>> thank you, mr. guest, you raise add interesting point and i've been to the border many, many times and spoken to family members and it's quite the opposite, they're sending the kids because of the violence, because they've lost a kid or trying to protect them and also the number of families members that we have that sponsored child, that number is high and has been in the united states, but thanks so much for your questioning and for the points that you've made. i will now recognize the gentleman from texas, mr. green for five minutes. >> thank you, madam chair. madam chair, i've been to the border and i've also been across the border. i had a constituent-- >> this entire program is available on-line on our website, c-span.org. we'll leave it here to continue our long-term commitment of

gavel to gavel coverage. u.s. senate. senators will consider samantha power's nomination to lead the u.s. agency for international development and she was u.n. ambassador under president obama. votes on the nomination expected this afternoon. live to the floor of the u.s. senate here on c-span2. the presiding officer: the senate will come to order. the chaplain dr. barry black will lead the senate in prayer. the chaplain: let us pray. eternal god, give our lawmakers the wisdom to remember to be grateful for all the things you have already done. lord, you have sustained our nation during seasons

of war and peace. you have helped us to find creative ways to strive for a more perfect union. you have provided us with solutions to difficult problems, just when we needed you most. eternal spirit, let this day be a time when senators feel gratitude for your bountiful blessings and faithfulness. may they express this gratitude by striving to live one day at a time, focusing on your mercy, love, and grace.

we pray in your loving name. amen. the presiding officer: please join me in reciting the pledge of allegiance to our flag. i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under god, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. the presiding officer: the clerk will read a communication to the senate. the clerk: washington d.c., april 28, 2021. to the senate: under the provisions of rule 1, paragraph 3, of the standing rules of the senate, i hereby appoint the honorable christopher coons, a senator from the state of delaware, to perform the duties of the chair. signed: patrick j. leahy, president pro tempore. the presiding officer: under the previous order, the leadership time is reserved. and under the previous order, the senate will be in a period

of morning business with senators permitted to speak therein for up to ten minutes each.

mr. schumer: mr. president? the presiding officer: the majority leader. mr. schumer: i move to proceed to calendar number 48, s.j. res.

-- pardon me -- 14, the methane c.r.a. the presiding officer: the question is on the motion. all in favor say aye. all opposed no. the ayes appear to have it. the ayes do have it. the motion is agreed to. the clerk will report the joint resolution as joint res. 14. the clerk: calendar number 48, senate joint resolution 14 providing for congressional disapproval under chapter 8 of title 5, united states code of the rules submitted by the environment a.m. protection agency related to oil and natural gas sector emission standards and modified sources review. the presiding officer: under the provisions of title 5, u.s.c. chapter 802, there will now be up to ten hours of debate equally divided. mr. schumer: mr. president? the presiding officer: the majority leader. mr. schumer: mr. president, at the start of the year, the senate democrats pledged that

one of our top priorities would be tackling climate change. i directed all of our incoming committee chairs to hold hearings and prepare legislation on the climate crisis. i promised that any infrastructure bill would be green and focus on creating the green jobs of the future. both of these efforts, i'm happy to report, are well under way. and today as we approach the hundred-day mark of this new congress, the senate will take the first major step in combating climate change on the senate floor by reinstating safeguards against me methane emissions. specifically, today's vote will use the congressional review act to reimpose commonsense regulations against methane leaks from the oil and gas industry, from production and processing, to transmission and storage. and let me note, mr. president, this will be the first time that the senate democratic majority has used the congressional

review act. it is no mistake we have chosen to use the law first on the subject of climate change. under this democratic majority, the senate will be a place where we take decisive, ambitious, and effective action against climate change and this c.r.a., the reinstatement of the rule dealing with methane emissions will be the most significant act that the senate has taken on climate change in more than a decade and maybe several decades. this measure will help us address the climate crisis in a very serious way. methane doesn't get as much attention as carbon dioxide, but it packs a bigger punch. over 20 years, a ton of methane warms the atmosphere 86 times more than carbon dioxide. thankfully, methane degrades

faster in our atmosphere, and curbing methane emissions is relatively cheap. so when it comes to global warming, tackling methane delivers a huge bang for your buck. even a little bit of methane reduction goes a long way, and it moves far more quickly than carbon reduction, carbon dioxide reduction, so as we move on this bill, which will have its effect on global warming within a year, it gives us some time -- although we don't have much -- to deal with the longer term and even more difficult issues of carbon dioxide. that's why president obama put the rules in place nearly six years ago, and at the time, amazingly enough, even the oil and gas industry welcomed them. industry doesn't want leaks in their pipeline and production any more than we do, but president trump inexplicably did away with these safeguards last september. it seems he does these things out of pique, mindlessly

opposing something just because his predecessor, barack obama, did it. it's very possible that the president didn't even understand what he was doing, but he so often acted out of anger and vindictiveness, not out of what was good for the country that he ended up doing this. i'm greatly looking forward to righting that wrong today. hopefully, in a bipartisan fashion, we have at least one republican senator who has joined us, and i hope that more, many more, will follow suit. if the leaders of the oil and gas industry are for this, how could our republican friends not vote for it? i won't speculate on the reasons, but none of them are good. i want to commend my colleagues who have been leaders on this issue, senator heinrich, senator king, senator markey. president biden has challenged the united states to cut its greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030. the best way to achieve this

ambitious goal is through bold action by this congress through legislation to reduce greenhouse pollution while creating millions of jobs and economic prosperity in the new clean energy economy. this is the first and large step in that direction. we have many more steps we must take, of course. the senate begins the important work of dealing with the climate crisis today by passing these very, very significant commonsense rules on methane. now, on a different matter, this morning, president biden unveiled landmark legislation designed to give american families a better chance to succeed in the 21st century economy. combining investments in education, child care, and workforce training. the american families plan, as it is called, makes exactly the types of investment our country should have been making for a very long time. in many of these areas, the united states has lagged well

behind other developed countries. governments throughout europe dedicate a significantly higher portion of their g.d.p. to workforce retraining and offering more flexible family leave policies. some say these kinds of policies are not infrastructure, but they very much are. child care is a necessity in the 21st century, and a lack of access to child care can be a throttle on future economic growth because it affects millions of american families. as technology and automation replace jobs in certain sectors of the economy, workforce training is a must. giving our children a head start earlier in life with pre-k education has benefits that span a child's entire life and so it will affect our country positively for decades to come. economically, socially, and in renewing the american spirit, which is so important to our

future. these things are just as important. the kinds of policies that deal with human infrastructure are just as important as roads and bridges, which, of course, are no doubt important in their own right. this is not an either/or. human infrastructure or brick-and-mortar structure. we must say yes to both. we don't want to choose one versus the other. that's like choosing between children, both of which we love. in the modern world, we need both infrastructure that matches the 21st century economy and human infrastructure that allows our workers and families to succeed in it. so i applaud president biden for putting this plan together. it's just the right approach. and i would add one final comment here. all of our republican colleagues, every single one, regrettably, chose to oppose the

american rescue plan, despite the fact that a majority of republican voters approved of the legislation. there seems to be a huge dichotomy between republicans in washington and republicans in the rest of the country who approve of many of the policies in president biden's plans. republicans and the rest of the country approved of the checks and investigates in vaccines, and they approved of investigates in infrastructure. i suspect many of these policies in the american families plan will get high marks as well. child care is popular. early pre-k -- early school training is popular, free community college is popular. the list goes on. will our republican colleagues start to listen to their constituents as well as the rest of the country or are they still the party of donald trump, a party that opposes the other side at all costs? that's no good for america.

that's no good for bipartisanship, and it's not even good for the republican party's future. now, tonight president biden will address a joint session of congress to mark the progress of our first 100 days and talk about where we as a country still need to go. i expect president biden, unlike his predecessor, will lay out the facts and appeal to our better angels. that's what he has been doing over these past hundred days, restoring effective, truthful, and responsiblive government. almost as important as what president biden is not doing. president biden is not constantly stoking division, outrage, racial animus. he doesn't fan the flames of every single culture war. he doesn't seek to personally dominate every single news cycle. he doesn't insult, degrade, or constantly lie. and it matters. newspapers are littered with

firsthand accounts of americans who feel they can finally sleep at night without worrying about what new scandal, outrage, or unhinged tweet the next morning would bring. as one republican operative put it recently, now there is a sense of relief. imagine that there is a car alarm that has been going off for a long time and suddenly it's quiet. politics is an important part of american life, but it's not meant to be all consuming. it's not supposed to keep average citizens up at night. politics is supposed to be where we come together to solve our differences amicably, not an arena of endless partisan warfare or a bottomless pit of chaos. so as president biden prepares to address the nation tonight, it's worth noting that as much as we've accomplished in the first hundred days, the contrast in style, tone, and effectiveness between president biden and president trump is important, too.

as we seek to repair the wounds left by january 6, as we seek to restore faith in government and in our democracy, it's important, so important to have political leaders who act with dignity, honor, and have fidelity to the truth. i yield the floor. a senator: mr. president. the presiding officer: the senator from new mexico. mr. heinrich: i would ask that jacob lindoff, a member of my office, have floor privileges for the rest of today's session. the presiding officer: without objection.

mr. mcconnell: mr. president. the presiding officer: the republican leader.

