Political Quotes

“Mr. President, today I rise to address the important urgency of addressing climate change. Across the country, we are seeing the impacts of the warmer climate, and it is having devastating consequences on our forests, on our farming, on our fishing, and on our urban populations. Years ago, people talked about what we might see if we continued to burn fossil fuels and continued to put carbon dioxide into the air, but no longer do we have to talk about what we might see, because it is here. The facts are on the ground right now. We can look at my home State of Oregon. In Oregon, we have the challenge of forest fire seasons that are longer by several months than they were just decades ago. We have the challenge of warmer winters, resulting in pine beetles doing more damage to our trees. The fact that we have lower snowpacks in the Cascade Mountains means warmer trout streams and less water for irrigation. We have had the worst-ever droughts in the Klamath Basin in the past 15 years. Over on the coast, we have a big impact on oysters. Because we have burned so much in fossil fuels to create so much carbon dioxide that has been absorbed by the oceans and turned into carbonic acid, the oceans have acidified. They are 30 percent more acidic than they were 150 years ago, meaning our oysters are having trouble reaching out and pulling the molecules out of the water to form a shell. In fact, it takes so much energy to do so that they are dying. That is what is happening.…”