We cannot wait for another 20 years to change our clean air laws and save lives.

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.

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…

But it gives people the flexibility to make that choice and ensure that we have both clean air and reliable power.

That is really striking.

That is why we introduced the Clean Air Act Amendments of 2010.

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.

I think that there are not many things that we agree on, but that would be one of them.

But we are glad that you could be with us today.

These are significant reductions that the EPA agrees will save more than 215,000 lives over a 15-year period.

Well, that is good. That is a pretty striking point.

One of the virtues of a trading system and using market, the highest market forces, to enable us to ratchet down emissions is we give flexibility, in this case to the utilities.

We believe that this is an important step forward and we look forward to working with you on it.

I want to very much thank Senator Alexander for being my partner in this endeavor now for years.

OK. Thanks very much.

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.

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'd like to first thank Senators Alexander and Klobuchar for working with me on S. 2995.

Now what if instead of having those plants all co-located together in one part of Sussex County they had one or two in Sussex County, another north in Kent County, and another one all the way further north in New Castle County.

Businesses do need certainty and predictability. They did then and they do now.

It is well past time to clean up the Nation's power plants, and please pass this life saving legislation.

That is the largest of the four, is it not?

As Senator Carper often says and said this morning, Delaware sits at the end of America's tailpipe.

I think we can figure that out, and we will just work on that.

We are not competitive with the rest of the world when we spend twice as much as the rest of the world for healthcare and do not get better results.