Chellie Pingree: “This is my experience: Climate change deniers, the people who want to just support the fossil-fuel industry, continually…”

“This is my experience: Climate change deniers, the people who want to just support the fossil-fuel industry, continually use misinformation, disinformation, social media memes, all kinds of things to argue their point, but the ultimate challenge here is we have an overdependence on fossil fuels. The use of fossil fuels is contributing to too much CO<INF>2</INF> in the atmosphere, which has created this extreme weather that we now have to live through and experience, whether it is the heat, flooding, extreme storms, whatever it is. If we care about the future of our planet, if we truly believe that it is our job as elected officials to protect the American public, we can't close our eyes to these impacts of climate change, so arguing about where things are manufactured or how they are disposed is a way of avoiding the fact that we have to move into renewable energy, and that is our challenge today. Of course, we don't want to use things that are strictly manufactured in China. That is why we passed the IRA, to put more domestic investment in things like solar panels and batteries and the things that we desperately need. As to this question about end-of-life solar panels, I wholeheartedly agree, we should recycle as much as we possibly can of everything that we are using in this country. Let me just read this little fact about that: ``Waste from end-of-life solar panels presents opportunities to recover valuable materials and create jobs through recycling.…”