European Union Emissions Trading Scheme Prohibition Act of 2011

Floor Speech

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Mr. MARKEY. I thank the gentlelady.

I rise in opposition to this legislation. If it were to pass the House, we lawmakers would be directing the Secretary of Transportation to tell U.S. airlines not to follow the law. If we prohibit our companies from complying with the laws in other countries, we should expect other countries to do the same when it comes to their companies complying with U.S. law.

In an effort to protect U.S. airlines, this bill might actually undermine airline security. The U.S. currently requires international airlines to comply with a wide range of U.S. laws when it comes to passenger, baggage, and cargo security in order to do business in our country. If we legislate our companies out of Europe's environmental laws, our homeland security could be adversely impacted if European countries decided to withhold their cooperation in response with regard to screening of baggage for bombs on planes flying into the United States.

When it comes to pollution from the transportation sector, the United States was the first to pass a law requiring anyone in the world interested in coming to our shores to follow our environmental regulations. In 1990, Congress passed the Oil Pollution Act in the aftermath of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. In order to reduce the risk of an oil spill, it required all tankers operating in U.S. waters to be double-hulled by 2015. No matter what country's flag a tanker is flying, it will have to be double-hulled to sail into the United States of America--to protect us from their pollution.

We acted unilaterally to protect our country from the carbon pollution associated with an oil spill 21 years ago. Now, after years of trying to forge an international aviation agreement, the European Union is acting to protect itself from the carbon pollution associated from airline travel.

Last week, an independent team of scientists at Berkeley released their analysis of land surface temperature records going back to 1800. They found--as their counterparts in NOAA and NASA had previously shown--that temperatures over the last decade were increasing. Once again, scientists have confirmed that global warming is real. Now that independent scientists have validated this bedrock fact, perhaps my colleagues who have questioned the science of climate change will be willing to give climate scientists the benefit of the doubt that the rest of their findings are accurate. And those findings have sobering consequences for the United States--more heat waves, rising sea levels, declining snowpack, more frequent drought, more extreme precipitation when it does rain--to name just a few.

2011 has been a record-breaking year for extreme weather in the United States. If left unchecked, climate change could make a year like this seem normal. The Europeans are taking climate change seriously. We shouldn't undermine their efforts by legislating that our airlines break the law. I would urge a ``no'' vote on H.R. 2594. Just remember that all of the other laws that we expect them to abide by in terms of the protection of American environment and American security become jeopardized when we question legitimate laws that the Europeans put on the books in order to protect our planet.

So I urge a ``no'' vote on this bill.

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