mr. mcconnell: tonight, mr. president, president biden will deliver his first address to the joint session of congress. i'll be there, and like my fellow kentuckians watching at home, i'll be curious to hear how the president tries to square his rhetoric with the administration's actions over the past hundred days. back in january, many americans hoped they could take the incoming president at his word. after a year spent beating back an historic pandemic and grappling with civil unrest, president biden pledged he would be, quote, a president for all americans, end quote, with plans to repair, restore, and heal. the american people elected a 50-50 senate, a closely divided house, and a president who preached moderation. he promised that his whole soul

was committed to uniting our people. many hoped his administration would reflect that promise, but the first hundred days have left much to be desired. over a few short months, the biden administration seems to have given up on selling actual unity in favor of catnip for their liberal base, covered with a hefty coat of false advertising. that's how the so-called american rescue plan, a grab-bag spending bill that directed less than 10% at vaccines and pandemic health care, was marketed as a covid-19 relief measure. in actuality, it sent sums of money to state governments whose revenues had already rebounded and declared war on the formerly bipartisan consensus that welfare spending should actually be linked to work. or take h.r. 1, the sweeping effort by democrats to mount a partisan takeover of all 50

states' voting laws, along with the federal election commission for good measure. after a republican won the white house in 2016, this was billed as a massive overhaul for a broken democracy. now a nearly identical plan is instead being marketed as a modest dose of preventative maintenance. it's still the same takeover it's always been. and now we have the american jobs plan, another multitrillion-dollar smorgasbord of social liberal engineering that would decimate entire industries and send only a small fraction on roads and brinls. it's being sold as a serious effort to rebuild our nation's infrastructure. it's pretty brazen misdirection. at both ends of pennsylvania avenue, democrats have chosen to live in an alternate universe where both the campaign promises they made and the mandate the american people delivered were actually completely different than what happened right here on

planet earth. unfortunately, mr. president, the real-life effects of this false advertising campaign have come thick and fast. pain and uncertainty at home and dwindling leverage and virtues signaling abroad. first came mixed messages on the status of the pandemic. existing vaccine distribution efforts surpassed president biden's supposedly ambitious daily target on the day he was sworn in. when his own officials let slip -- vowed to big labor and walked back their comment. and the president continues to issue directives that are strangely out of step with the science like his big announcement several weeks ago that if citizens behave themselves -- behave themselves, he would actually permit them to enjoy small outdoor gatherings on july 4th that the c.d.c.

guidance says would be safe right now. then there's the environmental policy. on day one, president biden rushed to cancel a pipeline project that would have employed thousands of americans and freezed permitting for more safe, reliable domestic energy. he also announced an urgent return to an obama era deal that has proven to uncurb the carbon emissions and unnecessary for the united states to reduce our own. why would he do that? because the far left demanded it. in fact, the most radical liberals in congress have taken credit for the influence for their new green new deal manifesto. meanwhile democrats have decidedly avoided taking ownership of their own campaign rhetoric on immigration. reckless mixed messaging has come home to roost in the form of a humanitarian and security crisis on our southern border.

soaring numbers of migrants are soaring, one convinced -- was convinced if biden promised it, the rest would change. there are overflowed facilities who have become the tragic face of this story. yet through this all, the white house's foremost concern seems to have been to avoid calling this what it is, a crisis. while broken immigration policy threatens security at the border, a dangerously misguided foreign policy threatens our safety overseas. years of carefully assembled multilateral sanctions had created an economic straitjacket around iran's terrorist state. but in its hayes to turn its -- haste to turn the clocks back, the biden administration has given up massive portions of this leverage to get iran back

to a failed nuclear deal. further east, american forces have been ordered to make a hasty total withdraw from afghanistan, to leave coalition partners and vulnerable afghans high and dry, especially women and girls. to pave the way for taliban rule and to enable an al qaeda resurgence that could again threaten our homeland and while national security experts are nearly unanimous in urging the administration to focus on competition with russia and china, the white house has proposed to cut defense spending after inflation and put our armed forces on the back foot. ignoring the facts, passing the buck, squandering leverage. this is not what the american people bargained for and they know it doesn't have to be this way. past presidents and congresses found way to make lasting and bipartisan progress on important

issues. for example, when we crafted smart policies to improve actual infrastructure, big, bipartisan majorities have signed on. just last year, when we worked across the aisle on targeted rescue packages to help american families weather a once in a century pandemic. not one -- not one of the five bills we passed last year earned fewer tan 90 votes right here in the senate. this year, the story has been different. behind president biden's familiar face it's like the most radical washington democrats have been handed the keys and they are trying to speed as far left as they can possibly go before american voters ask for the car back. but it's not too late. this white house can shake off its day dreams of a sweeping socialist legacy that will never happen in the united states. they can recommit to solving our

nation's actual problems to fostering consensus instead of deepening our divide. that, mr. president, is what the american people want and what they deserve. not an administration that chooses to govern like it owes everything -- everything to the radical left. the presiding officer: the senator from new mexico. mr. heinrich: i am proud to join with the majority leader and with my colleagues from maine and massachusetts to lead this effort to restore responsible methane emission standards at the e.p.a.

we can take commonsense being action -- commonsense action right now to slow climate change and simultaneously reduce the incredible waste of a valuable energy resource. methane is the primary constituent in natural gas. it's an incredibly potent driver of the greenhouse gas effect. over the short term it's actually 86 times more powerful than co2 emissions. it's estimated that about a quarter of all the human-caused global warming that has occurred since the industrial revolution can becontributed to methane emissions, the lion's share of the methane emissions are from the producing of oil and gas. that's due in part to outdated and oftentimes faulty equipment, pipes that leak methane into the air and many oil and gas

operators also engage in a practice known as flaring where operators ignite and burn off excess gas and worse yet venting where uncome busted natural gas is released into the air. beyond the obvious consequences for climate change, these types of methane emissions waste incredibly value resources. fugitive methane harms the public health by polluting the air that we breathe. when methane leaks from oil and gas wells, pipelines or other infrastructure, harmful carcinogens and other organic compounds also leak into the air alongside it. that means more children suffering from asthma attacks, more seniors having trouble breathing, methane pollution is real and present in many states and it is a real problem in my

state of new mexico. we saw clear evidence of this over the four corners region in northwestern new mexico, the san juan basin, southwest colorado, when a giant cloud of methane about the size of the state of delaware became so large by the mid-2000's that it could be seen by nasa satellite images. this chart right here is a map from nasa of the western united states and you can see right here the cloud of methane over the four corners, which coincides with the san juan basin where much of our oil and gas has been produced over the last several decades. you can see from this map from the jet propulsion laboratory how real the issue is. in recent years, researchers detected increasingle levels of

dangerous methane pollution now over southeastern new mexico where oil and gas operations have been booming for the last decade. it's clear this oil and gas producing region has joined the san juan basin as another contributor to our methane emissions challenge. now, late last year, the e.p.a. and the new mexico environment department conducted helicopter flights over the san juan and permian basin, they us used infrared technology that would normally not being visible to the naked eye. if we solved methane, we would have solved many of the problems long ago. for example of what this technology can help us see at an individual oil and gas operation level, look at this side-by-side image from the group earth works. as you can see, this is what the human eye sees, simple oil and

gas infrastructure, a number of tanks, some piping. but by using infrared imaging, you can see the enormous amount of methane simply being vented or leaking into the air. that entire plume is invisible to the naked eye. and we're not so -- i would once again we would have solved these problems a long time ago. the overflights that were conducted by the new mexico environment department found that methane leak rates over new mexico's permian basin in 2020 have increased by 250% over 2019 levels. simply unacceptable. nationally the environmental defense fund has found that while oil and gas production has not rebounded from a crash brought on by the pandemic last year, methane emissions are

already soaring back to prepandemic levels. that is completely unacceptable when companies have the knowledge, have the technology, have the workforce to fix these leaks and stop the wasteful practices of venting and flaring. when we set clear rules and emission standards, the most oil and gas operators are on board with updating their equipment and practices to minimize methane leak and to bring that gas to market. that's their business plan, not wasting methane. we saw this bear out in practice in new mexico over the past two years. as our state's oil and conservation commission convened conversation -- sorry. convened conservation and public health advocates and local oil and gas producers to establish

state-level methane emissions rules. new mexico's new rules govern not just oil and gas production sites, but also things like pipeline and storage sites that also oftentimes leak methane into the atmosphere. and under our new state rules, oil and gas operators have the flexibility to choose the best technologies to meet the target capturing 98% of natural gas by 2026. a spoke manning for the oil and gas association said that they support this goal and newly finalized rules which promote, quote, safe, responsible production of oil and gas. end quote. new mexico has joined other western states like colorado, north dakota, and wyoming that have adopted strong state-level methane level rules. until recently, we also had

strong federal methane rules in place at the e.p.a. now, unfortunately these rules became one more target of the trump administration's reckless rollbacks of protections of our clean air and clean water in this country. late last year, president trump dismantled an e.p.a. rule that required oil and gas producers to monitor for methane leaks at their wells, at their excessor stations and at -- come pressor stations and other operations. this rule or roll back of a rule is simply a disaster for our climate and for public health. it was even rejected by much of the industry that it was purporting to help. many leading american oil and gas producers and companies simply panned president trump's rollback of these commonsense methane standards. just one example, gretchen watkins, shell's president in the united states, called the

