Diana DeGette

If you are Type 1 diabetic and you take insulin, if you don't get your insulin, you die.

This really is a national crisis, as we keep hearing, and it is not going to be getting any better.

I was absolutely thrilled to see your request for $936 million towards a new accelerating environmental and economic justice initiative.

Do you think that this hurts the ability of the local neighbors to actually move forward in supporting their communities, when they see that the Government just doesn't even care?

Would you agree that underenforcement of environmental laws is a classic example of an environmental--of environmental injustice?

What I really can't understand is how not either of their witnesses or one of the Members is willing to talk about how we address cleanup of these environmental justice areas.

These neighborhoods are classic environmental justice communities. They suffer from highways going right through the middle, from railways, refineries, other historical polluters.

It is called 'Protection from Cumulative Emissions and Underenforcement of Environmental Law Act.' And that is my bill.

It will leave a stain on who we are as Americans since we would be exchanging the religious freedoms of tribal people for a promise of jobs and profit offered by a foreign mining interest.

We have to. We have to for Tom`s son, for those ten people who perished yesterday. We have to keep it up.

I hope that this--that this hearing will help bring some light and bring some changes to Texas.

And I want to thank Rep. Veasey, Rep. Fletcher for working with me to implement a number of the recommendations from our Climate Crisis Action Plan.

And I want to thank Representative Rice and others who have pointed out how Texas has dropped the ball.

I'm hoping, as we develop an infrastructure bill, we can start to think about how we can harden the grid because we know the weather is getting more extreme.

What do cities need to do to--and communities need to do--to sort of harden their preparation for these coming storms?

Any claim that this systemwide failure was caused primarily by the use of renewables is blatantly false.

The Texas grid must be designed with a full appreciation that climate change is real.

The magnitude of the damages was foreseeable and preventable.

We have to learn exactly what happened, why it happened, and what we need to do to make sure it doesn't happen again in Texas or anywhere else.

Climate change is here, and we need to recognize this reality by taking action to ensure our electric grids are designed with the resiliency and reliability needed in a climate-changed world.

I also want to thank the leadership of two of our colleagues, Representatives Fletcher and Veasey, who have been tireless advocates for their constituents in this time of crisis.

Adapting and confronting to a changing climate will not come cheap, and it will not come easily.

We need to accept this fact and prepare. We need to stop kicking the can down the road.

The key lesson from what happened in Texas is that extreme weather events are devastating and happening more frequently.

Last month an extreme weather event in Texas triggered a crisis of an enormous scale and took a staggering toll on the State.