Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I rise today with two of our colleagues, Senator Ed Markey and Senator Jeff Merkley, to reflect on the 24th session of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change that concluded just this last weekend in the country of Poland. This important conference, which is better known as COP24, refers to Conference of Parties 24. I think they have been meeting for 24 years. They met there for 2 weeks as leaders from nearly 200 nations, working to reach an agreement on how our world will actually implement the Paris climate agreement. The stakes could not be higher. I am not one, as my colleagues know, given to hyperbole, but the future of our planet and the future of our children and grandchildren may well hang in the balance. Was it a positive step forward that the international community could come together and agree to meaningful action to combat climate change on a global scale by finally getting to implement the Paris Agreement? Yes, it was. Having said that, this agreement is not perfect, they know it, and we know it. No one is pretending that it is. It falls well short of the steps that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, determined just 1 month ago are needed to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change over the next decade. The entire world needs to do even more to address this problem.…”