Domestic Prosperity and Global Freedom Act

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. McNERNEY. Reclaiming my time, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently released its multiyear report on the state of climate science. The world's leading climate scientists examined the peer-reviewed science and confirmed that climate change is already happening on all continents and across the oceans and will get much worse if we don't act.

The impacts of runaway climate change will be severe: reduced crop yields, more heat waves and diseases, decreased water availability, and more extreme weather events.

That means that we need to scrutinize the energy infrastructure decisions that we make today because of their impacts on climate change in the future. Every decision to build a new LNG export terminal has climate implications. We need to understand and weigh those effects. Otherwise, we risk locking in infrastructure that will produce carbon pollution for decades to come or creating stranded investments that must be shut down before they have paid for themselves.

Natural gas combustion for electricity does emit less carbon pollution than coal, but natural gas production does result in gas escaping, and natural gas is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. We need to consider the effect of carbon emissions in the United States.

In addition, liquefying natural gas and shipping it overseas is an energy-intensive process that will result in some significant domestic carbon emissions. For example, the direct emissions from the Sabine Pass process will represent 2 percent of the entire State of Louisiana's emissions.

The Energy Information Administration's modeling shows that LNG exports would increase domestic natural gas production in the United States. Of course, that is obvious. This could increase emissions of methane, which is, as I mentioned, a potent greenhouse gas, unless we take very severe measures to control that pollution at the wellhead and throughout the natural gas system.

In a carbon-constrained world, we need to understand all of these domestic emissions' impacts and how they compare with emission impacts abroad. The DOE has taken a first step to begin looking at these issues but has not completed a rigorous study of the effects of the different levels of LNG exports on carbon emissions.

We need to make sure we understand the effects on climate change of major energy infrastructure investments that will last for decades.

My second concern is economic. Shipping natural gas overseas will raise domestic natural gas prices. That is basically the law of supply and demand--unless that law is no longer valid.

Manufacturing is seeing a domestic renaissance here in this country because of natural gas prices being lower. This is domestic manufacturing. We want to make things in America. We want to make it in America. We want to continue to see that renaissance. We want to see manufacturing increase throughout the country and throughout the States.

Therefore, I oppose the bill.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source