trump administration's rollback, quote, frustrating and disappointing and pledged to voluntarily continue reducing their methane emissions. why would they do that? because it's the right thing to do. because it makes business sense, because the rollback was, frankly, nonsensical. so repairing leaks, installing new leak detection technologies will also create a number of good-paying jobs. it's really the epitome of a win-win situation. without clear federal rules in place at the e.p.a., however, industry-led voluntary emission reductions simply won't go far enough to curb the problem that we have. we need clear standards that create clear requirements for reducing waste and harmful pollution. it's not just me saying this. since we announced this effort to use the congressional review act, more and more leading

companies in the oil and gas sector have come forward to say that they would welcome reinstating the e.p.a.'s methane emission standards. that includes the e.q.t. corporation, one of the nation's leading natural gas producers which operates in west virginia, ohio, and pennsylvania. in a statement, e.q. t.'s president, kobe rice, called the uniform methane standards, quote, sound federal policies and committed to, quote, producing our natural gas in accordance with high environmental and social standards, end quote. the major oil company says, quote, we welcome direct federal regulation of methane emissions and support resolution via the congressional review act. shell u.s. tweeted sound policy surrounding natural gas is critical to its role in the

energy transition. we need to restore the direct federal regulation of methane emissions, and we urge congress to approve the methane resolution under the congressional review act. not my words. shell, one of the world's major producers of oil and gas. these are the words of industry leaders who welcome us setting clear standards on methane emissions. we are voting to reinstate the commonsense methane requirements for the oil and gas industry's production and processing segments, and the methane and volatile organic compound requirements for oil and gas transmission and storage facilities. with this vote, congress will once again affirm that the clean air act requires the e.p.a. to take action to protect the air that americans breathe from dangerous and harmful pollutants

like methane. just like we did back in 2017 when the senate came together on a bipartisan basis to uphold similar rules that govern the oil and gas production on federal bureau of land management lands. in that vote, our former colleague senator john mccain and our colleague senator susan collins, senator lindsey graham joined with senate democrats in retaining the b.l.m.'s methane rule that promoted responsible development of natural gas resources on our public lands. i would hope that all of us and i mean all of us, sincerely this is an effort that should receive the support of every single senator in this body. i would hope that all of us can come together on a bipartisan basis once again to restore and strengthen responsible federal methane standards for ail and gas operators. i am so pleased that senator

collins has already joined us as a cosponsor on this resolution. and finally, i'd like to point out that these rules are important, not just to the health of oil and gas producing states like new mexico or wyoming or colorado because these rules will ensure the safety of not just oil and gas production sites but also of the gas pipelines and the storage sites that exist in every state in this country and in communities across this country. these upstream segments of the oil and gas industry are in every single community you can imagine in all parts of the nation. and just like we all know we need to remove poisonous lead from our drinking water pipes, we need to be sure that the natural gaslines that run into our homes, into our businesses are not leaking harmful methane pollution in the very spaces

where we all breathe and live. as we transition towards a 100% clean energy future, a future without pollution, we must do all that we can to mitigate the harmful pollution caused by our current use of fossil fuels. and that's exactly what these rules are designed to do. as president biden demonstrated just last week when he convened leaders from around the globe, americans are ready for us to move past former president trump's backwards and reckless vision on climate. restoring and strengthening methane standards at the e.p.a. will be one of the most powerful steps that we can all take here in this senate today to confront the existential threat posed by greenhouse gas pollution and a warming planet. and it will make the air over all of our communities cleaner

and healthier and easier to breathe. for all of these reasons i would encourage once again not just a few of my colleagues but all of our colleagues to join us in voting for this bipartisan resolution to restore some common sense and some responsible federal standards for the waste and leakage of methane. thank you, mr. president. i would note the absence of a quorum. the presiding officer: the clerk will call the roll. quorum call:

a senator: mr. president? the presiding officer: the invite whip. mr. thune: is the senate in a quorum call? the presiding officer: yes. mr. thune: i would ask that the quorum call be limited. the presiding officer: without objection. mr. thune: this evening, president biden will deliver his first address to congress. i've been asked, i think as most members have, by the need came what do you expect to hear, what do you want to hear. honestly, mr. president, i'm interested to hear the direction the president will set in his speech. the president's inaugural address leaned heavily into the theme of unity and bipartisanship. but unity and bipartisanship have not been a distinguishing feature of the biden presidency. the president's first major bill, a covid relief bill, broke the streak of bipartisanship on covid legislation, a streak that goes back to march of last year.

since that time and we were the majority, we passed five bills, all of them with big bipartisan majorities. under president biden, democrats shoved through a totally partisan bill filled with noncovid-related liberal priorities. republicans are more than ready to work with democrats on additional coronavirus legislation. in fact, ten republicans developed a covid proposal and then met with president biden to discuss it. but democrats and the president were having none of it. it was their way or the highway on -- high way on covid legislation. no bipartisanship, no compromise. it was support democrats bill and its wasteful spending on non-covid-related priorities or be left out of the discussion. mr. president, as i pointed out, only about 10%, 10% of that, quote, covid bill was actually

covid related. it was a deeply disappointing start to the biden presidency and a betrayal of the unity that president biden had pledged himself to in his inauguration address. but unfortunately, the biden presidency is mostly continued along in the same partisan fashion. the president promised to be a president for the whole people. yet he seems more focused on making sure that he's a president for the far left. and you don't have to take my word for it. one of the leading voices of the far left in this congress, this congress, mr. president, recently stated that president biden had exceeded, not met, exceeded progressives' expectations. well, mr. president, between democrats and the white house, the first three months of the biden presidency have been a long stream of policies and proposals that seem to have come right from the progressives' playbook. proposals for tax hikes and more

tax hikes and still more tax hikes to pay for new government programs, like the president's green new deal-esk civilian climate corps, a stark retreat from border security with a huge crisis going on at the border as a result, a bill that would place unprecedented restrictions on the free exercise of religion in the name of equality, legislation to dramatically revise our electoral system to secure democrats' hold on power. the list goes on. once an ardent defender of america's core institutions, the president recently established a commission to explore the idea of court packing. perhaps the most outrageously partisan and political proposal we've seen in this century. mr. president, from the way democrats are behaving, you

would think that the american people had elected overwhelming democrat majorities and a president with a reputation with a strong -- as a strong leftist. but of course that isn't even close to being the case. we all know that. democrats have a razor thin majority in the senate and an almost equally thin majority in the house of representatives where they lost a substance number of seats -- substantial number of seats. as for the presidency, certainly a democrat won the election. it's worth noting that the only candidate who could win the democrat primary was a man historically regarded as a moderate. that's right. even among primary democrat voters, the democrats' far-left liberal candidates did not fare so well. if there was any man -- if there was any mandate in the election, it was a mandate for moderation, compromise yet democrats are behaving as if they've been

delivered a mandate for a partisan revolution. mr. president, there has been one encouraging thing lately, and that is the fact that president biden seems to actually be considering pursuing bipartisanship on an infrastructure package. he has had multiple meetings on infrastructure with republican members of congress, and while i'm still waiting just to see how committed democrats are to achieving a bipartisan as a result, i am encouraged that the president is at least talking to republican members. a bipartisan infrastructure proposal should be a slam dunk. congress has a history of bipartisan collaboration on infrastructure legislation. in fact, our last major infrastructure bill, the fast act, received strong support from both democrats and republicans and was a remarkably successful bill. as chairman of the commerce committee, i helped spearhead a bipartisan reauthorization of the f.a.a., including critical programs to improve airport

infrastructure. and last congress, the environment and public works committee developed major bipartisan infrastructure legislation. there is no good reason that we shouldn't reach bipartisan agreement on another substantial infrastructure bill, but it will require a commitment from democrats and the president to real bipartisan work and a recognition that bipartisanship involves compromise and that no one side is going to get everything that its members want. bipartisanship is not democrats limiting republicans to support democrats -- or i should say bipartisanship is not democrats inviting republicans to support democrats' ideal bill. bipartisanship is sitting down at the table, identifying what we agree on, and then working out a solution to our differences that involves both sides accepting compromises. so, mr. president, i hope that

tonight the president will go beyond empty talk about bipartisanship and make an actual concrete commitment to achieving bipartisan results, starting with infrastructure legislation. i hope, although i do not really expect, that he will move away from the policies and partisan priorities of the far left and toward a more moderate vision, more in keeping with the bringing americas together that he spoke of in his inaugural address. but ultimately, mr. president, what matters the most is not what the president will say tonight but what he will do in the days and weeks to come. will he finally deliver on that promise of unity that he spoke of in his inaugural address? or will he continue to pursue the partisan path that progressives have laid out for him? mr. president, for the sake of our country, i hope he chooses

bipartisanship. mr. president, i yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum. the presiding officer: the clerk will call the roll. quorum call:

the presiding officer: the senator from west virginia. mrs. capito: thank you, mr. president. i ask that we vitiate the quorum call. the presiding officer: without objection. mrs. capito: thank you, mr. president. i rise today in opposition to the resolution of disapproval on the trump e.p.a.'s methane policy rule. this resolution we have in front of us today is nothing more than a political posturing, i believe. ironically, the democrats are targeting natural gas for blame when methane emissions have actually fallen. according to e.p.a. data, natural gas systems in the u.s. reduce their overall methane emissions by nearly 16% between 1990 and 2019. it is widely recognized that the

