Political Quotes

“Mr. Chairman, when a company wants to export liquefied natural gas, LNG, it has to submit an application with the Department of Energy. For export to countries with a free trade agreement with the United States, the Department of Energy must grant the applications without modification or delay. For export to countries without a free trade agreement, the Department of Energy must approve an export application unless it finds that the proposed export will not be consistent with the public interest. To make this determination, the Department of Energy evaluates a range of factors when reviewing an application, including economic impacts, international considerations, U.S. energy security, and environmental effects. The Rothfus amendment prohibits the Department of Energy from even considering one of the most important factors; that is, the impact of LNG exports on climate change. The world's leading scientists are unequivocal: climate change is already happening on all continents and across the oceans and will get much worse if we do not act to cut our emissions of carbon and other greenhouse gas gases. That means that we need to scrutinize the energy infrastructure decisions that we make today for 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.…”