Political Quotes

“I want to thank the distinguished leader for his statement. I, too, wish this were a bipartisan bill. I do. I wish it were a bipartisan bill. Unfortunately, as the ranking member of the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, I found out about this from the press, not from the chairman of the committee. I found out from the press about this bill. That is not how you pursue bipartisan legislation. If there were a true attempt and a true desire to do bipartisan legislation, certainly this would have been handled differently. Let me be clear, Mr. Chairman, I fully agree that the climate is changing. I agree that humans are contributing to that change. I agree that there is something that we need to do about this, and we need to be aggressive. As we heard from scientists just yesterday in the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, they have confirmed to us that the United States can eliminate all emissions, and we are still going to see warming. We are not going to see changes in the temperature if we eliminate all of our emissions. Mr. Chairman, China, right now, is the top emitter. They are emitting 80 percent more than the United States. As a matter of fact, Greenpeace found last year they are actually increasing their emissions. Here we are, the United States, for about the last 20 years, the largest absolute reduction in emissions of any country in the world. The Paris accord is fundamentally flawed. It is not the solution.…”