During a House Natural Resources Committee hearing prior to the congressional recess, Rep. Teresa Leger Fernandez (D-NM) spoke about Republican attacks on NEPA.
00:00Chair recognizes the gentlelady from New Mexico, Ms. Ledger Fernandez, for five minutes.
00:04Thank you, Mr. Chairman. You know, basically, the Republican attack on NEPA is part of their
00:12larger effort to dictate from D.C. what should be happening locally. They want to dictate from D.C.
00:19their desire for more fossil fuel projects, even though the American public wants more
00:25renewable energy to meet America's growing energy demands. Their changes to NEPA would destroy
00:32community input. Remember, NEPA is indeed a process built. It encourages and requires coordination
00:40with tribes, local communities, scientists, environmentalists, conservations, but also,
00:46in my district, farmers and ranchers. Before you undertake projects that could destroy sacred sites,
00:53pollute your water or ruin your farm or a secure system. And those are the, that's the kind of
01:02input we want to encourage. As Mr. Morgan just testified, the local community has a lot of great
01:11ideas and we want to be able to input them. They enter into negotiations as part of this process.
01:16But what Republicans are doing is eliminating the input from the local communities in negotiations.
01:26Today's hearing is no different than last night's hearing before the Rules Committee,
01:30where Republicans were proposing three bills to overturn resource management plans. In Alaska,
01:36it was a resource management plan that had been worked out over years through lots of negotiation,
01:42years of negotiation, right? Years of negotiation and give and take on what should we have in this
01:46resource management plan, local import, local negotiations, dictating from DC. The Rules Committee
01:54was considering a bill that seven days after it was introduced, they were going to overturn that resource
02:00management plan. Now that bill isn't going to be heard because Democrats had a motion to require
02:09the disclosure of the Epstein files. That would have been heard in rules. But Republicans are so afraid
02:16of voting to release the Epstein files that they canceled the rule. There was no rule issued and there will
02:25not be a vote on those three bills this week. Basically, their fear of voting on the Epstein files shut down
02:34the rules committee and the regular order before this house. That's how afraid they are of the Epstein files.
02:42And in some ways, it seems that they are also afraid of community input.
02:48So, you know, we've talked a little bit on this committee about how the fact that there has been progress made, you know,
02:56response times are about basically in half, but they're understaffing everything. And if you understaff,
03:00in New Mexico, in my region, there is nobody to actually review the permits. That's going to put
03:07everything back even further. But Mr. Hergott, I heard you state earlier that this committee should
03:13codify the seven counties decision to clarify that environmental impact statements should only
03:18include proximal impacts and impacts that directly result from a project's activity. So do you agree that
03:26greenhouse gas emissions that drive climate change are a direct result of producing and transporting
03:32fossil fuels? I think that NEPA requires that you look at direct and indirect impacts based on what
03:37the statute say and currently that is not required. So the question was, do you agree that fossil fuels,
03:45the transportation, the development and the burning of fossil fuels drives climate change? That was the
03:51question. I I'm not a scientist to make that determination. But I will tell you, it does
03:56increase emissions. It doesn't it reduces emissions on rail. But that's not the substance of making a
04:02substantive decision about the science of an emission or the amount of a discharge is for is for the the
04:09federal practitioners that are actually pushing the substantive values through the process where I am
04:15talking about is. So the question was whether fossil fuel development emission transportation and burning
04:21increase addresses climate change? It appears you're trying to not answer the question.
04:25No, it increases CO2 and pollutants. It absolutely does. It does. It does. It does, right? And so then we should include that in this and it's not included in this NECA project.
04:34That makes a jump to anthropogenic climate change and oscillations in the environment and all sorts of things that are not a direct location of that project. So unless you change the rule about cumulative impacts and global climate emissions.
04:43Well then we should change the rule because this is something that is impacting everybody, especially if you're in a drought prone area where we rather have disasters.
04:50The last question I wanted to ask was to Mr. Morgan was how can the United States be an energy dominant country if we make it harder to build wind and solar in this country?
05:02We can't.
05:03My time is, I would follow up, but my time is expired and so I yield back.
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