Political Quotes

“today I rise in opposition to the resolution before us from my colleague from Alaska. Since 1970, the Environmental Protection Agency has been charged with responding to and identifying threats to our atmosphere, threats that affect public health, threats that affect weather, threats that affect climate. During this time, the EPA has identified and responded to many threats: sulfur dioxide; nitrogen dioxide; mercury, a potent neurotoxin; lead, lead that was poisoning the air our children breathed and affecting their mental development. In each of these cases, we had a force that said: We must respond. Now, today, we have before us a resolution which says: It does not matter that our public health is being affected. We are going to overturn the finding. We are going to call the science invalid. We are going to say politics, not science, should be the foundation of our policy. This, of course, is the attitude that was put forward year after year during the Bush administration: Take the scientific papers and shred them. Take the scientists and set their views aside. Today, we have a continuation of that Bush strategy of burying science. It is the wrong foundation for public policy to bury science. We should take and respond responsibly. We have now before us a finding that was developed actually by the scientists in the Bush administration.”