Angus King

This has been a very informative hearing, and I thank you for your work and look forward to continuing to work on this problem with you.

The cheapest forest fire of all is the one that doesn't occur.

I just think if you could isolate... it would be important, again, to either verify what my foresters in Maine from the private sector have been telling me for years or not.

I would like to see some data that will either verify that or refute it.

I am not advocating higher prices for water, but it seems to me that is an inevitability as we go to different technologies.

Well, as demand increases and supplies either stay constant or dwindle, that is going to be a logical outcome.

If gasoline were $.20 a gallon we would all be driving Humvees or something.

The amount of fresh water remains constant.

Resilience equals diversification, and I think desal is an important part, piece of that.

It is hard to beat free. It comes out of the sky.

What can we do in federal policy to help in the areas that you are working on, whether it is tax policy, incentives or regulation?

But for the record, if you could supply that, I would like to see a comparison of how tax policy, grant policy and regulatory policy affects the two forks of the solution.

I would be interested, if you could supply this for the record, in a comparison between buying a filtration plant and protecting naturally.

Are there differences in abilities to finance those two solutions?

We do know, however, that reuse might fill as much as 50 percent of our future growth projections.

Can we just continue to absorb growing population in Phoenix and Los Angeles?

I would say we also need better data to make better policy, and I find that very concerning for all of the work that we are doing here.

What bothers me is that the budget that was recently submitted by the Administration cuts the NOAA budget by 16 percent, cuts research in NOAA by 32 percent and even cuts the National Weather Service by 6 percent.

Even in Maine we are not immune to the impacts of a fragile water supply due to drought conditions.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you to our expert witnesses who are joining us this morning, especially my constituent from Maine.

The nub of this seems to be the attorney general's recusing himself early on in his tenure.

Nobody in our country is above the law.

I think it's a fair question who he was consulting with.

Firing of Robert Mueller is not something that could be just said, OK, we're going to move on from here.

There was no detail, there was no explanation. There was no background, no sources.