Congress Must Seize This Opportunity to End Climate Change
Floor Speech
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. CASTEN of Illinois. Mr. Speaker, in 1896 Svante Arrhenius hypothesized that carbon dioxide pollution would trigger a greenhouse effect.
Since then, we have emitted 1.4 trillion tons of carbon dioxide, and it has gotten hotter.
In 1987, the Reagan administration crafted the Montreal Protocol to close the ozone hole. It used market tools to solve environmental problems, and it worked.
The Kyoto Protocol was supposed to apply that logic to carbon dioxide. But as many of you know, we then decided to just go collectively crazy. Scientific truths got politicized. Crackpot theories got weaponized. Meanwhile, it got hotter.
Today, the Select Committee on the Climate Crisis will release a comprehensive report with a roadmap to turn this ship around. It provides policy recommendations to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by almost 90 percent, save our country $9 trillion, and save 62,000 lives per year by 2050.
It goes further than that. It identifies negative emission tools to take us back to the sustainable carbon dioxide levels we had in 1985. 1985 by the way, is that point in history where prior to that point we had emitted 50 percent of all the CO
I urge my colleagues to seize this opportunity. This is an opportunity to grow the economy and to protect the environment, but more importantly, it is an opportunity to tell your children that when the times called on you to act, you rose to that challenge.
Please. Seize this opportunity.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source