Keystone XL Pipeline Act

Floor Speech

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Ms. MURKOWSKI. Mr. President, as we just heard, the House has sent over legislation they have moved through that body that would allow for export of LNG. As we speak, in the Energy and Natural Resources Committee downstairs, the committee is considering a bipartisan LNG measure. Five Republicans and five Democrats are coming together with an LNG export proposal that they have not only worked with the administration on, but the administration is actually carrying out, without the law being in place. Certainly we are getting to a place with our LNG and our natural gas opportunities where there are good, substantive developments being made in our laws and in how we can provide for not only certainty through the regulatory process--efficiency, expediency--but assurance to the public--to families, to businesses, to manufacturers--that pricing issues will be addressed and the opportunity for jobs in this country is put first and foremost. So I think there is good news going on today.

There is further good news as we begin the glidepath toward passage of the Keystone XL Pipeline. We have had a host of measures come before us in the form of some 35 amendments that we have considered as a body over the course of these several weeks. I think it has been good debate. I think it has been a good process. We are now getting to the final closeout.

AMENDMENT NO. 80, AS FURTHER MODIFIED

Some very important issues have been raised in this debate. I wish to thank Senator Vitter for bringing the very important issue of revenue sharing to the attention of the Senate. He offered an amendment that has been before us for consideration. He has been very steadfast in ensuring that there is a continued commitment to America's energy security and increasing offshore energy production.

The American energy revolution has provided us with high-paying jobs for millions of workers. It has led to lower gas prices. It has provided a real stimulus to the pocketbooks of just about every American. It is fundamentally changing our role on the international stage, which is so important.

The amendment Senator Vitter has offered to the underlying bill, which would increase access to our offshore energy resources and provide revenue sharing for coastal producing States, is a very important one. Again, I thank him for that.

One of my top priorities as chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee is to help ensure the exploration and the development of Alaska's Outer Continental Shelf--OCS--which holds an estimated 236 billion barrels of offshore oil and 132 trillion cubic feet of offshore natural gas. This is clearly an amazing resource base. It is going to take a while--more than a decade--to develop, but it will provide substantial government revenues for generations to come.

With the benefits that come with this resource development, there are also impacts. There will be impacts both to the State of Alaska and to coastal communities. It will require major investment in new infrastructure, whether it be ports or pipelines or roads. That just comes with this kind of resource production.

I look forward to working with Senator Vitter to address the revenue sharing not only for my State but for the gulf States and other States that host energy development off of their coastline in legislation that the energy committee will consider later this year.

I appreciate the continued support of my colleague from Louisiana and for providing a fair share of the revenue from offshore oil and gas activity to the States that are most affected. His State most clearly has experienced the benefits of offshore activity. I have seen this for myself when I have gone down to visit.

He is also working hard to ensure that others enjoy those benefits as well. Again, we are having a great debate over energy policy. We are seeing many good amendments with ideas that could be included in future bills, and I certainly look forward to working on revenue sharing with my colleagues from Louisiana, Senator Vitter and Senator Cassidy, and with other Members of the Senate as we go forward in this Congress.

I will now yield to my colleague from Louisiana for any comments he may choose to make.

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Ms. MURKOWSKI. Madam President, this amendment is an issue that Congress has considered many times over the past 16 years, but we declined to impose a renewable electricity standard.

We called it several different names. We called it a renewable portfolio standard. Then it moved to renewable electricity standard. It was later rebranded the clean energy standard. Now it is back to the RES. But this latest proposal that 25 percent of electricity supplied by a retail provider be generated by certain renewable resources by 2025 is really no different than the EPA's move to impose a 30-percent reduction in greenhouse gases from existing powerplants by 2030 under this proposed CPP regulation.

I would encourage Members to oppose this amendment.

Further, I would note to colleagues that we are very close to finishing up these amendments. If we move quickly, if we stay on the floor and stick to 10-minute votes, we can finish them all before lunch. I think that would be good, but it is going to require the cooperation of all Members.

With that, I ask for the yeas and nays.

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Ms. MURKOWSKI. Madam President, this is an amendment Senator Barrasso and Senator Cardin have been working on together. This amendment provides that the Federal Government must consult with the relevant Indian nations before modifying or breaking any trust or treaty obligation. This obligation is already required by Executive order. The Federal Government has been fulfilling its government-to-government consultation responsibilities on the Keystone XL Pipeline project for over 6 years.

