Stephen Fincher Quotes

The U.S. has a proud history of cleaning up our air through technological innovation. We did it with leaded gas, acid rain and countless other pollutants, and we can do it with carbon pollution, too.

We can be thankful President Barack Obama is taking aim at one of the prime causes of climate change and extreme weather: air pollution. The EPA's carbon pollution standards are the most significant step forward our country has ever taken to protect our health by addressing climate change.

The EPA issued the MATS rule in 2012, and it is the first national standard created to address power plant emissions of toxic air pollutants. Under MATS, power plants are required to install equipment to reduce emissions of specific pollutants, such as mercury and sulfur dioxide.

Critics play a dangerous game when they denounce the science and law EPA has used to defend clean air for more than 40 years. The American people know better.

The U.S. limits mercury, arsenic, and soot from power plants. Yet, astonishingly, there are no national limits on how much carbon pollution these plants can dump into our atmosphere.

I strongly support the Bush Administration's clean diesel rules, which will reduce air pollution from diesel engines by more than 90 percent, and reduce the sulfur content of diesel fuel by more than 95 percent.

Way back in 2000, the EPA was poised, and, in fact, had drafted a rule, to specially regulate pollution - water pollution and other types of pollution - from power plants, but the energy industry pushed back pretty significantly.

Clean air is a basic right. The responsibility to ensure that falls to Congress and the president.

I don't need a strong EPA. I don't need to fund a lot of money there.

Take air quality in the United States today: It's about 30 percent better than it was 25 years ago, even though there are now more people driving more cars.

If the EPA continues unabated, jobs will be shipped to China and India as energy costs skyrocket. Most of the media attention has focused on the EPA's efforts to regulate climate-change emissions, but that is just the beginning.

We look back at the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments, where people screamed and hollered it's going to be too expensive, they couldn't afford it, and it wouldn't work. And it worked. It worked faster than people expected, at much less cost.

You talk to the farmers, the ranchers, our small community bankers, and boy, one of the No. 1 issues is the regulations coming out of Washington.

Ever since I've been in Congress, various groups on the business side, those entities that are creating jobs out there, have felt that the Clean Air Act is really - that there are all sorts of presumptions in favor of the environmentalists.

I am not convinced the Clean Air Act was ever intended to regulate or classify as a dangerous pollutant something as basic and ubiquitous in our atmosphere as carbon dioxide.

America's ranchers and farmers produce the highest-quality products in the world.

I'm old enough to remember when the air over American cities was a lot dirtier than it is now.

EPA can and should now focus on getting real results in the fight for clean air, land, and water.

The legal fight over climate change begins in the United States with the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1977. Under the Act, the E.P.A. is required to publish a list of 'stationary sources' of air pollution, of which the most important are power plants.

The EPA's climate change regulations are based on compromised scientific reports and heavily flawed data.

The EPA has performed a very important role for us all.

Dust is part of rural America. It is completely unreasonable for the EPA to put a price tag on communities for carrying out activities essential to their well-being. This is a prime example of federal regulations gone too far.

There is no doubt that pollution contributes to the climate changing around us, but what I refuse to do is support a climate tax bill like Waxman/Markey put in place that would have cost farmers and ranchers in the state, that would cost small business the opportunity to grow, that would increase that bills that families pay, $1,700 a year.

The Obama administration's EPA ruling to cut carbon emissions at power plants is a direct affront to workers in states like Alabama, which not only rely upon coal-fired plants to generate most of their electricity but are also home to thousands of coal industry jobs.

I can tell you that a carbon tax will be a total economic disaster.