shale gas boom led to significant greenhouse gas emission reductions over our power sector. some climate change advocates, including those in washington, want to ban oil and gas production and use, and they oppose maintenance and expansion of our pipelines in this country. the c.r.a. is part of that effort, i believe. the c.r.a. is part of a plan to double down on an industry that the biden administration obviously, from the day they -- from the day the president took office, do not support. just yesterday, the biden administration's office of management and budget issued a statement of administrative policy. on the resolution that we are considering today. the statement does not hide the disdain that the administration has towards the oil and gas sector. the statement presents a laundry list of alleged harms to americans from the oil and gas industry and none of the benefits. it doesn't mention that our natural gas production and use

have gone up. our gun's overall greenhouse -- as that has happened, our country's overall greenhouse gas emissions have gone down. it does not talk about the wage gap between natural gas sector jobs and so-called green jobs. as "politico" reported this week, the median wage for solo workers is $24.48 an hour compared with $30.33 for those employed by the natural gas sector, which amounts to a roughly $12,000 annual wage gap. in yesterday's statement, the administration showed its cards for its next step. passage of this resolution would lay the groundwork for a planned regulatory war on oil and gas. according to the administration, today's resolution, and i quote, clears the pathway for e.p.a. to evaluate opportunities to promulgate even stronger

standards under section 11 of the clean air act to address dangerous methane and other pollution from both new and existing sources across the oil and gas sector. that's right. they want to come forward wb even stronger -- with even stronger clean air sectors than the obama administration did. before starting a rulemaking to ask public comments, the biden administration has made up its mind to regulate much more aggressively. i guess i'm not really surprised. it is time to identify the best policies to do that. we shouldn't demeanize the life blood of our economy. we should celebrate the emission reduction and look for further ways to incentivize those. we shouldn't destroy the economic engines, solution that's don't pick winners and

losers. the market is pushing industry to lower its methane emissions and for those still flaring gas, one way to reduce flaring is to build out our pipeline infrastructure so they can get the gas, the very commodity they are trying to produce and sell to the market. so let's come up with solutions that actually help protect our planet and don't overregulate industry for political points. solutions like improving the environmental review and permitting processes so that we can complete these pipeline projects more efficiently and cleaner. i urge my colleagues to vote against the resolution -- i urge my colleagues to focus on real unifying solutions. thank you, and i yield the floor. the presiding officer: the senator from pennsylvania.

mr. casey: mr. president, thank you. today is workers memorial day when we remember all of the workers in our nation who have been killed, who have been injured, or who became sick on the job. on this day we reflect upon the losses these workers and their families have suffered and we also, and i believe we must, recommit ourselves to ensuring that every worker in america is safe on the job. on a day like today, i'm remembering pennsylvania workers, not only workers of today and the challenges they face in the workplace and the challenges their families still face, especially in the grip of and we hope ultimately in the aftermath of a terrible pandemic. but we're also, of course, remembering those who came

before them, generations of workers in a state like pennsylvania, folks who built this country, made this country run, helped us win world war ii, not to mention other battles, economic and otherwise. so we're remembering those stories. i'm also remembering, of course on a day like today, a lot of stories like my home area. live in northeastern pennsylvania, i live in scranton, pennsylvania, which at one time was the coal capital of the world. that region was. and every family, every community seemed to have a story about one of their loved ones, sometimes a grandfather or a great-grandfather or an uncle or a grandmother or some relative and how they struggled in those days. one story is not, unfortunately,

atypical. this is a story about an 11-year-old boy working in the anthro site coal mines. in those days in order to pull the coal out of a coal mine, you had to pull it out by a coal car and it was pulled by a mule. in this case, this 11-year-old boy, and, of course, it was permissible in those days to allow someone that young to work in a coal mine. this -- this young kid reached down to -- to get the straps that connected the mule to the coal car and then when he was bending down to pick up one of those leather straps, the rear hoofs of the mule kicked him square in the face. here's the description of what happened after that mule kicked the 11-year-old, and i'm reading from an account. quote, the kick hurled him over

a loaded 5-foot high coal car into the mine, the face of the mine, as the miners would say. the 11-year-old had his nose smashed, he had an opened wound from his forehead, across his eyebrow, down his nose, through his lip and into his chin. no ambulance was called, no paramedics came to save him. work didn't even stop. and then the account goes on to talk about the mine boss had another young kid walk this 11-year-old out of the mine, taking the child home -- a long perilous journey home. once he finally made it home, the 11-year-old's mother called the doctor. they laid him on the dining room

table where the doctor sewed the long gouge on his face. there were no benefits no, workers compensation, no safety net in place to take care of the adult worker much less the injured child, unquote. that's, unfortunately, an account that was all too common in those days. much has changed, fortunately, but candidly not enough. we mark today the 50th anniversary of the occupational safety an health act going -- and health act going into effect. it just happens to be today. this is a landmark achievement in the fight to guarantee every worker a safe workplace. it was passed because of the tireless efforts of workers and unions who stood up for their fellow working men and women and demanded government action that led to the so-called osha act.

there remains, of course, much work to be done to protect our workers. let's turn to the pandemic and our workers. the covid-19 pandemic has made clearer than ever the need for action to strengthen workplace protections, ensure workers can stand up and advocate for safe workplaces. the virus has touched every workplace in the country, presenting a new threat to workers' health on the job unlike any we have seen in our lifetimes. throughout the pandemic, millions of workers have been at risk -- at risk of contracting the virus as they did their work. having to worry every day when they headed home about their health and, of course, the health of their families. the death toll from this virus, this pandemic, is staggering. more than 570,000 americans are dead, more than 26,000 in pennsylvania. these, of course, were mothers

and fathers, and grandmothers and grandfathers, sisters and brothers, neighbors and friends. the disproportionate effect on people of color is also staggering. those who were widely represented in the essential workforces that -- that have continued to go to work every day throughout the pandemic. this disproportionate impact on people of color has been especially disturbing and devastating. the toll never should have been this high and workers never should have had to face the risk that they faced every day during the pandemic. to honor all of these workers and their families, we must continue to take action to protect them on the job and ensure that workers are never left as vulnerable as they were in the pandemic. now we've made some steps -- taken some steps recently. the american rescue plan, passed

by congress and signed into law by president biden, has already been critical to helping protect workers from covid-19. the rescue plan provided billions to help get americans the vaccines they need and to ensure that frontline workers received the supplies an personal protective equipment they needed to stay safe on the job. it also included $100 million for osha to protect workers on the job. so we can celebrate that on this celebration of workers memorial day. this $100 million in funding is essential to -- to help defeat the pandemic, but also in the process to keep workers safe. we must ensure that policies are in place to strengthen our workplace safety laws and also to strengthen enforcement. we must ensure that the highest standards -- the highest standards which are informed by

recent science, protect to -- exist to protect workers for their health, whether to protect a worker from covid-19 or in a coal mine, we must organize and bargain collectively by passing the p.r.o. act, the protecting the right to organize act. the p.r.o. act would ensure workers have a voice on the job and are able to advocate for safe working conditions and we must ensure osha, the ocking -- and its sister agency, the mine safety and health administration have the authority, the resources and the personnel they need to protect workers every day of every year. our nation's workforce has done heroic work throughout this

pandemic. one part of that workforce that has done both essential and heroic work over the past year is our nation's home and community-based services workforce. often not talked about in the debates here in congress. these workers are the backbone of our care giving infrastructure and we know that as part of the rescue plan, president biden -- i'm sorry, as part of the american jobs plan, the president has proposed and we have not yet passed, but we're working on it, president biden has calleddor a -- for -- called for a $400 billion investment to be directed to invest in seniors and people with disabilities and to support this vital and undervalued workforce. this great american idea, to develop the best caregiving workforce in the world, not one

of the best, not second or third, the best workforce in the world, to care for and provide support and services to people with disabilities and seniors, this great american idea is an idea that's focused on that workforce, which is a workforce primarily of women of color making only $12 an hour. we can't say that we have the best caregiving workforce in the world if we're not going to invest in that workforce and to lift them up. the american people want this to happen. this is overwhelmingly popular. more than 70% of the american people want us to make this investment in home and community-based services, thereby lifting up that workforce so that we can provide better care for people with disabilities and seniors so they can not only survive but also to

thrive. making this investment is a vital part of raising standards and working conditions for this essential workforce and for all workers. mr. president, let me conclude with this. the story of the 11-year-old boy kicked in the face in the anthracite coal mines, that 11-year-old was my grandfather, his name was alfonsis casey, and like a lot of young kids, started in the coal mines at a young age, at age 11, worked in the mines between 1905 and 1910. when he worked in the mines, there were virtually no protections, even for a child. thank goodness we made a lot of progress since then the but we still have a long way to go to make sure that all workers and all workforces are protected in their workplace. and we also have to make sure that we're making the

appropriate investments in them to call ourselves the greatest country in the world many we can't say we're the greatest country in the world if we're paying people $12 an hour to do the important work this they have -- that they have to do every day and want to do, it's a high calling to care for people with disabilities and seniors. so just like that 11-year-old boy, and so many like him in those days, we've got to make sure that today's workforce is the subject of our protection, is the subject of our attention, and is the subject of our investment. let's lift them up so that we have the best workforce in the world and the safest workplaces, not only on workers memorial day but every day. mr. president, thank you, and i would yield the floor and note the absence of a quorum. the presiding officer: the clerk will call the roll. quorum call:

quorum call:

the presiding officer: the senator from rhode island. mr. whitehouse: mr. president, i ask unanimous consent that the pending quorum call be vitiated. the presiding officer: without objection. mr. whitehouse: thank you. i'm here to speak on the upcoming methane congressional review act matter and to speak in support of overturning the trump misrule regarding the problem of methane emissions. let's start by setting the stage that about a quarter of the global warming that we've experienced has been due to methane, and about a third of that is due to activities of the oil and gas industry.

