On the recordAugust 23, 2018
I thank my colleagues from Maine and Rhode Island who were here today to draw attention to the Trump administration's very dangerous proposal that takes a wrecking ball to the Clean Power Plan that has been put in place. It has been put in place to try to reduce the costs we are facing from climate pollution and carbon pollution. What we see in the Trump administration's plan is going to drag us backward. In fact, an analysis was done of their plan, and it will be worse than doing nothing at all. We know, and my colleagues have talked about this, that every day the American people are already paying the costs of carbon pollution in extreme weather events, whether those are forest fires, whether they are droughts that are wreaking havoc on crops, whether it is flooding. My colleague from Maryland, Senator Cardin, and I were just in Ellicott City, MD, 2 days ago, where within a 2-year period they have been hit by what are called 1,000-year floods because there is only supposed to be one-tenth of 1 percent of a chance that happens. Yet we have seen two of them in 2 years, causing loss of human life and incredible property damage. The cost of doing nothing is huge. That is why the previous administration adopted the Clean Power Plan. With this administration taking us backward, those costs of doing nothing are going to rise again.…
