Political Quotes

“Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to the gentleman's amendment. It flies in the face of 97 percent of the world's scientists who agree that climate-warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activities and could impose significant human and economic costs on societies, including ours. This amendment requires the Department of Energy to assume that carbon pollution isn't harmful and that climate change won't cost a thing. That is nothing but fantasy. The Republicans, in general, don't seem to trust the scientists, and I would hope that they would listen to the economists and business leaders ringing alarm bells about the potential costs of unmitigated climate change. Standard & Poor's rating services recently released a report warning that climate change will put downward pressure on the sovereign credit ratings of countries around the world. They wrote: Climate change is likely to be one of the global megatrends impacting sovereign creditworthiness, in most cases, negatively. For example, Standard & Poor's concludes that: Extreme weather events, especially floods, can be expected to increasingly take a toll on a country's infrastructure and, thus, productivity. Standard & Poor's also warned that fiscal performance will decline as government budgets come under increased stress from climate-induced emergency support and infrastructure reconstruction costs. We have had a little bit of that in our country already.…”