so this is a very significant part of our climate problem. i should say our climate and oceans problem. and we don't actually know how bad it is. the environmental defense fund has recently estimated that methane emissions from oil and natural gas operations could be as much as 60% higher than previous estimates. so it's a significant part of the problem. one of the reasons we don't know how bad the problem is is because of the way the oil and gas industry has based about reporting its methane problem. just to understand what the natural gas industry would like to tell you is that natural gas is a far cleaner fuel, far safer from a climate perspective

than coal or than oil, bunker oil, or whatever else you want to burn. and it is true that once natural gas has been burned at the burner tip, it is less harmful. but the natural gas industry wants you to forget, is everything between the well and the burner tip. because through that enormous web of piping occurs so much leakage that satellites flying overhead can pick up the pools of methane floating in our atmosphere from the leakage. the natural gas industry doesn't want to talk about that, and one of the things that they did was they got the trump administration to early on

withdraw e.p.a.'s request that in the previous administration the industry more or less agreed to that would have required oil and gas companies to report on their methane emissions. when the fossil fuel apparatchiks occupied in the trump administration the offices at e.p.a. and energy and interior and other places important to the industry, they did what the industry wanted. and the very first thing, march 2, 2017, was to withdraw the request that would have had oil and gas companies report how bad their methane leakage actually was. it didn't take long to follow that up on march 28 with an executive order from trump directing e.p.a. to suspend or

rescind existing methane regulations for the oil and gas industry. but that wasn't enough for the oil and gas industry. on april 19 they got e.p.a. to postpone implementation of a rule that would have required them to equip new wells with equipment to prevent methane leaks. you wouldn't think that would be asking too much, particularly from an industry that wants to tell everybody that it's better for the climate and the environment than the rest of the fossil fuel is industry. but no, they asked e.p.a. to undo that requirement so they could more readily leak methane from new wells. and even that wasn't enough. in may of 2017, they got the department of the interior to suspend a rule that would have required oil and gas companies to curb the flaring of methane

from their oil and gas wells on public lands. and then again september 11, 2018, they got e.p.a. to propose a rule to weaken the methane leak detection and repair requirements for their new wells. weaken the detection and repair requirements for methane leakage from their own wells. then they proposed a second rule to eliminate e.p.a.'s regulatory authority over methane emissions from oil and gas facilities. that's getting a little bit out there. because methane is a greenhouse gas, regulable as a pollutant

by the e.p.a., and it also has a whole lot of unfortunate characteristics for people who have to breathe it in. but that's what the oil and gas industry wanted e.p.a. to do, to eliminate its regulatory authority over methane emissions. and then more recently, on august 13 of 2020, they got e.p.a. to promulgate a rule to eliminate that rule, to eliminate that regulatory authority over methane emissions from oil and gas facilities. this is dirty conduct by an industry, to take advantage of its ability to plant industry operatives in positions of public responsibility in order to leak more methane, put less

equipment in place to protect against methane leakage, and reduce its requirements even to report on the methane leakage that is going on, that is not responsible corporate conduct. these rules are a disgrace. the c.r.a. should pass. and we should get on to taking on this problem of methane. i'll close by pointing out that i have a bill that would do quite a lot to solve this problem. one of the problems in this whole enterprise of pollution is that when it's free to pollute, people will pollute. if corporations view themselves as having only an obligation to their shareholders and only an obligation to their shareholders

that is denominated in dollars, why would they ever spend any money at all to protect against pollution unless they were required to or unless it had a cost? we k know it actually has a cos. people suffer from pollution. that's a cost. our oceans are acidifying because of carbon dioxide pollution. that's a cost. people lose their homes in wildfires that didn't used to happen. that's a cost. my state has to plan to lose its current map to sea level rise and to lose precious shore front land. that's a cost. these are real costs. the industry just doesn't want to pay them. they want a free ride on everybody else's suffering and one way to solve that is to put a price on the pollution. and by the way, this is not a

liberal democratic environmental agenda. this is economics 101. milton friedman for pete's sake said that if you want to have an economic system that works, you've got to put what he called negative externalities. the bad things that hurt other people. you have to put the cost of that into the product. otherwise you don't have a market system. you've got a subsidy system. you're picking winners and losers. as much as my colleagues on the other side like to say that they don't like subsidies and they don't want to see government picking winners and losers, when it's the fossil fuel industry that gets subsidized, when it's the fossil fuel industry that is the winner, they can't line up fast enough to subsidize and pick winners and losers. so we're going to have to work pretty hard to solve this problem because we've got some

real hazards in front of us. what my bill would do is to measure the thing that they didn't want to do, measure methane emissions from oil and gas production. as i said, new developments in satellite technology mean we don't have to depend on them any longer. we can actually do a lot of this everybody inning. we can check their measuring. we can use reagan's phrase, trust but verify what they're reporting with a whole lot of other data we can pull together. so get the data. how much are they leaking? figure it out basin by basin, because that's where it really happens. it happens in these pools that emerge from the basins from all of the leakage. and then put a price on it. not hard to do. there's a social cost of carbon that president obama proposed. president biden has put it back in at the previous level while

they get to work on figuring out what updates there should be to it. we have a social cost of carbon. you can quantify the methane harm and compare it to the carbon harm. you can make an equivalency between those two. and you can determine what the social cost of methane leakage should be. it's really not all that complicated. we would start it in 2023 so that the industry which has been so reprehensible in its leakage, in its influence over e.p.a., and its influence in the trump administration. we're actually giving them a chance to clean up their act and do what they should have done all along. so it would begin in 2023 and it would cost them $1,800 per ton of leaked methane. you leak it, you pay for it. it's not that complicated.

when i was growing up, we had a pretty simple rule in my family. you spill it, you clean it up. i don't know why that's not an appropriate rule when the company and the industry gets big enough and has enough political and dark money, that ought to be the rule. you spill it, you clean it up. you leak the methane, you pay for it. so i hope that we can get that methane factor passed into law as well. because we know perfectly well this is not an industry that is going to pursue the public interests if it's not required to. we saw that in the trump administration. we saw it on march 2, 2017. we saw it on march 28, 2017. we saw it on april 19, 2017. we saw it on may 10, 2017. we saw it on september 11, 2018.

august 28, 2019. on august 13, 2020, when over and over and over again they hurt the public by using their clout over the regulatory agency of this country to their own benefit. so you can't count on them to take care of this on their own. they just won't. they've proven that. that's not a contested fact any longer. we gave them the chance to clean up their act without this kind of requirement, and they totally failed. in fact, they spent all their energy trying to degrade the regulatory authority that kept them trying to clean up methane. so let's solve this problem. methane is a real problem. there's a lot of it changing our climate. the climate situation has become an emergency. methane is easily preventable from leaking.

and by the way, here's the added bonus. it gives a lot of people jobs. there's a lot of work that we can do to reclaim the damage that the fossil fuel industry has caused. cleaning up the wells, cleaning up the mines, cleaning up the piping. those are all real jobs. so let's get after it. let's start with the c.r.a. let's go on to a proper methane fee to put the leaking out of business. and on from there. mr. president, i yield the floor. and i note the absence of a quorum. the presiding officer: the clerk will call the roll. quorum call:

quorum call:

the presiding officer: the senator from maine. mr. king: i have 15 requests for committees to meet during today's session of the senate. they have the approval of the majority and minority leaders.

the presiding officer: duly noted. mr. king: later today we will have perhaps the most consequential vote on climate. it's a pretty straightforward vote, although it's an interesting procedural problem. the vote is a congressional review act vote to repeal the repeal of the regulation of the release of methane from oil and gas both drilling and transportation. a repeal of a repeal is the legislative equivalent of a double negative, and of course we all know a double negative produces a positive, and that's exactly what will happen in this case. some years ago regulations were imposed upon the oil and gas industry to control the escape of methane from drilling operations. this isn't about natural gas or oil. this is about fugitive gases that escape into the atmosphere as part of the drilling process

or the transportation process. the problem is that methane is the nuclear weapon of climate change. methane is 80 times as dangerous as co2 in the atmosphere in terms of capturing heat and contributing to climate change. 80 times. not 80% more. not eight times more. 80 times more. now, the good news is methane only persists in the atmosphere for about 20 years. code code, unfortunately, over 100 -- co2, unfortunately, over 100 years. because of its short residence time and high potency, removing it now will have immediate and substantial effects on the overall -- overall amount of greenhouse gas that is in our atmosphere. there is nothing we can do in

the short run to deal with climate change that is more significant than the vote that will take place on this floor in a few hours. this is probably, as i said at the beginning, one of the most important votes that we will have in this chamber in order to forestall and slow the climate catastrophe that everyone acknowledges is headed toward us. whether it's wildfires, whether it's changes in ocean temperature that affect sea life, whether it's hurricanes, whether it's pure temperature. and let me talk a bit about climate change as a national security issue. i serve on the armed services and intelligence committees. it is a national security issue for a number of reasons. one is the sort of dollars and cents. it affects our military facilities around the world that are going to be affected by rising sea levels. we're going to have to spend billions of dollars in order to

