Political Quotes

“We support the amendment because we think it is important to have a national risk communication strategy. We get troubled and we get confused in this debate when we are going to declare 7,866 chemicals toxic without doing the basic science. Hopefully, as we move this forward, I believe we are going to find some of the 7,866 that are safe, so when we do a risk advisory, we are going to be able to say: These are bad; these are okay. What the bill does is just say they are all bad, and we don't have any science to prove that. I think we are close on PFOA, and we are close to that on PFOS. Again, we could have moved in a bipartisan manner to address those. We didn't do that. But we would like, as the EPA considers this and informing the public, that they look at hazard identification, exposure assessment, and a risk characterization. So risk is a combination of time and exposure over a period of time. You can talk to toxicologists. That is what they do. That was the glue that held the TSCA bill together was the focus on using science. Again, as you have heard tonight and you will hear tomorrow, our problem is that we are rushing legislation before we are allowing the science to truly evaluate this, and we are classifying, currently, all 7,866 as hazardous, which I don't believe they are. We have never, in the history of this Republic, under the Superfund Act, legislatively banned a chemical. We have always allowed scientific process.…”