Political Quotes

“Madam Speaker, I would like to begin by saying that the issue of climate change is very personal to me. I have a 5- and a 7-year-old at home, and like any parent, there is a lot that I worry about for their future. One of the things I worry most about is the planet that we are going to leave behind for them and for their future children. The path we are on right now leads to a grim future for our planet. We have burned fossil fuels like coal and oil at unsustainable rates, releasing extraordinary amounts of greenhouse gas emissions into the air. We have destroyed forests and other carbon sinks around the world that previously absorbed some of those emissions. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a collection of 1,300 independent scientific experts from countries all over the world, concluded there is a more than 95 percent probability that human activities over the past 50 years have warmed our planet. As a result, the last 5 years were the hottest ever recorded, according to the Trump administration's own weather and space agencies. Over the past century, average global temperatures have increased steadily. Sixteen of the last 17 years have been the warmest ever recorded by human observations. In my home State of California, the indicators of our rapidly changing climate are unmistakable. Our summers are hotter, our droughts are more severe, and our land is drier, creating fuel for year-round wildfires that have wiped out entire communities.…”