Keystone XL Pipeline Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. BOOKER. I am grateful that Senator Boxer will yield for a
question.

This is a question I have of Senator Boxer, and I wish to get her
feedback because of her years of experience, her wisdom, and her depth
of understanding on this issue. I think there needs to be an amendment
for critical protection.

The need for regulation requires agencies to supplement already
issued environmental impact statements when significant new
circumstances come about. When there is information about these new
challenges to the environmental impact of a project, something really
has to happen.

So this pending bill deems that the final environmental impact
statement issued last January would fully satisfy the NEPA, that this
would remove the obligation of permitting agencies to supplement that
EIS if any new circumstance or information is discovered.

The amendment would change that and would preserve the obligation of
agencies to supplement--if we had such an amendment, it could really
protect that.

I was told by a lot of people that NEPA is sort of referred to as the
environmental modern day Magna Carta. In other words, it is such a
critical set of protections. If we have a circumstance in which there
is a significant change in the pipeline--say they just decide to change
the direction or move it a little bit and it goes through an entirely
new area--not to be able to take into consideration new information,
new circumstances where an environmental impact statement abated, seems
to be wrong. It actually seems to be giving this company, this foreign
company, more information, more opportunity than our current American
companies.

I would love for the Senator to comment.

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