shore up those facilities, so that's just a kind of nuts and bolts dollars and cents. but the part that really worries me is migration. we all know about the migrants from syria, from the syrian civil war. i don't know the exact number, maybe four or five million. but those migrants upset the political system of all of europe, created a major political crisis. the estimate for climate migrants because of the inhospitality of the climate in the band around the central part of the earth is in the hundreds of millions. between 100 million and 200 million climate migrants who are escaping a place they can't live anymore because of drought, because of famine, because of a

lack of drinking water, just because of high temperatures. humans aren't evolved to live in places that are 130 degrees of heat. so people are going to be on the move. think of the disruption caused by the immigration or the migration from syria and multiply that by 10, 20, 30, 40 times, that's what we're talking about, and that kind of pressure and famine and drought and all of those things throughout history is what's caused wars. it's a threat multiplier. it's a threat creator. it is, in fact, a national security issue. this isn't about just being, you know, concerned about whether we'll have more warm days in april. this is a national security issue and it's a worldwide -- and it's of worldwide import. now, why is this vote today important if it is a worldwide

issue. i have had people say to me why are we going through all this, why are we going to cost ourselves any money when it's just as big a problem coming from china or india? we can cut down all of our businesses in maine and we're still not going to be able to solve this problem, nor could we if we did it in the united states. molecules of methane or co2 don't care about borders. they go around the world, and they are causing this problem to happen around the world. but yes, this vote today is important because it's a signal to the rest of the world that we're serious about this problem. a negative vote today is a signal to the rest of the world that we don't care. and the rest of the world is going to be paying attention. this is a global problem. it is going to take solutions from every country and particularly from the larger emitting countries like the united states, like china, like

india, but we have to show that we're willing to do it here if we're going to ask other people to make these kind of steps in their country, and that's why i think this vote has international implications as well as national. now, what about the cost? are we imposing some enormous cost or are we talking about new technology? no. this is a relatively cheap way to get a major improvement in the emission of greenhouse gases. we're not talking about carbon capture, which is very important, but we're a ways away from cost-effective carbon capture technology and the costs are still very high. this is a relatively low cost. requiring methane emissions from oil and gas production is the right thing to do for our climate and the air quality of communities across the country.

i couldn't say it better myself. i'm reading someone else's words. it's widely acknowledged that methane is a highly potent greenhouse gas with a global warming potential 80 times greater than co2. beyond the long-term impacts related to climate change, methane emissions also have implications for local air quality. we owe it to the communities where we live and work to reduce these emissions. who said that? angus king didn't say that. shell oil said that. many, if not most, of the major producers of oil and gas in this country are supporting this vote today. this is not a vote where fossil fuel is on one side and the environmental community is on the other. no, this is a broad coalition of people worried about health, of people worried about the environment, of people worried about climate change, and also people in the industry who are

worried about the effects of this on this on their industry if we don't take care of this. and here is a very -- this is very interesting data. we all know that different technologies have different impacts on the environment, and this is -- these bars are the emission levels per unit of energy produced of various alternatives -- air pumps, wood pellets, natural gas, propane, heating oil, coal. these are all in use in the united states. and we have substantially lowered our emission of greenhouse gases because of the conversion from coal and oil to natural gas. and that hasn't been caused by regulation or by the dead hand of government. that's been because of the market, because of the enormous production of natural gas in this country. now, here's the problem.

and i have always thought of natural gas as a transition fuel. 60% of our electricity in new england comes from natural gas. and indeed, our co2 is down because of that. but here's the problem. see this little black line here? that's the actual emission from natural gas if you count methane. so the advantage, the environmental, the climate advantage of natural gas disappears if you count the methane that is released in the production of natural gas. but it's controllable. it's not inevitable. it's not something that's impossible. there are now technologies to survey pipelines to detect leaks and to prevent them. it's really pretty straightforward. if you have a pipeline that's leaking and is putting methane in the atmosphere that's 80

times as bad as co2, let's fix it. and that's all we're talking about today. we're talking about restoring commonsense regulation on the release of dangerous climate change-inducing gases, principally methane. some of the other things that are released are also dangerous for people living in the area of the well or the pipeline leak. i'm not -- i'm not opposed to the use. i mean, right now, as i say, natural gas is the preferred alternative, and you can see why, except for the methane problem. so let's eliminate that. let's make the chart look like this. then natural gas works. but we have got to deal with methane. this is the low-hanging fruit of climate action. this is an opportunity for this country to make a statement internationally, to make a statement to our people, and to

do something about the most serious environmental problem we face. every day that goes by, it gets more expensive to deal with. every day that goes by, it's going to be more difficulty for our people, the impacts are going to be more catastrophic, the impacts are going to be more difficult in terms of what we have to spend to deal with it. so let's spend relatively little now to eliminate one of the most serious risks. it's not minor. it's a very significant part of the climate -- of the climate issue, and it's one that we can do at a relatively low price with not a heavy hand of regulation, commonsense regulation, and we can do something important for the american people and indeed the people of the entire world. mr. president, this is an important vote this afternoon. i hope it's a resounding vote. it should be. it should be a resounding vote

to say to the world and to say to the people of this country we're on your side, we understand there's a problem heading for us, and we are going to act to deal with it. this is our responsibility. it's why we're here. and we have the capability to do this starting today. thank you, mr. president. i yield the floor. a senator: mr. president. the presiding officer: the senator from new jersey. mr. menendez: mr. president, i think i will get done before, but in case, i ask unanimous consent to be able to finish my statement before the vote. the presiding officer: is there objection? without objection. mr. menendez: thank you. i rise today to express my support for the nomination of ambassador samantha power to be our next administrator of the united states agency for international development. ambassador power's qualifications for this position are beyond dispute.

her lifelong commitment to protecting human rights and preventing global atrocities, combined with the foreign policy experience she gained during the obama administration, make her impeccably qualified for this role. i want to highlight in particular her leadership on the international effort to end genocide. our struggle against these horrific crimes is ongoing and unrelenting. like ambassador power, i was proud to see the biden administration formally recognize the armenian genocide, a recognition by the united states government that was long overdue. ambassador power's intellect, energy, and focus will be an enormous asset to usaid and the administration's efforts to end poverty around the world, help victims of conflict improve food security and build the kind of resilience that ultimately benefits the security and prosperity of the american people. this work is not easy, but it is exactly the sort of work that

president biden described in his inaugural address when he spoke of the united states as, quote, a strong and trusted partner for peace, progress, and security. it is also the work we must do to confront the immense crises we face around the world. many of the conflicts ambassador power contended with during her time at the united nations continue today. new conflicts, as we know, are brewing in ethiopia, haiti, burma, and creating hundreds of thousands of innocent victims and refugees. climate change is increasing food insecurity, intensifying natural resource scarcity, and beginning to drive mass migration. and of course, the covid-19 pandemic is an ever-evolving threat, and its proliferation around the world will continue to endanger our public health here at home. as long as there is a covid-19

virus anywhere, it can be everywhere. we cannot hermetically seal off our nation, and that's why this particular role of usaid is going to be increasingly important. as we reengage with our partners in the world to meet these challenges, ambassador power will play a critical role. i'm confident her experience, tenacity, and drive to build a better, more prosperous, peaceful world are exactly what usaid and our country need at this moment. i urge all of my colleagues to support ambassador power's successful confirmation, and with that, mr. president, i yield the floor.

the presiding officer: the clerk will report the motion to invoke cloture. the clerk: cloture motion, we, the undersigned senators, in accordance with the provisions of rule 22 of the standing rules of the senate do hereby move to bring to a close debate on the nomination of executive calendar number 61, samantha power of massachusetts, to be administrator of the united states agency for international development, signed by 18 senators. the presiding officer: by unanimous consent, the mandatory quorum call has been waived. the question is, is it the sense of the senate that debate on the nomination of samantha power of massachusetts to be administrator of the united states agency for international development shall be brought to a close. the yeas and nays are mandatory

under the rule. the clerk will call the roll. vote:

vote:

vote:

vote:

the presiding officer: are there any senators in the chamber wishing to vote or change his or her vote? if not, the yeas are 67. the nays are 28. the motion is agreed to. cloture having been invoked, the senate will proceed to executive session to resume consideration of the following nomination which the clerk will report.

the clerk: nomination, united states agency for international development, samantha power of massachusetts to be administrator. a senator: mr. president? the presiding officer: the majority whip. mr. durbin: i ask unanimous consent that the postcloture time on the power nomination expire at 3:30 p.m. if confirmed the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table and the president be immediately notified of the senate's action. following disposition of the nomination, the senate resume legislative session and vote on the passage of calendar number 48, senate joint resolution 14 and that if passioned, the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table. the presiding officer: is there objection? without objection. mr. durbin: mr. president, at 3:30 p.m., the senate will vote on confirmation of samantha power to be administrator of the united states agency for international development. on passage of the joint resolution of disapproval regarding the methane rule.

