Louise Slaughter Quotes

Imagine if Congress always put the interests of polluters ahead of the health of our families. Our rivers and lakes would be choked with sewage. Acid rain would pour down from smog-filled skies. Hundreds of thousands more of our neighbors, friends, and loved ones would be victims of cancer, heart disease, and asthma.

The movement across Canada to fight toxic chemicals is a women's movement. It's a concern about health; it's very intimate.

One of the first laws against air pollution came in 1300 when King Edward I decreed the death penalty for burning of coal. At least one execution for that offense is recorded. But economics triumphed over health considerations, and air pollution became an appalling problem in England.

Of course, as consumers, we want cheap and good products; however, if these production processes are exceeding wastewater discharge standards and even causing heavy metal pollution, they will cause long-lasting damage to the ecological environment and public health.

There can be no intelligent control of the lead danger in industry unless it is based on the principle of keeping the air clear from dust and fumes.

The Chinese have figured out that they have a giant environmental problem. Folks in Beijing, some days, literally can't breathe. Over a million Chinese die prematurely every year because of air pollution.

I do care about the mercury contamination which this country will be experiencing because of the attempted sellout by this administration to special interests which will result in more mercury in the blood of young children in America.

Mercury emissions will continue to harm the environment and to endanger the health of children and pregnant women, until this Administration puts public health before politics.

If you’re a Chinese mayor and have to choose between growing jobs and cutting pollution, you will invariably choose jobs: Coughing workers are much less politically dangerous than unemployed workers.

As a native Oklahoman, I'm dismayed by what fossil fuel pollution has done to the Sooner State.

Glyphosate is only one of more than 80,000 registered commercially produced chemicals in the U.S. Some of these compounds, such as PFOA and the one I made my name investigating, hexavalent chromium, have also been convincingly linked to health crises - testicular cancer in the case of PFOA and lung cancer in the case of chromium-6.

I have generally and will always fight for clean air and safe drinking water laws.

My fear is that we are losing sight of how much we depend on the EPA to protect not just our environment but the people who live in it.

No Minnesotan should ever experience preventable health risks from breathing polluted air or from drinking unsafe water.

I am very concerned that federal and state air quality programs do not consider public health in regulating certain classes of industrial air emissions.

There are so many chemicals in things - that's why people are getting sick.

My struggles have been around protecting our air quality, protecting people from mercury in fish. I was very involved in the effort to get the FDA to recognize that mercury in fish is a real health issue and the FDA, you know, needed to be on that. But they were very tight with the fishing industry and did not want the public to be aware in the same way that they later didn't want the public to be aware of the problems with Vioxx, and they sat on the studies for many years and allowed 140,000 people to develop heart disease.

The important thing to understand is that the case for pollution control isn't based on some kind of aesthetic distaste for industrial society. Pollution does real, measurable damage, especially to human health.

Pure air, pure water, the inspection of unhealthy habitations, the adulteration of food, these and many kindred matters may be legitimately dealt with by the Legislature;

Coal is our country’s dirtiest energy source, from mining to burning to disposing of coal waste…. Coal is an outdated, backward, and dirty 19th-century technology…. Not only is coal burning responsible for one third of US carbon emissions—the main contributor to climate disruption—but it is also making us sick, leading to as many as 13,000 premature deaths every year and more than $100 billion in annual health costs.

Our children should not have to draw the breath of life in a city awash in pollution.

Think about how tangible it would be to the citizens of Washington State to finally have the Hanford nuclear site cleaned up. Think about how tangible it would be to the citizens along the Hudson River to fix that pollution. These are some of the most direct things we can do to benefit our environment.

The danger of dioxins in our environment, our food chain, and our bodies is difficult to illustrate, since they are not visible to the naked eye. My time in Vietnam allowed me to see the result of large quantities of them and therefore understand better the insidiousness of the smaller quantities that have found their way into our lives and bodies.

Not only will a carbon fee reduce carbon emissions, it will force big polluters to pay for the damage their pollution does to public health and the environment, generating billions in new revenue for the American people.

Every day, we are bombarded with a multitude of toxins in the environment. We know that the negative health impacts from this constant exposure can add up.