John Delaney: “I thank my colleague for his leadership on this issue, for organizing our discussion here today, and for his leadership…”

“I thank my colleague for his leadership on this issue, for organizing our discussion here today, and for his leadership on so many other important issues here in the Congress, and I like the way he introduced this next segment of our discussions around economic policy because I will spend a little bit of time on that. Mr. Speaker, I am going to start by talking about probabilities and severities--because I think it is important to think about that when we are thinking about climate change--and then move into some market-based solutions that I think work very well with some of the EPA's recent guidance, which I am very supportive of. Let's start with the view of what experts think of this issue. It is estimated that 97 percent of the serious climate scientists in the world believe that climate change is occurring and that human behavior is contributing to this. A friend of mine had a very good analogy for this when he said: If you took your child to 100 physicians and 97 of those physicians said that your child had a condition that needed to be treated, would you wait to get the last three? Or would you act on the advice of 97 percent of the physicians? That is effectively what we have with respect to the advice that serious climate scientists have with respect to the two questions as to whether is climate change happening and is human behavior contributing to it.…”