Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I want to talk about what is happening to our environment in South Florida as a result of sea level rise. We can put this into political terms of climate change, but that seems to be an issue some want to deny. So I want to talk about what you can't deny, and that is that the sea is rising, particularly as shown in South Florida. A year and a half ago, I brought the commerce committee to Miami Beach and brought a whole series of witnesses, one of whom was a NASA scientist who testified that measurements--now, this is not a forecast and this is not a projection; these are measurements of the level of the sea over the course of the last four decades--that the sea has risen in South Florida between 5 and 8 inches. The reason I am bringing this to the attention of the Senate today is that I just returned from Miami, where the latter part of September, the first part of October is the seasonal high tide, and the streets of Miami Beach are flooded. As a matter of fact, 2 years ago the mayor of Miami Beach, when he was campaigning for that position, did a campaign commercial in a kayak on Alton Road, which is on the westerly side of the barrier island, away from the ocean, and it was flooded. In the intervening 2 years, the city of Miami Beach, in cooperation with the local governments of all of the southeast Florida governments, has spent millions of dollars on big pumps so that when the tides come, they can get the water out of the streets.…”