Political Quotes

“while the chairman goes about the parliamentary task of organizing a sufficient second on the national endowment bill, I do wish to describe some of the changes our coastal and Great Lakes States are seeing and need to deal with. Probably the most obvious of all are the storms we have been seeing-- the unprecedented and extreme storms we have been seeing--along our coasts. Whether it was Hurricane Katrina or Superstorm Sandy, we have seen unprecedented damage done at the merger of land and sea, where driven by these powerful storms the sea can wreak such havoc on the land. But it goes well beyond the damage of extreme storms. If we go out into the Gulf of Maine, we can see the cod catch, which is a historic fishery going back centuries, has now collapsed to the point where the Draconian measures that must be applied to that fishery actually risk extinguishing the fishing industry for cod in some of our Northeastern States. We can move down the coast to the Carolinas, where highway departments are raising the bridges out to the Outer Banks in order to prepare for higher seas and stronger storm surges. We can go further south, to the Florida coast, where in some parts of that ocean--the Caribbean ocean nearby--as little as 10 percent of the coral remains alive. That is actually a pretty big industry for Florida.…”