Presidential Leadership

Floor Speech

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I thank Chairman Boxer for pulling us together. I want to make three quick points in the time I have.

The House bill cuts $2 billion out of the clean water and safe drinking water infrastructure loan programs at a time when EPA calculates we have a $600 billion water infrastructure deficit. We are behind on rebuilding America's clean water infrastructure, and yet they cut it. We need the infrastructure. We could certainly use the jobs. This is a very misplaced cut.

From a clean air perspective, the bill cuts $60 million from State and local grants that ensure clean air and clean water and attacks clean air programs. In 2010, the Clean Air Act is estimated to have saved 160,000 lives, compared to where things would have been without it.

Physicians for Social Responsibility says that U.S. coal plants alone cause about 554,000 asthma attacks each year. Why do I talk about asthma? Rhode Island has a 10-percent rate of asthma, despite not having a single coal-fired powerplant.

Why is this? Because out in the Midwest, they are pumping their pollution up into the sky, where it falls down on our New England States.

Average smokestack height increased from 200 feet tall in 1956 to over 500 feet tall in 1978. In 1970, there were only two U.S. smokestacks over 500 feet tall. By 1985, there were 180 smokestacks taller than 500 feet, and 23 were over 1,000 feet tall--so tall that they had to be put on air traffic control maps.

Why? Because it exports their pollution to us. A State such as Rhode Island has no shot at controlling the pollution that is dumped on us that originates in other States if there is not a strong national EPA to do this. So it is very vital to us. And asthma is a real threat.

Lastly, on carbon pollution, we hear a lot of talk about this, and there are certain things that are just factual at this point. It is a fact that over the last 800,000 years, the atmosphere has been in a range between 170 and 300 parts per million of CO

2. That is a measurement, not a theory. In 1863--a long time ago, during the time of the Civil War in this country--an Irish scientist, John Tyndall, determined that carbon dioxide has a blanketing effect in the atmosphere and increasingly warms the Earth. That has been textbook science for more than a century. It is not a negotiable or debatable proposition. We have burned 7 million to 8 million gigatons of carbon dioxide every year, and it is having an effect. We are now at 391 parts per million--well outside of a benchmark that has lasted for 800,000 years.

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