The Public Record
Tom Carper is an American politician currently serving as the senior United States senator from Delaware, a position he has held since January 3, 2001. A member of the Democratic Party, Carper has focused on various issues including healthcare, environmental protection, and fiscal responsibility throughout his career. He previously served as the Governor of Delaware from January 21, 1993, to January 2, 2001, and as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from January 3, 1983, to January 21, 1993.
Secretary O'Mara is quite familiar with the large coal-fired plant, actually four plants, that we have in the southeastern part of Delaware at the Indian River Inlet and has been very actively involved with NRG, the utility, to cause them…
We appreciate your leadership and your energy, the energy that you have brought to Delaware and clean energy, clean energy to our environment into our economy.
Finally, I would like to mention briefly the 53 percent nationwide reduction in NOx. This is an important step forward.
As Senator Carper has said, air pollutants do not recognize State boundaries.
As Senator Carper often says and said this morning, Delaware sits at the end of America's tailpipe.
I have been joined at the hip with this man over here, George Voinovich. I have been drafting on him, as we say in NASCAR, drafting on him on diesel emissions for a long time, and together we have done great work.
We will not support, in fact, we will vigorously oppose any changes that would undermine the enforcement of the new Source Review Program or other provisions of the Clean Air Act.
It is well past time to clean up the Nation's power plants, and please pass this life saving legislation.
It was great to have your here, and we look forward to working with you going forward in what you described as a mutually reinforcing partnership.
How do we strengthen our mission standards, how to reduce the emissions of unhealthy substances into our air, and at the same time not impede our economic growth?
I think that there are not many things that we agree on, but that would be one of them.
I would just--I do not think you were here when we said this, but Senator Voinovich and I worked on this for, I think, for about 4 years during the first part of the Bush administration.
I think Senator Carper is right in pursuing legislation here to deal with these three pollutants.
I find it very, very helpful that we have national policies established by Congress in this area.
I think what you said is our efforts--EPA and our legislative efforts--our efforts will be mutually reinforcing in cleaning up our air, which is very encouraging to me.
We say, for example, in our legislation, we want to see mercury emissions reduced by 90 percent by a date certain.
One of the virtues of having to set some targets out there, to say these are our mission's targets, is it provides, we hope, the kind of certainty that we are looking for.
It is not one size fits all. One size does not fit all. But we will let market forces help guide that.
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