Clean Air Act
Floor Speech
Mr. QUIGLEY. Well, I want to thank you so much for having me. I want to thank my colleague from New York for his efforts and everyone who's here tonight toward this end. This issue is critical not just to our health, our Nation's health, but also to our country's national security and our economy. Because I rise today to protect the integrity of all things of science because it is science that these facts and figures that have led hundreds of scientists to confirm that global warming is real. It is this science that led the Supreme Court through jurisprudence to rule that the EPA does in fact have the authority to regulate greenhouse gases. And it is this science that led the Congress to pass the Clean Air Act, the act which designated the EPA as the body charged with overseeing, adapting, and implementing these regulations.
In the coming months, the EPA will begin regulating greenhouse gases from certain emitters for the first time. These regulations have become hugely controversial and, sadly, political. These rules combat man-made climate change--man-made climate change that is melting our polar ice caps, that is raising the level of our oceans, and that is modifying our seasonal temperatures; man-made climate change that is altering the duration of our growing season, that is flooding parts of the world and causing multi-year droughts on others; man-made climate change that is allowing particulate matters to infiltrate our children's lungs, making them suffer from lifelong asthma and making us die earlier.
But some would argue these rules, these new regulations, are burdensome; that they kill jobs, they imperil economic recovery, they are nonsensical, they aren't pragmatic. That is nonsensical.
Let's take EPA's proposed rule regarding toxic emission from industrial boilers, a seemingly innocuous rule, right? Wrong. This rule called for the cleanup of units that burn fuel onsite to provide electricity and heat. This action, this rule, would cut mercury particulate matter, carbon monoxide, and acid gases by requiring facilities to install equipment to clean up these toxic emissions. This so-called ``job-killing rule'' would, as predicted, save from 2,000 to 5,000 lives each year. The need to crack down on greenhouse gases is based on sound science, the results of hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific studies that say that global warming is real and that man contributes to it.
And if you're keeping score at home, there are zero peer-reviewed scientific studies that say that global warming is not real and that man does not contribute to it. But, more than that, the need to crack down on greenhouse gas emissions, the need to give EPA the tools to do its duty as mandated by Congress and deemed their responsibility by the Supreme Court. This issue certainly is lethal. It kills people. And my friends who oppose this radical fight against global warming, you can't work if you're dead.
December 31, 2010, marked the 40th anniversary of the Clean Air Act. The Clean Air Act has saved the lives of over 160,000 people, as conservatively estimated by the EPA. This issue then is a public health issue.
Chicago is my hometown. It is in the midst of a public health crisis. We are the morbidity and mortality capital of the United States for asthma. Having two children who face this ailment, it strikes near and dear to home. We are dealing with skyrocketing rates of death due to asthma, but we're not the only city with this problem. A report released by the American Lung Association reported nearly 60 percent of Americans live in areas where air pollution has reached unhealthy levels that can and does make people sick.
Yet we are standing here on the House floor arguing against job preserving measures, measures that will keep us alive and able to work, measures that will create jobs in clean and green industrial areas.
As Al Gore said in 2005, ``It is now clear that we face a deepening global climate crisis that requires us to act boldly, quickly and wisely.'' Attacks on the Clean Air Act and the EPA's ability to regulate greenhouse gases are a huge piece of the larger climate crisis, a crisis that has a hefty cost--our health and our lives.
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