Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I am proud that the Senate voted to reject an effort to overturn commonsense protections to reduce methane waste. It was 3 years ago that satellite images from NASA revealed that there is a giant cloud of methane--about the size of the State of Delaware--sitting over the Four Corners region in Northwestern New Mexico and Southwestern Colorado. Although evidence had shown that there was methane air pollution in the Four Corners as early as 2003, the image of NASA data is truly striking. This is a warning of a potentially major threat to public health for communities in the region. The San Juan Basin in the Four Corners region has long been a leading producer of oil and natural gas. With the natural gas boom of the mid- 2000s, production in the basin grew by leaps and bounds, and that created hundreds of new high-paying jobs and a major new domestic source of an important energy resource. Unfortunately, amid all this growth, some producers developing natural gas on our public lands and on Tribal lands released harmful air pollution and wasted these publicly owned resources by allowing methane to leak into the air from faulty equipment and pipes, and even by burning off valuable natural gas in the process called flaring. Following the discovery of the methane hotspot, researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory joined Caltech and University of Michigan scientists to conduct a detailed study into the cause of the methane cloud.…”