Keystone XL Pipeline Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. HEINRICH. Mr. President, I wish to take a couple of minutes to
talk about the pending business--the TransCanada tar sands pipeline. I
think it is helpful to start out by recognizing that we actually
haven't had a global energy bill in the Senate going back to 2005. So
it has been about 10 years since we have truly looked at our entire
energy policy in this country and set a new course for what we should
be doing in the future.

Despite the fact I think bumper stickers are a little dangerous, I
thought it would be helpful to at least try to encapsulate the general
direction we should be going--the short and sweet of what lens we
should be viewing our national energy policy through. I think if I had
to boil that down to a simple and concise statement, what I would say
is simply fewer imports and cleaner fuels. So as we look at different
proposals over the course of this upcoming Congress, I think it will be
very helpful, particularly on the energy committee and on the floor, to
view these projects through that lens.

Oddly enough, we are not dealing with a major energy policy as the
very first thing the Senate considers as its pending business. We are
dealing with one single project put forward by TransCanada, an
international corporation, that has spent millions and millions of
dollars over the last few years lobbying Washington for this particular
project.

A lot has been said about the tar sands and about oil sands, but one
of the things I think would be helpful to talk about is the fundamental
difference between the oil that is produced around the United States
and tar sands production. At the end of the line we are talking about
the energy that is produced, but at the front end there is an enormous
difference between oil that is drilled in Southeast New Mexico,
Northwest New Mexico, in West Texas, in North Dakota or Colorado and in
the tar sands. If we look through that same lens of fewer imports and
cleaner fuels, tar sands development fails on both of those fronts.

We talk about more dependency in the United States on importing
energy, and here we are talking about a substantially dirtier fuel
source. In fact, we aren't allowed props on the floor, but when having
this conversation in caucus, I brought some tar sands with me so I
could show people the difference between oil and tar sands and how just
toxic and sticky it is and how it represents a step backward in our
overall energy policy in this country.

When thinking of oil production, most people think of putting a well
in place, you case the well, and there is a well pad. It has an impact,
certainly, but it is substantially limited compared to what we are
seeing going on in the boreal forest in northern Alberta right now.

This is a picture of northern Canada. For those of us in arid
Southwestern States, I can't tell you how envious we are of the kind of
water one finds in this part of Canada. Also, the fish and wildlife and
the forest resources are substantial. If we look at this picture, some
people would say: That is the kind of place one might want to see as a
national wildlife refuge or a national park. This is what the boreal
forest looks like before tar sands production.

The thing to remember is that tar sands are not drilled for. They are
not produced the way oil and natural gas is produced. Tar sands are
mined, and they are strip mined. Let us see a picture that exemplifies
the boreal forest and then the tar sands production area in the back.
This in the front is how it started out and the back is what you have
once you are producing the tar sands.

We heard from our colleague from Wyoming in his statement recently on
the floor that there is no significant environmental impact from this
project. But when we look at tar sands production, I don't know how we
can look at a photo such as this and say there is no significant
environmental impact.

Let's look at the next picture, and we can take an even closer look
at what the tar sands look like when it is in production. We are
talking about an enormous area across northern Canada impacted in this
way. As we can see, the tar sands is not oil, it is sand and bitumen
together.

To be able to process tar sands, to send it through this tar sands
pipeline--the Keystone or any other pipeline--to be able to produce it
and refine it is a very complicated process. You start by removing the
forest cover, then you scrape off the topsoil, and after that you dig
up the remaining tar sands and then you have to heat those up and
process it to get the energy-bearing oil portion out. Just to be able
to move it through a pipeline you have to heat it up, you have to
pressurize it and you have to add caustic solvents.

One of the reasons it has been so incredibly difficult to clean up
the existing tar sands spills in places such as Michigan and Arkansas
is because--unlike oil, where we have a fair amount of experience, though it is not easy to clean up--there are additional solvents and because the very sticky nature of this substance makes it almost impossible to clean up. We have had very little luck cleaning up tar sands spills to date.

We see in the front of this picture the boreal forest--or what is
left of it--and then we see acres and acres and acres, thousands upon
thousands of acres of tar sands production. So I think the first thing
that is important for people to know is that this simply is not
traditional oil and gas development. It is not clear a well pad, drill
a hole, and produce oil. It is the kind of impact that if it were
proposed for New Mexico or New York or California or even Texas we
would have enormous outcry. We don't have the kind of open-pit mining
and strip mining we once had in this country, but that is what it is
most analogous to.

That said, another one of the claims that has been made repeatedly
about this particular project is that the emissions it would create are
inconsequential. So it is helpful to look at the emissions to
understand that, because tar sands are fundamentally not only harder to
handle but fundamentally dirtier from a pollution point of view than
traditional oil resources. It is instructive to look at the difference
between if we created the same amount of energy from domestic New
Mexico, Texas, Colorado or North Dakota crude oil versus if we produced
that energy from tar sands.

