" This is no time for finger pointing" McClellan

Congress can't responsibly continue to ignore the global climate change issue. Higher temperatures threaten serious consequences. I met the other day with our top experts from NASA. How many Senators realize that it is now not a question of whether; it is a certainty. Nothing we do today is going to stop this. To show you how far behind the curve we are, it is a certainty that the Arctic ice sheet is going to melt. If the Arctic ice sheet melts completely, that exposes the Greenland sheet. Nobody can tell you with certainty what is going to happen to Greenland. But any policymaker ought to stop and shiver at the prospect that it is a certainty the Arctic ice sheet will melt. The Greenland ice sheet will be exposed. And if it were to melt, with catastrophic consequences, say goodbye to Florida, goodbye to the port of Boston, and New York, and a bunch of other places. That would be a catastrophic event. There is nothing in this bill that tries adequately to deal with that reality.

What is going to happen with respect to drought, disease, floods, lost ecosystems? And from sweltering heat to rising seas, global warming effects have already begun. Sit down with the top scientists. Sit down with Nobel Prize winners and listen to them tell you about the certainty of what is already happening, not a matter of scientific speculation. The seas are rising. It is getting warmer. They will tell you what is happening. This bill doesn't deal with it.

We tried, on this bill, to pass an economy wide cap-and-trade bill, a bill that uses the marketplace to be able to work effectively. Didn't get enough votes. The compromise was, they passed the language that didn't require anything, and they even took out of this bill the language that didn't require anything. This is the most obtuse, head-in-the-sand ostrich policy I have ever seen in my life. A bunch of responsible people in the Senate and House of Representatives, ignoring scientists all across the globe, turning their backs on foreign ministers, trade ministers, environmental ministers, prime ministers, presidents of countries, all of whom have embraced, at political risk, the reality of that science, and only the United States of America stands apart and alone, ignoring that reality. Where is the leadership?