On the recordJune 25, 2013
I say to Senator Whitehouse, one of the things the Senator and I know--and we have been asking for this and talking about this--we need Presidential leadership. We saw that today. The speech that was given here in Washington really detailed a lot of the important work that needs to be done. We both serve on the Environment and Public Works Committee. We know how important it is to get an EPA Administrator in place and to move forward with the greenhouse gas regulations the Supreme Court has now said we can move on. So this is a big day, and I think there are many of us in the Senate who are willing to work on a bipartisan basis. We hope a lot of our Republican friends will step forward and see that there is a space here to talk about climate, to try to work with each other. I applaud the President for what he did today, how specific he was in terms of the EPA and greenhouse gases, how specific he was about policies throughout the government. I wanted to, in what is left of my 5 minutes, talk a little bit about the Southwest. Sheldon Whitehouse and the others have talked about their regions of the country, but really what we are talking about in the Southwest is that from the climate models--just business as usual that we see--if the temperatures go up 1 degree in other places in the United States, it is double that in the Southwest.…
