North American Energy Infrastructure Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. TONKO. I appreciate the gentleman from California, our distinguished ranker on the committee and former chair, for yielding.

Mr. Chairman, it is unfortunate that the energy bills before us this week do not lay out a roadmap for where we truly need to go; that is, to a future in which we have reduced our reliance on fossil fuels, greatly increased our focus on energy efficiency, and expanded our use of renewable energy.

H.R. 3301 and H.R. 6 are all about keeping us dependent upon fossil fuels, especially oil and gas. H.R. 3301 establishes a new process for considering and approving cross-border energy projects--pipelines and certainly transmission lines. In fact, it would be good to have a defined and predictable process for evaluating these projects and either approving or rejecting them within a reasonable timeframe.

Unfortunately, this bill is all about approving these projects quickly, with minimal consideration of their value to all sectors of our economy, the value to our consumers, and certainly the value to our environment.

The advocates for this bill and this infrastructure approval process sound as if we have never approved cross-border projects. But, in fact, we have many cross-border pipelines and transmission lines. This infrastructure, once in place, operates for decades. And all projects are not all equal in their impacts and are certainly not all equal in their size.

This bill does not require a sufficient analysis of the overall benefits of proposed projects. It is not enough to determine if any project is in our national security interests. Those are important interests, of course, but there are many others as well. The public, State and local governments, nonfossil fuel business interests, and others should be able to offer their views on a proposed project. This bill virtually cuts them out of that effort. You do not gain public support for infrastructure projects by cutting the public out of the decisionmaking.

H.R. 3301 does not provide for sufficient public input or sufficient weighing of overall national benefits and costs of these projects. Supporters of H.R. 3301 claim that this bill is not about the Keystone XL pipeline.

Well, H.R. 3301 is not a Keystone XL approval bill, per se, but that project would certainly be resurrected and approved if this bill were to become law.

This bill should not become law. It does not provide the type of thoughtful, comprehensive, and certainly inclusive process that should guide decisions that impact energy resources for many decades to come. I urge defeat of this legislation.

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