil energy look unaffordable, no matter how cheap.
Junk science and sophistry has no place standing between hard-working Americans and new, high-paying jobs.
I urge my colleagues to oppose the amendment.
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Mr. MARINO. Mr. Chair, I support the amendment.
It is bad enough that agencies already take too much time to conclude construction permit reviews.
It is even worse for them to draw out the process on the basis of junk science.
And that is precisely what the Obama administration's pronouncements on the ``social sost of carbon'' appear to be.
The Obama administration's current ``social cost of carbon'' estimate is plagued by defects including the lack of full scientific peer review, robust public comment, and full compliance with federal requirements for influential scientific assessments.
Subsection (K) of the bill prohibits the use of the administration's ``technical update of the social cost of carbon for regulatory impact analysis under Executive Order No. 12866,'' as well as successors to it.
The gentleman's amendment makes crystal clear that agencies also may not rely on administration ``guidance'' documents intended to facilitate agencies' use of the prohibited technical document.
I urge my colleagues to suport the amendment.
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