The rules under assault today will improve the health of millions of Americans.

There is a simple reason. Nobody in that room had any skin in the game.

The second rule, EPA's cross-state air pollution rule, is also a tremendous victory for public health.

I have a hard time reconciling those representations with the company's decision to file for bankruptcy 1 month later.

Well, who would be against such a thing? Well, I will tell you who would be. Entrenched fossil fuel industry wouldn’t like this.

That kind of incendiary language has no place in this.

I disagree vehemently, however, with the policy conclusions my Republican colleagues have already drawn.

I understand, we have been under federal consent decrees and we can't get out from under them.

No one wants to go and invest in the market in a solar energy, wind power, anything else, unless they know it is really going to return the investment and give them a profit.

These are serious allegations. Mr. Stearns said the administration gives 'some of this money out to people who are either contributors or strong supporters.'

I fully agree with him and I look forward to working with him to reduce some of the rhetoric.

The combination of those two regulations would also be a substantial increase in costs, in some places as much as 23 percent increase in the cost of electricity prices.

I was taken aback by the figure that between 1995 and 2010 the share of photovoltaic cells and panels manufactured in the United States dropped from 40 percent to just 6 percent.

I don't think we ought to use this failure of this particular guarantee to discredit was it an important loan guarantee in order to move to be able to compete in this area with China and to move our country away from dependence on fossil…

Today, we are holding a hearing on the loan guarantee provided by the Department of Energy in 2009 to Solyndra.

Each year, this rule will prevent up to 34,000 premature deaths.

Given the bankruptcy of Solyndra and the dollars now at risk, we have an obligation to the taxpayer to investigate the transaction thoroughly.

I hope you will not vote for these bills, but if members have already decided to do so, I respectfully appeal to your sense of honesty and decency to do at least this: please explain clearly to your constituents, to the church…

The bills we consider today would block and indefinitely delay EPA's efforts to make good on a 40-year-old promise to the American people that toxic air pollutants will be controlled.

The Administration has major concerns with these two bills. They are a clear attempt to roll back public health protections.

Let me emphasize in the strongest possible terms that these bills are not mere '15-month delays of the rules as EPA itself has requested' as some have cast this legislation.

I would like to see some of those figures scrutinized carefully.

Cancer, birth defects, brain damage--we have long known that toxic air pollutants such as mercury, arsenic, dioxin, lead, and PCBs can cause these serious health effects.

EPA asked the court to allow them until April 2012 to issue the boiler rules.

Our country is struggling, and to say that the environmental rules are responsible, how could that be if these rules have not yet been in effect?