I think it is important for colleagues to recognize that this amendment does not create any new law; it is merely an additional guarantee that the Federal Government will live up to its existing obligations to consult with the Indian nations, which is a matter I think we should all be able to agree on.

This is an issue Senator Barrasso has been working on with the Senator from Maryland, and they have indicated that they will accept a voice vote on this amendment.

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Ms. MURKOWSKI. Mr. President, we are here today because the Keystone Pipeline border crossing permit has been pending for years. There are no shortcuts at play.

The Booker amendment, drafted as a savings clause, would withhold the approval the bill seeks to confer if there are any new circumstances, new information relevant to environmental concerns. That is the whole point here.

The Keystone administrative record is already thousands of pages long. We have had 6 years of dos and redos. If this amendment is adopted, it begs the question as to whether there will ever be a decision.

I think the obvious strategy of pipeline opponents is to drag out the approval process until everybody gives up on it; everyone walks away. That is certainly not the intent of those of us who support this bipartisan bill. We don't want to see an endless round of further considerations. I think the majority here in the Senate believes it is time to move forward. Let's not have continued delays.

I urge a rejection of this amendment.

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Ms. MURKOWSKI. I would suggest that this amendment is designed to further delay this pipeline. It requires that a study be done by all Federal agencies with even a smidgen of review authority to determine whether increased greenhouse gas emissions are likely to contribute to an increase in more extreme weather events. It doesn't specify that the increased greenhouse gases that are under study are only related to the pipeline project. So, for instance, the President's deal to allow an increase in greenhouse gas emissions until 2030--if it caused the impacts listed in this amendment, it would stop the pipeline. That is not what we want to do.

I am going to be urging my colleagues to vote no.

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Ms. MURKOWSKI. Mr. President, I am very pleased that we are at this point after three solid weeks of debate. The Presiding Officer introduced this bill on January 8, 2015, and it is now January 29. After weeks of good, solid debate, we have officially passed our bipartisan bill to approve the Keystone XL Pipeline.

This legislation was not only important to pass so we could add more jobs, have energy security, and good trade relationships with our neighbor in Canada, but also we were able to return to what we call regular order in the Chamber. The Senate has been given the title of the world's most deliberative body. I think it is fair to say that in recent years we have not really worn that title very well. We have not been able to engage in the deliberation and debate that I think Members of the Senate and the public at large expect.

What we have seen over these past few weeks was a return to regular order where a Member is free to call up an amendment, have it debated, and have it fall or succeed based on a process that has been long established in this Chamber. That is a good thing to see.

Boy, did we have our share of ideas. By last count, I believe there were close to 250 amendments that Members had offered from both sides of the aisle. That is a lot of ideas. There was a lot of pent-up demand, if you will, on energy-related legislation.

All in all, we voted on just over 40 amendments. I believe the final count was 41 amendments. We made a lot out of the statement that we have surpassed--with just this one bill in 1 month--all of the recorded votes that we had throughout 2014. In fact, we surpassed it with nearly three times more votes than we had in all of 2014.

Senator Cantwell and I have been here in the well during this last vote, and we have received thanks from Members who said: Thank you for getting us to this point. We appreciate that. Good job.

But I think we all recognize there were some points of very clear tension around here, and that is just part of the process. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed, and we were able to come back together. We were able to get the process moving forward and keep this bipartisan coalition in tact.

I will just point out to the Members that with the help of the ranking member on the energy committee--with the exception of one night--we did it all during daylight hours. Not to get real personal around here, but we have gotten into a habit in recent years of not taking up votes until just about the dinnertime hour. I don't know about the rest of you, but when I call the family in for dinner, we kind of expect it is dinnertime.

I am pleased that we were able to work with everyone's schedule and move through amendments in a fashion that was reasonable and structured. Yesterday was not exactly convenient with the numbers that we processed, but we did it. So I appreciate the great level of cooperation we have had. It is not easy to start out a new Congress in a new majority as the manager of the first bill brought to the floor, but I had a lot of phenomenal help.

