[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 4]
[Senate]
[Pages 4788-4789]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                             CLEAN AIR ACT

  Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, what I came to the floor to talk about--
and I would like to do that now--deals with clean air, it deals with 
jobs, it deals with the responsibilities the EPA has with respect to 
clean air and to make sure that as they execute their responsibility, 
they are mindful of jobs.
  A lot of people think we cannot have cleaner air without destroying 
jobs. As it turns out, we can have both. We can have cleaner air. We 
have had it for years. We adopted the Clean Air Act in 1970, with major 
amendments to it in 1990. We literally created millions of jobs from 
that act to reduce the emissions of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, 
mercury, and other forms of pollution that, in many cases, have killed 
people--hundreds of thousands of people--over the years. We not only 
save lives, we improve health in the country. We put a lot of people to 
work coming up with new technologies that reduce harmful emissions. We 
have a lot of people working in this country to reduce emissions from 
our cars, trucks and vans and doing it in a way that gives us better 
gas mileage.
  When I filled up my car with gas over the weekend, it was about three 
and a half bucks per gallon. As the Presiding Officer knows, we are 
going to start building by the end of next year in our old GM plant new 
cars, Fisker, cars that drive about 80 miles per gallon. They are 
beautiful. Chevrolet is selling the Volt and will sell more in the 
years to come. They are making huge improvements in mileage. We are 
getting this greater improvement in mileage and reducing our dependence 
on foreign oil, cleaning up the air, and putting a lot of people to 
work. This is one of the deals where we can have our cake and eat it 
too.
  I just came from a Bible study group. There were very nice comments, 
Mr. President, about you yesterday at the Prayer Breakfast. Before that 
I did a telephone townhall. Initially, I learned this from Bob Corker, 
a Republican Senator from Tennessee, who shared this idea with me a 
couple years ago. You get a big conference call with people in your 
State. We had 5,600 people on the call. We spent about an hour 
together. They raised all kinds of issues.
  One of the ladies on the call asked me: Why are we letting EPA tell 
companies what they can do with respect

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to their emissions? We are going to destroy jobs. As it turns out, the 
premise is not correct. It is not that the EPA wants to do this; it is 
their job. The EPA is being told by the U.S. Supreme Court that under 
the Clean Air Act, if the EPA can show through good science that there 
is harm to our health or to the welfare of the people by virtue of our 
pollution, EPA has no other choice but to regulate it if we will not 
pass laws to do that.
  We have not passed laws. Some people say: Why don't we put a tax on 
carbon, on things we burn and that have carbon in them to make it more 
expensive and maybe people will use less of it. We are not going to put 
a tax on carbon around here. I don't know that too many people have the 
political courage to do that.
  We argued about what President George Herbert Walker Bush did to 
reduce acid rain, reducing dramatically through market systems sulfur 
dioxide. We met our reduction targets in one-half the time at one-fifth 
the cost. People do not talk about acid rain anymore. There is an 
effort to take that approach and apply it to carbon dioxide. There are 
not the votes here to do that either.
  EPA has basically little choice when the Supreme Court interprets the 
Clean Air Act. They have to do something. We have not done our part, so 
the job of EPA is to pass commonsense regulations which will be mindful 
of their impact on jobs. As it turns out, we are going to create a lot 
more jobs by virtue of cleaning up our air than we are going to lose in 
terms of employment opportunities.
  The last point I wish to say, if I may, is the Presiding Officer and 
I live in Delaware, the first State to ratify the Constitution. We are 
enormously proud of our State, as our colleagues are of their States. 
In Delaware, we do not have mountains. One does not find the Blue Ridge 
Mountains or the Rockies there. We are a pretty flat, low-lying State, 
just north of Maryland, just south of Pennsylvania, and just west of 
New Jersey.
  I joke with people. I say the highest point of land in Delaware is a 
bridge, and that is not much of an exaggeration. We are a low-lying 
State. Something is happening in our lovely little State. We do not 
have a lot of land. We are starting to see the sea level rise. It is 
not just on the Delaware beaches and shores, it is happening up and 
down the East Coast, in the gulf, and over on the West Coast as well.
  We have great beaches--Rehobeth, Bethany, Dewey, and others. We used 
to replenish our beaches maybe every 5 or 6 years. The waves come in, 
storms--nor'easters, maybe an occasional hurricane. We have to 
replenish our beaches. We have to do it more frequently now, not 
because of storms but because the sea level is actually starting to 
rise.
  As the Presiding Officer knows, just north of Rehobeth Beach--a great 
little beach town--just north of Rehobeth Beach, about 10 miles, is a 
beautiful natural wildlife refuge called Prime Hook. It is right on the 
Delaware Bay. Prime Hook has a number of beautiful freshwater wetlands 
and marshes. It is a great place for people to hike, watch birds, and 
do all sorts of activities. It is a real national treasure. We are 
starting to see saltwater intruding and taking over what had previously 
been freshwater marshes and wetlands.
  If we look at the Delaware River from the Delaware Bay, north up the 
Delaware Bay, it becomes the Delaware River and we head up to 
Pennsylvania and into New York. As we go farther and farther up the 
Delaware River, in recent years, we find that instead of turning from 
saltwater to brackish to freshwater, that line moves farther north.
  Something is going on. Maybe people do not want to recognize or 
acknowledge that, but something is going on. We are seeing strange 
kinds of tornadoes, frequency of tornadoes, thunderstorms in the middle 
of winter. Out of the 10 hottest years on record, 9 of them have 
occurred in the last decade. Something is going on here. EPA is trying 
to figure out if there is some way we can gradually reduce the emission 
of greenhouse gases into our air and do so consistent with a strong 
economy and creating jobs, not destroying. I think we can do both. We 
have to be smart to figure that out and have a partnership with the 
executive branch, businesses and the legislative branch and be 
consistent with what the Supreme Court has ordered EPA to do.
  One last, quick point. We spend more money for health care than 
Japan, by far. We spend more money on health care than any other nation 
on Earth, by far. In Japan, they spend half as much as we do for health 
care and get better results, everything from higher life expectancy to 
lower infant mortality. They cover everybody. Think about that: They 
spend half as much, better results, and they cover everybody. How can 
they be that smart and how can we be that dumb?
  One way we can spend less money on health care is to, frankly, have 
cleaner air. We cannot only save billions of dollars--we have already 
made great progress--but we can save tens maybe hundreds of billions of 
dollars in health care costs by continuing to clean our air, to make it 
cleaner.
  With that, I am happy to conclude. It is a joy to be here and see 
you, Mr. President, presiding in this Chamber and with all these young 
people to recount one of my favorite stories about Barack Obama and the 
six points I gave to him 2\1/2\ years ago to reduce the deficit. We are 
actually starting to do that, knowing we need to do a whole lot more.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. TESTER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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