Political Quotes

“I thank the gentleman from Florida for his remarks. Again, Mr. Speaker, I would like to just talk about this word denial that we hear thrown around a lot in this debate. There has been no denial, Mr. Speaker, of the benefits that humanity has enjoyed because of fossil fuel use over the last decades. Again, I am going to pull up this chart here. The benefits are clear. The lower left graph is GDP per person in the world. It has skyrocketed, coincidentally, with the increase of energy use. But life expectancy has skyrocketed over the last 200 years, again, coincident with increased energy use, access to reliable, clean energy. It is no wonder. You consider how energy is deployed. Take water, for example. The tremendous progress that we have made with clean water and pumping stations and ways to pull water in and to clean it, that is all done using fossil fuel-based energy, whether it is coal, gas, oil. There has been a tremendous success over the last 200 years as humanity has looked for energy and used fossil fuels-based energy products. Mr. Speaker, if President Obama and the unelected Federal bureaucrats at EPA had installed today's regulatory regime in the 19th century, my district and this country would look vastly different. Access to reliable, affordable energy has improved the quality of life of people wherever it is available, which is why the Clean Power Plan is so deeply misguided.…”