Motion to Instruct Conferees on H.R. 4348, Surface Transportation Extension Act of 2012, Part II

Floor Speech

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Mr. MARKEY. I thank the gentleman.

Today marks the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. Instead of spending the daylight hours passing a clean transportation bill that will help shore up real jobs for Americans, the Congress will be spending the day repealing public health protections and giving away nearly all of our public lands to oil and gas companies in the culmination of the Republican majority's Oil Above All agenda. It is really a ``Midsummer's Nightmare'' for the American people.

But before we get to voting on the Republican oil package, we get to debate whether another Republican bill, whose sole premise is to prevent EPA from following the scientific evidence, should be included in the Transportation bill.

This bill says that no matter what EPA learns about the sludge that comes out of coal-fired power plants, no matter how high the concentrations of poisonous arsenic, mercury or chromium, no matter what EPA learns about how these materials find their way into our drinking water, EPA is forbidden to classify or regulate it as hazardous waste. EPA is forbidden to require that this toxic material be disposed of carefully.

This bill turns a blind eye to evidence of known hazards and takes us back to the Dark Ages, to a time before science was valued and before advanced knowledge transformed society. It takes us back to an era when mercury and arsenic, major components of coal ash, were used to cure toothaches and clear up your complexion. It takes us back to an era where children were sent deep into the bowels of the Earth to rip coal from the mines and die early deaths.

Apparently, House Republicans not only wish to embrace the principal energy source of the 19th century; they also wish to return us to the 19th-century principles about public health and the environment regarding arsenic and mercury and their danger to the citizens of our country.

Now, there are good uses for coal ash, beneficial uses. It can be used to construct highways and shingles. That's good. It can be mixed into concrete and grout. That's good.

But what we don't want is for the industry to be able to use it to construct a golf course, like what they did in Battlefield, Virginia, because it can directly contaminate the groundwater. It can pollute and cause injury and cancers in the neighbors of that golf course.

We also don't want it to be disposed of in pits that aren't sealed to handle this special waste, like what happened in Tennessee when a TVA disposal pit collapsed, engulfing an entire small town in toxic sludge. We should have regulations to protect against that ever happening in our country again.

This is exactly what this bill, the Republican bill, will do. It will blast us back into the past and allow coal ash to be disposed of without proper construction or monitoring.

At the end of this month, transit and highway funding will expire, hundreds of thousands of jobs are at stake, and our transportation infrastructure will be in peril. Even Senate Republicans have recognized the dangers inherent in allowing this to occur and have joined with Senate Democrats to craft a bipartisan bill so we can put people back to work using coal ash in the highways of our country.

But in spite of this, the House Republicans are insisting that unrelated and unnecessary toxic provisions dangerous to the health and well-being of Americans be attached to this bill in order to protect Big Oil and Big Coal.

Instead of allowing the coal industry and Republicans to transport our country's environmental and public health standards back to the era of Charles Dickens, we should be holding them to higher expectations for the 21st century, for the public health and well-being of our people.

I urge a ``no'' vote on this preposterous Republican initiative.

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