the presiding officer: the senator from iowa. mr. grassley: many times in the past presidents should be given a good deal of discretion when choosing their political appointees and so long as their nominees are qualified and do not obstruct the advice and consent process, the senate should not stand in the way of their confirmation. after all, presidents are ultimately responsible for the actions of their administration. and if the buck toolly stops at the resolute desk, they need to be trust their subordinates to get the job done. that being said, i now come to the point of my coming to the floor that i must vote no on the nomination of samantha power to be director of usaid. on february 18, i sent a letter

to ms. power asking questions regarding e-mails that came out of her office during her time serving as u.n. ambassador. heavily redacted versions of those e-mails obtained by my office appeared to suggest that ms. power's staff may have been working behind the scenes to remove the islamic relief agency from the u.s. treasury department's sanctions list. that organization was placed on sanctions list for what? funneling money to terrorist groups and thus removing it would allow that organization to receive private donations as well as taxpayer funds. in her letter responding to my questions, ms. power claimed that she was not working to take the islamic relief agency off

the sanctions list. she further claimed that the e-mail questions -- e-mails in question were part of an effort to challenge false claims made by the islamic relief agency at the u.n. denying their involvement in terrorist financing. in order to verify her claims, i've requested on multiple occasions that she provide unredacted copies of the e-mails and complete answers to the questions that will i posed in my original letter. but after three months, all i've received is a collection of public press releases. i have not received the e-mails i requested. i have not received answers to my questions. normally political appointees and nominees wait until after

they're confirmed to start ignoring congressional inquiries. but in this case, it seems the executive branch has decided advice and consent is going to be a mere formality and there's no need to wait. this seems to be a pattern. for instance, i asked secretary of h.h.s. a number of specific questions for the record as part of the finance committee vetting process. i received responses that didn't even try to answer the substance of my questions. i also asked the secretary to reconcile some conflicting information on our house financial disclosures and responses to questions for the record for the energy committee about her taxes.

in fact, it was probably innocent mistakes on her part if anything, but the secretary declined to respond at all. maybe the white house figures this simply, that they don't need republican votes so they don't need to answer even routine vetting questions from republicans. but then the white house can't blame republicans for voting no on their nominees when they ignore our oversight questions. i yield the floor.

a senator: mr. president? the presiding officer: the senator from massachusetts. mr. markey: mr. president, the methane president is not a new one. it has quickly and drastically warmed our planet since the industrial revolution. and today it accounts for one-quarter of global warming. we have no time to lose. in the short term, mect thain is more than -- methane is more than 80 times more powerful and damaging than its better known cow sin named co -- cousin named co2. while we've made progress, reducing our carbon dioxide levels, methane pollution has continued to surge in the background. even last year with more cars off the road and many stuck in

their homes, methane pollution levels just kept rising. and it arose in record amounts. in 2020 we saw the largest ever annual increase in methane emissions. if we continue to fail to act, methane pollution from the oil and gas industry is projected to cause as much near-term global warming as 260 coal-fired power plants every year by 2025. this is a crisis brought on by humanity, but thankfully it is one that we can solve as well by humanity. we have the technology and we understand the science and we need now to summon the political will and the regulatory leadership in order to solve this methane problem.

last week i sent a letter to president biden asking him to lead the world in developing a bold domestic methane strategy. although the administration's economy-wide goals for greenhouse gas emissions are a good baseline start, we need robust and specific targets for methane. by voting today to rescind the trump-era tax on methane regulations, we can protect the methane act by reinstating strong standards we can protect public health and create new jobs in detecting and repairing leaks, and by taking a stand today for environmental progress and good governance, we can begin to repair the immense damage done by donald trump. he was an enemy of science, a roadblock to science and a willing saboteur of american jobs and health as long as it meant he could pursue his

anti-environmental agenda. today we have the opportunity to recommit to climate action and to environmental justice. the covid-19 pandemic has helped expose the deep, systemic, and historic injustices our communities of color and low-income neighborhoods continue to face, communities like those in checklist. -- in chelsea, massachusetts. or waymouth, massachusetts, which struggles dalely is with a natural gas compressor station. big oil and gas corporations have used places like waymouth as a weigh station for pollution without fear of reprisal. this week we can stand up for justice for these communities instead of idly standing by. by passing this resolution on

the floor this afternoon, we can make real progress for our global community and for all americans that breathe different air because of their race, their zip code or their income level. in massachusetts, ralph waldo emerson said, health is the first wealth. today's vote is a decisive victory for our families. it will give the biden administration the tools it needs to shut in this methane for a very inexpensive cost to the oil and gas industry, providing real benefits to the health of our planet and the health of families in our country. and, as a result, i urge an aye vote on that c.r.a. and in addition, mr. president, i would like to speak on behalf of the nominee of the biden administration to become the

administrator for the u.s. agency for international development, or usaid. he has a great nominee, samantha power, for this job. as noted in a "new yorker" profiler of her, samantha's last name, power, comes from thish the poor, meaning of the poor. and fittingly, she has dedicated her entire life in service of others, using her razor-sharp intelligence as a journalist and activist and diplomat to stand with the world's voiceless masses all while advancing u.s. interests by building bonds in every corner of the world. ambassador power has been known to be ferocious in the pursuit of justice, human rights, and democracy, always taking the time to hear other points of view with great humility. while she disagrees with henry kissinger on everything from

politics to the no-brainer debate of the red sox versus the yankees, henry kissinger has said that samantha, quote, has an excellentage littoral mind and even on matters where i might come to a different conclusion, i respected her analysis, perhaps the highest prays ever given by a yankees fan to a member of the red sox nation. samantha's personal background gives her a unique and deep respect for this country and all that it stands for, spending time between pittsburgh, atlanta, a dublin, and boston, she received her bachelor's degree at yale university and went on to obtain her law degree at harvard university. she served in several key positions during the obama administration including as the special assistant to the president, the national security counsel, senior direct for

multi-lateralia fairs and human rights and notably as the youngest-ever u.s. ambassador to the united nations. prior to entering government service, she began her career as a war correspondent, reporting from the siege of sarajevo, became a pulitzer prize-winning author and served as the founding executive director of the carr center for human rights policy at harvard university. as she takes on the important work of leading usaid, the challenges that samantha power will face are daunting recovering from a pandemic, tackling the climate crisis and extending lifesaving assistance to the nearly one billion people around the world who go to bed hungry every single night. i know of no person more qualified to take on this task. she embodies that bold red, white, and blue usaid logo which

states, from the american people. in 2015, samantha power invited me to be her guest to attend his holiness pope francis' address before the united nations general assembly. for two irish catholics from massachusetts, it was the experience of a lifetime. on that day, pope francis spoke of the need for compassion, inclues sift and -- inclue sift and action to tackle the world's shared challenges. paw samantha will take her compassion and inclues sift to achieve great things for the people of the united states and for the world at usaid. there's no one better qualified, ever, to serve as the head of this agency, and i just with the greatest of enthusiasm recommend

an aye vote for every member of the united states senate on her confirmation as our director, as our administrator of this great group that serves in every country around the world. and, mr. president, i yield back. the presiding officer: the senator from louisiana. mr. kennedy: mr. president -- thank you, mr. president. mr. president, this body does not have to automatically raise taxes to pay for infrastructure. now, i know some of my colleagues disagree with me. some want to raise the gasoline tax. the president -- i think he wants to raise every tax known to man and beast. to spend on infrastructure and other things. and that's -- he's the

president. he's -- and he's an american. he's entitled to his own opinion. but i don't think we've spent nearly enough time looking at our current spending and asking ourselves if we could reprioritize some of the ways that we're spending taxpayer money. let me put it another way, mr. president. no person with even a casual relationship with the federal budget and/or an i.q. above a root vegetable believes that every single penny being spent today in the united states government's budget is being spent efficiently. i mean, it's just not, mr. president. you know that. you've run a state before. you've put together a budget

before. it's not. for example, we waste $144 billion a year -- every year -- on improper payments. we send checks to people who are not entitled to receive them for the earned income tax credit, for example. we spend money on people who don't exist or aren't qualified to receive medicaid. we even send money to dead people, and they cash the checks -- or at least their relatives do. now, i'm not naive. i know we will never, ever -- as organization as large as the federal government will never be able to avoid 100% of improper payments. i understand that.

but we ought to at least try, particularly on sending the checks to dead people. and even if we could reduce that $144 billion by 10% or 20% or 25%, we're talking about a very large amount of recurring revenue. a very simple solution -- i've suggested it to the white house, which hasn't responded. but we have passed legislation in this body, as you know, to try to stop sending checks to dead people. there's just one problem -- it was made effective three years from now. i had to agree to it in conference to get the bill passed. there's no good reason for it. -- other than some lobbyists insisted on it.

