Steven Holt: “I thank my friend from Oregon. Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to this bill. We have heard about the nature of this…”

“I thank my friend from Oregon. Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to this bill. We have heard about the nature of this very dirty material that is dug, rather than pumped, and the fact that it will go through America, not to America. Now, we might ask, on a day when U.S. oil production was announced to reach a 30-year high of more than 9 million barrels, why we would be even considering this. Well, it is not because this fits into our energy picture. We will risk oil spills that are a mess to clean up. And we hear, oh, but oil spills won't occur. Well, the TransCanada pipeline, also known as Keystone, had 12 separate oil spills in its first year of operation, tens of thousands of gallons. It is hard to clean up. And, as you have also heard from my friend, this doesn't count as petroleum, and, therefore, they don't pay into the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund. So taxpayers are on the hook for this difficult cleanup. But the real problem is none of these points. It is that it is taking us down the road where we should not be going. This is the most carbon- intensive liquid fuel--if you want to call it liquid--that we could possibly use. It is changing our very climate in ways that are deadly and costly. We shouldn't be going in this direction. It is that simple.”