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Floor Speech

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I rise to speak on the CRA related to the Environmental Protection Agency, now better known as the ``Polluter Protection Agency,'' trying to unwind methane rules.

So there are three things I would like to say about methane: We all know that it is a pollutant. We all know that it is dangerous. It is even explosive. And yet the fossil fuel industry insists on leaking it in enormous quantities. And for years, they have falsely reported to the EPA how much their leakage was, but it is a lot, and it makes a big difference, particularly on the climate side because methane is a super pollutant in the short run--in the first, say, 20, 25 years. So it is really important to stop leakage of this dangerous substance.

And there is no value to the leakage. This is just laziness and sloppiness and bad corporate behavior. It is not like there is a methane leakage association that wants to see more methane in the atmosphere. It is just waste and sloppiness, bad corporate behavior.

This body keeps rolling over to those folks. One of the first things that we did was to undo the methane fee so that the leakers didn't have to pay anything for their leakage. Now, we had agreed on that, working with the fossil fuel industry through Senator Manchin, who was their representative in these negotiations. And what we settled on was that only the worst polluters would be subject to the fee; only the ones who couldn't even meet their industry's standards, only they would have to pay.

Second, the revenues from the fee would go back to the industry to pay for fixing the mess they were creating.

And third, we front-loaded it so they got nearly a billion dollars upfront.

What did they do? Took the money and called on their Republican friends here in the Senate to undo the fee. It was a complete bait-and- switch.

Now we are here on changes to the methane rules and the effort by EPA to delay those changes. This adds the additional insult to being a violation of the Administrative Procedures Act.

I tell my colleagues: If you continue to sanction these procedural violations of regulatory Agencies, don't think we are going to forget that when the shoe is on the other foot. This set of extensions of the methane rules was done regulatorily, without something called notice and opportunity to be heard--``notice and comment'' is the technical term under the APA.

It is a basic provision of the APA that you have to go notice and comment. If you don't want to do notice and comment--as EPA did not in this case--you have got to show good cause. And what courts have said good cause is, is an emergency. There is no emergency here.

Look at some of the things that EPA has done. They claim that the industry needed time to adopt technologies which had, in fact, already been widely adopted--flatout lie from EPA.

They said that compliance deadlines were too close. Well, many of them actually had already been in effect. So that can't be the real reason.

And then they delayed the Super Emitter Program for the worst methane leakers, but it had already been up and running for months. So there was nothing new happening. There was no emergency.

So if you all--my colleagues on the Republican side--if this is the way you want regulatory Agencies to behave in a Democrat administration, keep this up because this is flatout rule-breaking by the EPA.

The last thing is, it is kind of pointless because we are going to catch your leakers. You can give them anything you want. You can continue to roll back methane fees; you can continue to roll back methane rules, but we are going to catch the leakers who are telling you to do this stuff.

We are going to catch them because satellite technology can now detect the plumes of methane that they emit, and they can really detect the big ones. They can source it down to a very narrow point of origin.

UCLA just opened up a website where you can go and see a summary of the satellite data: what landfills, what oil facilities, what are the big leak points so the local communities can take action against the irresponsible members of the fossil fuel industry who are leaking enormous amounts of methane.

So you may have clawed back the methane fee and bailed out the worst performers in the industry and you may have violated the APA to postpone these other rules, including rules against super emitters, but at the end of the day, you are not going to get away with the methane leakage.

You are going to be caught. It is going to be visible on satellite. There is going to be every opportunity for naming and shaming and enforcement, and we are going to end up getting this right. So it would be better if you just didn't put us through this, if you behaved properly for the Senate, if you let the methane fees stand, and if you didn't allow EPA to break the rules to give polluters yet another break from this polluter-friendly EPA.

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