president biden right now, i think, could pick up at least $10 billion, maybe more -- we're not sure how much -- by just saying, effectively immediately, my administration is no longer going to send checks to dead people. i mean, who's going to get mad? who supports sending money to dead people? the american people don't. number two, we could repurpose the money -- a lot of the money that we've already appropriated. i've lost count of how much money we have appropriated for coronavirus, not just on the public health but also for our economy. and, look, i voted for many of the bills. i didn't vote for the last one because i thought the last one was unnecessary, it was too expensive, and it really wasn't about the coronavirus. but i think all fair-minded people can agree right now on two things. number one, a lot of the money we appropriated in the last

coronavirus bill has not yet been spent. and, number two, we're no longer in an economic crisis. the main crisis we have right now is our small business women and small business men can't find workers. so we're currently not in an economic crisis. and i think that we can go back and take some of that money -- in my state in louisiana, it's going to take some aspects of my state government, it'll take them ten years to spend all the money we sent to them in the last bill. and i can tell you, given the option to my state, they're going to choose to spend that money on infrastructure and not what congress sent them the money to spend it on. number three, there is a very interesting study by the c.b.o. between -- take the years -- i think it was 2013 to 2017, the c.b.o. took the entire federal

nonmilitary workforce on the one hand which we spend about $220 billion a year, because we have to have workers, and they took every job in the federal government and compared it to every job, every equivalent job in the private sector. it was a massive study. so it's apples to apples. and the federal government -- or, rather, the c.b.o. found that the federal government on average pays a federal worker 17% more annually than we pay the same worker in the private sector. now, i don't begrudge anybody a living, but what if we could reduce that to 15% or 12%? what if we could just not automatically fill every vacancy? what if we actually stopped and asked ourselves, if this position has been vacant for eight months, maybe we don't need it. i think there are enormous savings to be had. and the final thing i'll point

out, mr. chairman, doing is better than having. doing is better than having. and you're happier when you're -- when you have earned something than when somebody has just given it to you. and we have -- we're the most generous nation in all of human history. we -- the american people spend about $1 trillion a year at all levels of government helping our neighbors and some folks who aren't our neighbors who are less fortunate than we are. but we have -- we spend about $75 billion, $76 billion a year on medicaid and on food starches for adults who are -- and food stamps for adults who are able-bodies who are 65 years of age and younger and who don't have children and many of them could work. now, i know there are obstacles to them being able to work.

maybe they need help looking for a job. maybe they need employment counseling. maybe they need help with transportation. but we could save enormous amounts of money, and our citizens -- our people, our neighbors who are receiving this money would be better off. if they had a job. we don't have to revint the -- reinvent the wheel. we only have to look at defend defend -- denmark. they have an infrastructure set up in government, which we could do which works with people to get them a job to get them off of welfare and denmark has saved an enormous amount of money. let me say it again, doing is better than having. am i saying we could save 100% of that $75 billion? no. i don't know how much we could

safe sand nobody -- save, and nobody else does because we've never tried. in seven minutes i've given you foir or five ideas -- four or five ideas. i'm not suggesting that -- i'm not pretending that i just discovered gravity. this isn't earth shaking. you could find this with a cursory amount of research. just call the folks over at the congressional budget office and ask them, how are some ways we can save money in our federal budget? and i just think we would all feel so much better. i know the american taxpayer would feel so much better. if just for a little while as we talk about the importance of infrastructure, true infrastructure, roads, bridges, and broadband, if we just spent a little while as we talk about infrastructure, how to pay for it without putting our hand

deeper in the taxpayer's pocket. i watched -- i've seen too many public officials do it and i think we need to at least try. with that, mr. president, i suggest the absence of a quorum. the presiding officer: the clerk will call the roll. quorum call: the presiding officer: the senator is in a quorum call.

without objection. a senator: thank you. the presiding officer: the senator from delaware. mr. carper: i rise to speak in support of senate resolution 14, which we will vote on later today. i want to thank senator heinrich, senator markey and senator king. i understand when you were governor of colorado, you might have created the preservation of this point of view. the american people rely on the u.s. environmental protection agency to ensure our nation has clean air, clean water and a safe environment. unfortunately in 2020 the e.p.a. strayed from its mission any number of times. one of those missteps was that

agency's emission rule. our nation's largest industrial source of this dangerous greenhouse gas. by passing this resolution, congress today will reject and nullify this dangerous rule and restore clean air and climate protections from the nation's largest sources of methane pliewns -- pollution. let me expwhrain what methane is and why it is so farmful to our climate. methane is a super pollutant. it damages our lungs and our planet. compared to carbon dioxide, methane is a small part of the greenhouse gas emissions. having said that though scientists tell us that methane is responsible for one-quarter of the manmade warming we're witnessing. let me say it again. methane is responsible for

roughly one-quarter of the manmade warming we're witnessing today. over a 20-year period, methane is 20 times more harmful to our climate than carbon dioxide, 84 times. for a small molecule, methane punches above its weight when it comes to contributions to climate change. the oil and gas is our largest source of methane, responsible for 30% of total methane emissions. for comparison this amount of methane pollution has the same climate effect as the emissions from the nation's entire fleet of passenger vehicles in a year. in addition to damaging our climate, methane emissions also contribute to ground-level ozone, known as smog. breathing in smog harms our lungs, it aggravates lung diseases like bronchitis and

asthma. exposure to smog has been linked to premature death and children and elderly are particularly you'll have are necial to these -- vulnerable to this these health risks. if we want to reduce this, we need to reduce methane emissions from the entire oil and gas sector. in 2016, as i was alluding to earlier, the e.p.a. built on state actions such as colorado, the former chief executive is presiding at this moment. the e.p.a. put into place commonsense clean air act regulations that required the oil and gas to update its equipment. the rule required the industry to inspect frequently in order to find and repair leaks and malfunctions that are such a big source of our methane problem. based on feedback from the oil and gas, meeting these new

immersion requirements did not place an undue cost on companies or raise costs for consumers. in fact, many oil and gas companies supported the measures and they still do. that's why it's so -- it was so surprising when in september of 2020 the e.p.a. issued the final methane rescission rule to roll back what so many believed to be a commonsense approach for reducing methane risks. while the tumtion moved -- trump administration moved forward with this damaging policy, the consequences of climate change were roiling our nation. california, for example, experienced its worst wildfire season on record, with forest fires covering the size of a state like rhode island. other western states like

oregon, montana and colorado had unprecedented wildfires. other parts of the country experienced extreme weather. iowa had hurricane-forced winds causing $7 billion in economic damage and flattened over half of the state soybean crops in one day. southern states like florida, like louisiana, like south carolina were battered by hurricane after hurricane after hurricane. in the summer of 2020, last summer, we saw the most hurricanes in the atlantic ocean in recorded history. despite all of this, the trump administration took a step to undo one of the key tools available to us to combat methane emissions that contribute greatly to climate change. the methane rescission rule was

a stark departure from the widely accepted,s science-based and commonsense view that we should protect people and our planet from the dangers of methane. in promulgating the methane rescission rule, the trump administration ignored the global scientific community, clufg e.p.a.'s own agency -- including the e.p.a.'s own agency scientists who warned that this was just the tip of the iceberg if we don't keep global warming down 1.5-degrees celsius. the bottom line is the trump rescission rule would increase public health dangers and bring us to the brink of irreversible climate catastrophe. it is a trump e.p.a. action that my colleagues and i reject today

through the resolution before us. the methane rescission rule stated methane couldn't be regulated under the clean air act. we reject that. the methane rescission rule stated the e.p.a. couldn't regulate the entire oil and gas sector from wellhead to storage. we reject that. the methane rescission rule stated greenhouse gases couldn't be regulated. we reject that. the methane rescission rule also reversed e.p.a.'s long-standing position on what is required to regulate a pollutant, making it harder for e.p.a. to implement clean air and climate protections. we reject that as well. with approval of this resolution, though, the e.p.a. can and should still move forward to strengthen methane standards for the oil and gas sector in the future.

this is timely coming on the heels of president biden's climate commitment for nations to reduce emissions by 50% from 2005 levels by the end of this decade, by 2030. passing this resolution will be good for our health, passing this resolution will be good for our planet, and passing this resolution will be good for america's economy. and that's why so many states, so many environmental groups even a number of significant oil and gas support this resolution. joining over 60 environmental groups as well as 20 states attorney general, seven major oil and gas support this by reinstating requirements to -- reinstating requirements to control methane emissions from the environmental defense fund to shell, from the league of conservation voters to, b.p. from the national sources of

defense council to ecuador, there are different interests, that congress should reject and nullify the methane rescission rule. so why do a number of oil and gas want congress to reject the trump rule? restore existing regulations and pursue further regulations? they know the best way to boost growth in their sector and across the economy is to keep methane and other climate pollution in check. with unchecked methane releases in its operations, natural gas production and use become part of the climate problem, not a support of the solution, as we endeavor to drive toward lower carbon fuels. companies know where the global market is heading. they know regulations will support innovation and technology and employment in

their industry, bringing down emission reduction costs for everyone. i sometimes like to quote albert einstein who said, among other things, this, he said in adversity lies opportunity. think about that. in adversity lies opportunity. we can see that in the issue of methane pollution and climate change. it presents plenty of challenges, yes, that's true, but it also presents a remarkable opportunity. it's an opportunity for us to protect our planet, improve the air that we breathe and strengthen our economy. at the same time the product that the oil and gas is capturing can be sold to fuel more homes and businesses across the country. i want to say that again too. at the same time the product that the oil and gas is capturing can be sold to fuel more homes and businesses across the country.

that's why today i will gladly vote for this rescission -- for this resolution, rather, which reaffirms that the clean air act requires e.p.a. to take action to protect americans from dangerous pollution like methane. in passing this resolution today, congress is rejecting the trump rule baseless interpretation of the clean air act and in its place reinstating commonsense methane public health and private protections across the entire oil and gas sector. we're clearing a path for other protections from methane and other pollutants. as a senate we're making our intent clearer. the clean air act gives the e.p.a. the authority and mandate to establish methane emission standards, even stronger than the ones we