Republican Rep. August Pfluger introduced a new bill Friday that would prevent the president from banning fracking nationally without the consent of Congress. [emphasis, links added]
Pfluger’s “Protecting American Energy Production Act” would explicitly require an act of Congress to impose a fracking moratorium and prevent the president from doing so directly.
Several Democrats have called for a de facto or de jure fracking moratorium, including Vice President Kamala Harris as she ran for the presidency in the 2020 election cycle.
“It is the sense of Congress that States should maintain primacy for the regulation of hydraulic fracturing for oil and natural gas production on State and private lands,” the bill reads.
“Notwithstanding any other provision of law, the President may not declare a moratorium on the use of hydraulic fracturing unless such moratorium is authorized by an Act of Congress.”
Some blue states — including New York and California — have passed legislation or taken other action to crack down hard on fracking.
Numerous well-funded environmentalist organizations have also advocated for a fracking ban for years.
“The Biden Administration has spent the last four years attacking the American energy industry, most recently attempting to shut it down by banning almost all new U.S. offshore drilling projects,” Pfluger said in a statement.
“It will be up to Republicans and President Trump to reestablish American energy independence and dominance in the 119th Congress. This is why my first piece of legislation in the 119th Congress will protect the American energy industry and consumers from the federal government.”
More broadly, President Joe Biden took a number of actions to reduce fossil fuel production over the course of his one term in office.
Some of his key policy decisions include banning new oil and gas leasing across 625 million acres of federally controlled waters, a failed 2021 attempt to bar new oil and gas leasing on federal lands, and freezing new export permits for liquefied natural gas for nearly a year.
Read rest at Daily Caller
Time to stop the President from Blocking Fossil Fuels just to appease those idiots from Greenpeace and the NRDC
This law should be expanded to require presidents to get Congressional approval to restrict not just fracking but drilling, whether on land or in the ocean, and include federally owned (read: taxpayer owned) lands.
Hmmm. The good Congressman replaced one falsehood—that the President can prohibit fracking without congressional approval—with another falsehood—that Congress can choose to prevent fracking or permit it. There is simply NO Constitutional prerogative (Article I, Section 8) granting ANY branch of the federal government, including the bureaucracy, the legal authority to interfere in the rights of private citizens to use their own private property in the way they see fit. We need to get away from this evil notion that the federal government has, by default, unlimited powers except for those explicitly prohibited by the Constitution, and return to the Founder’s intention, that the federal government has, by default, no powers except for those explicitly enumerated in the Constitution. Stop promoting the false premise of the Swamp!