William Tauzin: “If the gentleman will continue to yield, I think it was Barbara Walters and Hugh Downs who did one of their 20/20 shows…”

“If the gentleman will continue to yield, I think it was Barbara Walters and Hugh Downs who did one of their 20/20 shows and interviewed people in California who lost their homes to the fires not too long ago. And who lost them because they were forbidden to do what in previous years they had been ordered to do, which was to disc around their homes the brush and the bushes that were a cause of these brush fires. They were not allowed to do it. In fact, they were forbidden to do it because of the Endangered Species Act suddenly came along and protected a thing called a Kangaroo Rat. To homeowners who violated the law and disced around their homes, they saved their homes. Others who followed the law did not protect their homes and lost them. That kind of cost is real to us in our society. The people in the Northwest who lost their jobs in the mills to the Spotted Owl controversy, the fishermen in the Gulf of Mexico who lost their fishing boats, some committed suicide over the fact they could not pay the bills anymore because they were required to pull a tab in their net in order to comply with the EPA regulation. Those are real costs in our society. We ought to know these costs. We ought to understand the risk, when we go about providing necessary environmental protections in our society. I wish you good fortune in this effort.”