Frank Lautenberg

It is essential that we take the danger posed by tired truck drivers seriously.

The Obama Administration has made the right move by initiating a new rulemaking on driver hours.

SHIPA will stop the relentless cycle of demands and pressure imposed on the states by the trucking interests for increased tractor-trailer lengths.

I pointed out that fatalities occur each and every day. That is common knowledge.

They are supposed to. We have to watch them all.

The NTSB has found that fatigue is a primary factor in 30 to 40 percent of large truck crashes.

[e]very year for the past decade, nearly, 5,000 people died and 125,000 were injured in crashes with a large truck. That's nearly 14 people a day, or 14 families torn apart by horrible, and often avoidable accidents.

When this process is over, we cannot wind up with the same flawed regulations that the last Administration designed.

We need to close that loophole and block these long, overweight trucks from using our national highway system.

Thanks, everybody, for being here. Thank you, Senator Thune, for being here.

It is hard to accept a condition that threatens people on the road when we can do something about it.

Frankly, our responsibility is to get to the end of the game, and that is to keep the trucking industry going.

Thank you for your testimony.

We have got to improve the pace with which the Senate moves its legislative agenda.

The--we're not fishing families, but we are fish-eating people, and I thank you all for your testimony.

Yes, but do we feel the heat? Do we see this--the reality of shells being too soft or even transparent in places?

Don't underestimate your message, because it comes from the gut, and that's the kind of thing that we have to hear.

We cannot sit on our hands while carbon pollution continues to spew from trucks, cars, power plants.

Despite that, our oceans are under assault--water pollution, climate change, offshore drilling--all pose severe threat to their future.

In fact, our coast is a $50-billion-a-year economic powerhouse that's responsible for one out of every six jobs in the State of New Jersey.

That's part A. And part B----

One the major ones is the acidification of the oceans and its effect on coral, coral being kind of the home place that fish can find refuge and procreate.

And that's why I wrote the Federal Ocean Acidification Research and Monitoring Act.

Our oceans cover, as we know, 70 percent of the Earth's surface.

Our oceans generate more income for our economy, the U.S. economy, than the entire agricultural sector.