Once again, we get an idea of the emissions just at the source of the
tar sands development here, but if we were to build this tar sands
pipeline and we burned all of that produced tar sands that will move
through it, the incremental pollution impact of that, the incremental
carbon pollution--not the base pollution of whether we created the same
amount of energy from oil sources or from some other sources of energy,
if we used oil from the United States to create this energy--not
looking at that but just the increment of burning tar sands oil instead
of conventional crude oil, it is the equivalent of putting 285 million
cars on the road for 1 year.

So the addition of carbon pollution to the atmosphere is anything but
inconsequential if we look at it from the point of view that it is the
equivalent of doubling Pennsylvania's cars--putting another
Pennsylvania's worth of auto traffic on the road every year for 50
years.

What that doesn't take into account is the additional carbon released
simply because we are cutting down all the forests, eliminating the
peat bogs, and fundamentally industrializing an enormous portion of
Alberta and Canada. That increment is another 6 million cars' worth of
carbon pollution on the road for 1 year.

So that brings me to: What difference does this make?

We may have seen in the news a few days ago how 2014 was the hottest
year on record. I wish I could say that was an anomaly. Unfortunately,
it is not. Fourteen of the last 15 years have been record-setting
years. And if there is something we know from our geologic records--
from ice cores, from the science that has been done at NASA and NOAA
and analyzed by our national labs and our university scientists--it is
that over time the amount of carbon pollution in the atmosphere--the
parts per million of carbon dioxide at any given time--tends to
correlate with temperature. It doesn't matter if it comes from a
volcano, it doesn't matter if it comes from the exhaust of a car. But
because we have added such an enormous increment in recent years, since
1880 and the Industrial Revolution, we can see that as the parts per
million of particles go up over time--this is the CO2 concentration over that time period from the Industrial Revolution to today. It is actually not quiteup to date because, unfortunately, we are now up here above 400 parts per million. Over that same time period, the average temperature has gone up year in and year out, with fluctuations, but the trendline continues to go up to a very dangerous level.

Adding an additional increment of carbon pollution is simply not
something we can afford at a time when we need to be showing real
leadership in terms of cleaning up our energy sources, moving forward
to a clean energy future, and putting Americans to work here,
domestically, with that approach.

The temporary jobs this tar sands pipeline will create are not
inconsequential. But since this has been sold as a jobs program, it is
worth stepping back and talking about how much of a permanent impact
this is going to make. I would make the argument that if we were truly
serious here in the U.S. Senate about the type of temporary
construction jobs this pipeline would create, we would get serious
about passing a transportation bill--and not only passing a
transportation bill, but financing transportation in this country,
financing infrastructure in this country the way we have historically.

We have a deficit of trillions of dollars worth of infrastructure at
this point in this country because we won't pay to maintain it. In
fact, our parents' generation built an infrastructure that is the envy
of the world. With the current approach in the Congress, we haven't
even had the decency to maintain the infrastructure they built and pass
it on to our children unimpaired, much less create additional
infrastructure of the type we saw from previous generations.

So if we look at the permanent jobs, as articulated in the
environmental impact statement, we are talking about 30 to 50 permanent
jobs from Keystone. That is slightly less than a single McDonald's,
although I would argue that construction jobs are usually higher paying
than McDonald's. But it gives us a sense of the kind of scale we are
talking about in terms of permanent jobs. If we compare that to just
regional projects in individual States--a transmission line in the
Southwest, three times as many jobs as that; an electric vehicle plant
in the West in Nevada, substantially many, many increments of permanent
jobs more, which once again brings us to the fact that in this
recovery, just in the third quarter of 2014, we saw 18,000 in clean
energy jobs created in this country.

We need jobs in this country. We need energy in this country. And I
would argue that the sooner we commit ourselves to a clean energy job-
intensive future, the sooner we will address the real challenges that
are in front of us.

I continue to urge the President to exercise his discretion and his
veto of this. I suspect it will pass the U.S. Senate. But the sooner we
get through this process, my hope is that we can return to a real
debate about how we address the science that all the scientists have
said is out there. We did make a big step forward yesterday in that the
Senate for the first time--and the Republicans in the Senate in
particular for the first time--accepted the reality of climate change.
Unfortunately, right now the policy prescription is to make that
climate change worse.

It is time we had an Apollo project for clean energy in this country.
That will take transition. That means we are going to continue to
produce fossil fuels as a part of that transition. But the sooner we
get serious about investing in research and development, the sooner we
get serious in terms of scaling the very real and economically
competitive technologies we already have, the sooner we get serious
about building infrastructure, such as transmission lines to carry
renewable energy from parts of the country where it can be produced
today to parts of the country where it will be consumed, the sooner we
will lead the world and put this country back on track to be the world
leader in not only energy but in clean energy.

Mr. President, I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a
quorum.

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