Volume 153, No. 49 covering the 1st Session of the 110th Congress (2007 - 2008) was published by the Congressional Record.
The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“THE SAFE CLIMATE ACT OF 2007” mentioning the Environmental Protection Agency was published in the Extensions of Remarks section on pages E594-E595 on March 21, 2007.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
THE SAFE CLIMATE ACT OF 2007
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HON. HENRY A. WAXMAN
of california
in the house of representatives
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
Mr. WAXMAN. Madam Speaker, I am pleased today to join over 125 of my House colleagues in reintroducing the Safe Climate Act.
As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently announced, the fact that the planet is warming is now unequivocal. And the human role in this is no longer in debate.
The planet is at a crossroads, and it is time for us to choose to act.
I originally introduced this legislation just 9 months ago today.
At that time, I discussed how there are different approaches that can be taken to climate legislation. Some bills seek a symbolic recognition of the problem. Others are premised on what may be politically achievable in the near term.
The Safe Climate Act was drafted on a different premise: It reflects what the science tells us we need to do to protect our children and future generations from irreversible and catastrophic global warming. The bill has aggressive requirements to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. But the reality is, these are the reductions that scientists say we need to achieve to preserve a safe climate for future generations.
No one had yet proposed legislation that aimed to solve the climate crisis, and I wasn't sure how my colleagues and others would respond to this proposal.
However, in just 9 months, there has been remarkable progress in building consensus on this approach.
During the last Congress, I was pleased that 113 members decided to cosponsor my legislation. I was particularly delighted that Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi decided to endorse the bill.
Then in January of this year, a coalition of environmental groups and companies joined together in calling for emission reductions that are consistent with the reductions required by my legislation. This coalition, calling itself the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, is made up of Alcoa, BP America, Caterpillar Inc., Duke Energy, DuPont, Environmental Defense, FPL Group, General Electric, Lehman Brothers, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, PG&E Corporation, PNM Resources and the World Resources Institute. And many others, including such diverse entities as states, American workers, small businesses, religious congregations and outdoors enthusiasts, are all urging comparable levels of emissions reductions.
All of these groups recognize an important truth--global warming is the greatest environmental challenge of our time, and we have a short window in which to act to prevent profound changes to the climate system. Unless we seize the opportunity to act now, and act decisively, our legacy to our children and grandchildren will be an unstable and dangerous planet.
The science clearly tells us what we need to do--we must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, starting now and continuing over the next few decades. To achieve this, we have to grow our economy into a new and cleaner future. It's simply too late for legislative baby steps.
I have been working to address the threat of global warming for many years. Over 10 years ago, the science and the threat of global warming were clear. That's why I introduced the Global Climate Protection Act of 1992, which would have frozen U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide at 1990 levels. But Congress failed to act.
Now our understanding of global warming has only grown stronger. We're actually experiencing the effects of climate change today. And they are not good.
As the earth warms, its ice is melting. From the glaciers in Glacier National Park, to the snows of Kilimanjaro and the Larson B iceshelf in Antarctica, ice that has been here since the last ice age is disappearing or already gone. Accordingly, sea levels will rise, posing enormous challenges for our coastal communities. The permafrost supporting towns and roads in Alaska is melting rapidly, and the summer sea ice in the Arctic Ocean is diminishing each year. These are changes we can see with our own eyes.
The seasons are changing--maple sugar producers in Vermont are tapping trees earlier, plants are flowering earlier, and birds are migrating earlier. These changes are happening across the globe. And with warmer weather come bugs that are no longer being killed by the winter cold, such as the beetles that are destroying forests across the Southwest and Alaska.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently confirmed that we have already observed climate-related changes in extreme weather including droughts, heavy precipitation, heat waves and the intensity of tropical cyclones. The year 2005 broke hurricane records, and America experienced the devastating results of just a few such storms with Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
The scientists have been proven right about global warming, over and over again, across the planet. We should start listening to them.
Now they are telling us that we have about 10 years to act to avoid being locked into irreversible global warming on a scale that will transform the planet. The scientists have identified a global temperature rise of just 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit as enough to produce undeniably dangerous consequences, such as 20 feet or more of sea level rise, which would flood large parts of Florida and New York City, as well as huge population centers in other countries. And scientists have calculated the quantity of atmospheric greenhouse gases that would very likely cause such a temperature rise. The nations of the world must keep greenhouse gases below that level to avoid irreversible dangerous global warming.
The United States emits more greenhouse gases than any other country in the world--about 20 percent of the total worldwide. We simply cannot avoid catastrophic global warming without substantial cuts in U.S. emissions. Of course, every nation will have to do its part. According to the best science, under any plausible scenario of future international actions to stabilize the climate, the United States will eventually need to reduce its emissions by about 80 percent.
Fortunately, we have some time to get there, as long as we start reducing our total emissions now. And that's what the Safe Climate Act does. It caps U.S. emissions in 2010, and then gradually reduces them by just 2 percent per year until 2020. This gives us over a decade to deploy the cleaner technologies that we already have but aren't using much, such as hybrid vehicles and wind power. After 2020, emissions must fall under the legislation by roughly 5 percent per year, as more advanced technologies, such as biofuels from waste materials and capturing carbon dioxide from power plants, become widely available.
The Safe Climate Act reduces emissions through a flexible, market-
based emissions trading program, as well as complementary requirements for cleaner cars and more electricity from renewable energy and efficiency. The Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy would oversee these programs nationally, while States would retain their authority to act on the State level. In effect, the Safe Climate Act sets the targets and then unleashes market forces and American ingenuity to solve the problem.
This sounds ambitious, and it is. But it is also completely doable, once we decide to act. Look at what we've already achieved. In just over 30 years, from the passage of the Clean Air Act in 1970 to 2002, the total air pollution from all automobiles was reduced by over 60 percent. We achieved these reductions even as the total number of vehicle miles traveled increased by 160 percent and GDP grew by 166 percent.
From 1990 to 1996, in just 6 years, we ended production of key chemicals destroying the Earth's protective tropospheric ozone layer and shifted to substitutes. Those chemicals had been widely used throughout the economy in applications from air conditioning and refrigeration to solvents and fire suppression.
In each case, entrenched industries told Congress that changes of these magnitudes would be impossible to achieve without massive economic dislocation. And in each case, they were wrong.
Our Nation has made dramatic advances in technology that have transformed our lives. We can do it again in developing new innovations for transportation and energy production. The Safe Climate Act will give the market the incentives necessary to unleash American ingenuity and solve the problem.
We've ignored the threat of global warming for almost too long, but we still have an opportunity if we act now. I urge my colleagues to join me in cosponsoring this critically important bill, and I urge the committee of jurisdiction to consider it without further delay. We must face and overcome the challenge of global warming, and the Safe Climate Act is the way to do it.
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