Bill Clinton: “Ladies and gentlemen, first let me thank you all for being here and thank the Vice President, the Cabinet, our Science…”

“Ladies and gentlemen, first let me thank you all for being here and thank the Vice President, the Cabinet, our Science Adviser, Katie McGinty, and others who worked so hard on this policy. If I might begin by just observing, I was looking at the clouds hoping we didn't have too much of a climate change this morning before the event could unfold. This is an issue which has been of great concern to me for a long time. When I decided to seek this office back in 1991, I did it after having spent more than a decade as a Governor deeply frustrated by what seemed to me too often to be inevitable, persistent, aggravating conflicts between the impulse to promote economic opportunity for the people that I represented and the clear obligation, the moral obligation, on all of us to try to preserve this planet that we all share. And anyone with eyes to see could look down the road and recognize that, even with imperfect scientific knowledge, at some point the impulse to give people something to do would have to be reconciled with the obligation to preserve the planet we all share and that if there were ways through the use of technology and partnerships and ingenuity to actually enhance economic opportunities while preserving the planet, how much better off we would all be. That is what we have sought to do in this administration.…”