Endless Frontier Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. MARKEY. Madam President, I appreciate the points that my colleague from Texas is making, but the bill he is proposing to pass by unanimous consent has not been considered by the Commerce Committee, and it would drastically and unilaterally tie the hands of the Department of Transportation from protecting communities from having massive amounts of dangerous, explosive liquefied natural gas shipped right through their towns and cities. I understand that the Republicans and natural gas companies want to railroad through the Senate a bill that would undermine the safety of the railroads in our communities, but we just can't allow this to happen.

In 2020, the Trump administration moved to allow trains of 100 or more cars to begin transporting liquefied natural gas with no additional safety regulations. It did this over the objections of the attorneys general of 15 States and the District of Columbia. Firefighters opposed it. Railroad unions that represented the railroad employees objected to it. The environmental community objected to it as did the National Transportation Safety Board.

Listen to this: A train of 110 tank cars, filled with liquefied natural gas, would have more than five times the equivalent energy of the Hiroshima atomic bomb.

We cannot put our firefighters, our railway workers, and our homes and families at risk from loose regulations on what could be catastrophically dangerous trains. Too many lives are at stake, and the Department of Transportation should have the ability to review this rule. This bill that is being propounded right now would blind our safety watchdog when we should be putting these threats under a microscope.

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