I wish to take a brief moment to thank those who have provided counsel and assistance to us. This is kind of like the Academy Awards for the first bill coming through the Senate.

I would like to recognize my staff on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee who have done a fabulous job with every part of this process: My staff director, Karen Billups, Pat McCormick, Kellie Donnelly, Colin Hayes, Lucy Murfitt, Tristan Abbey, Kate Williams, Robert Dillon, Chelsea Thompson, Chuck Kleeschulte, Cathy Cahill, Chris Kearney, Mike Pawlowski, Chester Carson, Mike Tadeo, Isaac Edwards, Jason Huffnagle, and Brian Hughes, on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee and on my personal staff as well. Our interns on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Samin Peirovi and Will Treadwell, also did a great job assisting my staff, including putting together binders, making sure we had the current amendments and the modifications that were in front of them. So they did a great job as well.

I also want to thank the members of the natural resources team in the Senate Office of the Legislative Counsel. These folks are kind of the unsung heroes. These are the ones who helped prepare the more than 240 amendments that were offered to this bill. We never see these folks, but they are churning out amendments as quickly as we can move ideas to them. Gary Endicott, Heather Burnham, Christina Jacquet, Michelle Johnson-Weider, Deanna Edwards, and Heather Lowell.

It is absolutely not possible to do what we did in moving this measure through--or any measure--without recognizing the work our floor staff does for us. I wish to thank Laura Dove and the entire cloakroom staff, including Robert Duncan and Chris Tuck. The Parliamentarians and the clerks really worked hard.

Also I wish to recognize on the Democratic side of the aisle Gary and--everybody has just done a phenomenal job and we so appreciate it.

I truly must say the opportunity to start with this first bill and to be working with my ranking member, Maria Cantwell, on this effort, knowing that she was just getting her staff in line as we moved to this bill--the staff director on the ranking side I don't even think had officially been brought on--and it was full on. They have done extraordinary work, working with us.

I want to recognize Angela Becker-Dippmann and Sam Fowler and all the rest of the team because they were extraordinary.

I also want to recognize Barbara Boxer and her staff as well. There was so much that needed to be coordinated.

I thank my ranking member for her patience, for her partnership, and for really the very good-faith efforts she has made as we have worked to get this bill to a conclusion, and offer a continued gesture of wanting to work together with her. I want her to know that I will be with her this weekend rooting for the Seahawks at the Super Bowl. So yet one more area of her operation, but a grand thanks to my ranking member and my partner on this bill.

With that, I thank the Chair and I yield the floor to Senator Cantwell.

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Ms. MURKOWSKI. Madam President, I wish to thank the Senator from Washington for her comments. I think it is clear that we have a great deal of work in front of us, but I think we also have a better idea of where some of that common ground may be as a result of the discussions this past month. So I am looking forward to advancing an energy initiative through the committee and, hopefully, through the full process, that will speak to the attributes of affordability, abundance, a clean energy supply, diverse and secure. We have a lot of work to do.

In the comments I made, I thanked a lot of people, but I think it is important to recognize that the Senator from Washington and I would not have been able to do the job we did--managing this bill on the floor, working with other Members, working with staff on the floor and our respective staffs--if there had not been a very clear and a conscious decision that management of what was going to happen on the Senate floor was going to be a little bit different, that there would be an opportunity for debate, and some have described free-wheeling debate. What is free-wheeling debate? I think we have just kind of defined it here with the Keystone XL Pipeline. I don't know whether that is going to be the course for everything going forward, but this was a pledge that the majority leader Senator McConnell made when he became the majority leader. I think we have seen that play out in a process that has been respectful, where at the end of the discussion we can still agree to disagree on the bill itself, but the process that has gotten us through final passage has been one that, again, was respectful and did allow for full and civil discourse. I think that is what the Senate should be all about and I am proud to have been a part of it.

With that, I know my good friend from North Dakota, the prime sponsor of this bill, is waiting to speak and I congratulate him for a phenomenal job. He and his staff--I should have mentioned his staff. Ryan and the others who have been working behind the Senator from North Dakota have been doing a great job. Senator Hoeven has been articulate, persistent, and really has done a phenomenal job moving this through the process.

I congratulate the Senator from North Dakota, and I yield to him.

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