Western Caucus on Jobs
Floor Speech
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Mr. LAMBORN. Thank you, Representative. You do such a great job representing New Mexico, and you know so much about energy issues and financial institutions, issues like that as well. But this is a great forum. I thank you for organizing this and your leadership on energy issues.
I want to quickly address an issue that is of great concern to many people, myself included, and that is: Who should be regulating things like hydrologic fracking, fracturing--or fracking, for short--here in the United States? We have about 10 different Federal agencies that have their hand involved one way or another in regulating fracking, or at least trying to do so, from the EPA all the way to the Securities and Exchange Commission, if you can believe that.
I'm concerned because in my work on the Natural Resources Committee, along with Rob Bishop that you heard from earlier, we have been hearing that the Bureau of Land Management, one of the agencies that our agency oversees, is proposing rules regulating fracking on public lands. The concern about that is that right now, in a State like Colorado, my own State, those State regulators are already doing a great job regulating fracking. They know the local geology. They know the water, the water aquifers. They know the things that someone in Washington is not really going to know.
If you add a second layer of bureaucracy onto what the States are already doing, you have the potential--in fact, the certainty--of crippling job production, crippling energy production, because you'll have twice as many regulations to have to deal with if you're an energy producer. Why in the world do we need to, when the States are already doing a good job, add another layer of red tape and bureaucracy? I'm really concerned about that.
The subcommittee that I'm the chairman of on Natural Resources, Energy and Mineral Resources, is having a hearing in Denver next week on Wednesday, the 2nd of May, at the State Capitol in Denver. We're going to get right into this very issue.
Should the States be regulating fracking, or do we also want to have the Federal Government regulating as well? I hope that the evidence shows--and I believe it will--that the States are already doing a great job. We can only lose by having another layer of regulation.
This is an issue that affects energy in the West on public lands, and I'm really concerned that we have Federal agencies getting involved when the States are already doing a fine job and it's only going to hurt the production of energy and the creation of jobs.
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