Political Quotes

“Mr. Chair, the Bureau of Land Management is currently working toward implementation of a rule that would modernize horribly outdated oil and gas regulations on Federal land. My amendment would strike a section of this bill that would halt this important work. What we have to do is to allow the BLM to proceed with them implementing this rule to provide a national baseline to protect our environment, our water, and our Federal lands from hazardous contamination. Since the 1980s, the scale and impacts associated with the oil and gas industry have grown dramatically, but BLM's fracking regulations have not kept pace. In March of 2015, the BLM finalized a modest, commonsense rule to update its 30-year-old fracking regulations. With these updates, the BLM is taking responsible steps to improve well integrity, reduce the impact of toxic wastewater, and increase transparency around chemicals used in the fracking process. Importantly, these new regulations will not impact States that already have robust fracking regulations and will simply offer a regulatory baseline for the States that do not have current fracking regulations. Notably, in 2013, there were still 19 States with operating fracking wells that had absolutely no hydraulic fracturing regulations in place. Right now over 90 percent of the more than 2,500 oil and gas wells drilled every year on federally managed lands use hydraulic fracturing.…”