On the recordMarch 29, 2017
Mr. Speaker, I thank my distinguished friend from Massachusetts, and I also thank his able staff for the incredible work they are doing. Mr. Speaker, I want to talk about the bill before us, the EPA Science Advisory Board, but also I want to talk about Mr. McGovern's amendment on Russia. They actually are linked because the last time a great power decided to deny science-based policy and to actually dictate politically what was science and what wasn't was Stalin's Soviet Russia. A famous scientist named Lysenko turned out to be a fraud and a con artist. But for 30 years, his thinking dominated Soviet science to the detriment of the Soviet people. It actually led to a famine in Ukraine, killing millions of people because he insisted on his political brand of agricultural science, which wasn't science at all. My friend from Massachusetts I think is wrong when he asks: What is the emergency? I don't think he understands that, from the Republican point of view, science mixed with public policy is an emergency. We have to do something about it. The world was created 4,273 years ago and carbon dating is a fraud. As your coastal areas are under water, think about the comfort of Republican philosophy: it is just a theory, and disputable at that. By the way, let's defund any research on it. Let's back out of our commitments.…





