David Obey: “I offer this amendment simply to have an opportunity to comment on what has just transpired on the House floor. My great…”

“I offer this amendment simply to have an opportunity to comment on what has just transpired on the House floor. My great mentor and friend through most of my public life has been Gaylord Nelson, the founder of Earth Day, and perhaps the greatest environmentalist who ever served in the United States Senate. Just before he died, I had my last conversation with him about environmental issues, and he made quite clear that he thought the greatest environmental threat to mankind over the next 100 years was the issue of global warming. And it is time this Congress face up to that fact and does something about it. I don't know what it takes to have this government get off its you- know-what and start dealing with the most critical environmental problem that confronts the entire planet. If we just take a look at a few of the pieces of evidence that are lying all around: core drillings in glaciers around the world enable us to study bubbles that go back as far as 300,000 years, and we see that we have a higher concentration of carbon dioxide than we have had in the known history of the planet. Since 1970, the duration and intensity of hurricanes has increased by 50 percent, the number of tornados in this country has now reached the highest number in recorded history, some 1,700 in one year. Two hundred western cities have broken heat records in the past 2 years. Glaciers, which are serving really as the proverbial canaries in the mines, are trying to tell us something.…”