Northern Route Approval Act
Floor Speech
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Mr. HUFFMAN. I thank the gentleman.
What a wonderful bill if you happen to be the Canadian oil company that reaps all the benefits, but it comes at the expense of the American economy and the global environment. We should reject this bill out of hand.
This sweetheart deal approves the northern route of the Keystone XL pipeline and exempts it from the rigorous public analysis and scientific standards that American companies are held to, including the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, among others. Bear in mind that tar sands oil is already exempt from paying into the trust fund that covers oil spill cleanup.
So with this bill, my colleagues are saying we should have no front-end environmental protection for this project and no backstop funding for when things go wrong--and things will go wrong. You just have to look at what happened at the Mayflower, Arkansas, spill a month ago. When that happens, American taxpayers are going to be on the hook for cleanup, and where is the offset for that? Meanwhile, TransCanada, the Canadian corporation proposing to build this pipeline, is on record before the Canadian energy board as saying that this project will increase the price of oil in the United States.
So let's be very clear about what we are doing. This House is considering a bill to cut corners for a foreign corporation to transport dirty fuel and raise gas prices for Americans. Why would we spend our time on this? Well, we're told it's about jobs, but the fact is we don't even know how many jobs this pipeline project will create. The estimates are all over the map. You could believe Fox News, which says it will create a million jobs, or TransCanada, which says around 13,000 construction jobs, or the State Department, which says it will directly create fewer than 4,000 jobs, and fewer than three dozen of those will be permanent jobs.
We don't even know the massive security risks and security costs that this project will foist upon the American taxpayers. At a minimum, we should approve the Connolly amendment to, at the very least, generate a threat assessment if this bill is to move forward.
This bill, colleagues, is a betrayal of our priorities as Members of the United States Congress.
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