Alan Lowenthal

I appreciate your testimony highlighting the increasing cybersecurity risk to our maritime transportation system.

Well, the FAA has no specific standard.

The JATR report found that there were no Federal criteria for determining 'when the core attributes of an existing design make it fundamentally incapable of supporting the safety advancements introduced by the latest amendments to…

This is all about you, the people. I can't imagine what you are going through, but I am so glad you are here to keep us focused that it is all about the people who have been impacted.

Plastics are also making climate change worse.

Last year I witnessed the impacts of plastic pollution on wildlife in Antarctica, one of the few places on earth that has been relatively untouched by human activity.

The Subcommittee on Water, Oceans and Wildlife will come to order.

So, in terms of a contribution to the global plastic quantity of waste, the 6.4 million that I mentioned--or billion, excuse me--we are a major contributor.

Plastic production is an environmental justice issue too.

An estimated 8 million metric tons of plastic enter the oceans each year at a rate of about one garbage truck per minute.

Certainly, single-use plastics have made life easier. But these materials come at a much higher cost than many would like to admit.

The bottom line is this: We need to do more, we need to look at a broader range of solutions.

It is imperative that the companies that manufacture and sell these products take ownership of their environmental impacts.

The global life cycle greenhouse gas emissions from conventional plastics which were produced in 2015 were 1.8 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent

In late 1965, a C-123 transport was shot down over Vietnam. The flight's four American crewmen were identified and their remains returned home. The 81 South Vietnamese soldiers also on board were never identified, their remains never…

We think that runs counter to the promise of public transit, which creates a lot of good jobs in our communities, that supports other workers to get to their place of employment.

My staff went through all of those, and roughly 2,700 pages were completely unrelated to what we asked.

We are talking about a study that was halfway completed and got canceled abruptly.

I want to ask you about the renewal of the mining leases right next to the Boundary Waters Wilderness in Minnesota.

We would like to see the un-redacted pages, or an explanation of why they are being redacted.

A lot of the pages that we got looked like this--look at Slide 2. That doesn't make any sense.

Well, let's just talk about that. Those 349 documents you say you have responded with--and we received that disk on Friday of these--what you are saying are the 349 different documents--we had 348, you say 349, we will accept your…

You now have--you see these. Can you respond by next week with the un-redacted documents, or provide a specific explanation why it was redacted?

But I would like to say--this is my time--that a simpler interpretation may be that the Administration wanted the leases renewed, regardless of the history, the law, and common sense.

I appreciate your taking the time to be here today. I am especially pleased because I have had a question that I have wanted to ask you now for almost 2 years.