On the recordMarch 30, 2011
I need to tell the American people and my colleagues who have not been following this important debate on a very good bill, I am so grateful to the Senator from Louisiana, Ms. Landrieu, for this bill. Unfortunately, there has been an amendment that was attached to this bill on the very first day which would stop the Environmental Protection Agency forever from enforcing the Clean Air Act as it relates to carbon pollution. This is a first of a kind. It has never been done. It is essentially a repeal of the Clean Air Act as it involves one particular pollutant, carbon, which has been found to be an endangerment to our people. The EPA did not wake up one day and say: We think carbon is dangerous. No; the scientists in both the Bush administration and Obama administration found out carbon is a dangerous pollutant, dangerous to the health of our families. So EPA, in what is I think a very solid way, has started to prepare to regulate carbon. They have done it in a way that has said they are not going after farms, they are not going after small business, they are going after the biggest polluters in the country. Guess what. The friends of those polluters, right in this Senate Chamber, have decided--and they already did it in the House, the new Republican majority--they are going to stop EPA in its tracks.…





