Environmental Legislation Quotes

I was part of Environment Canada's work to stop acid rain, create national parks, clean up the Great Lakes, develop new environmental legislation and negotiate the treaty that saved the ozone layer.

With regards to the Blackfoot Clearwater Stewardship Act, I believe it lacks a balanced approach. It designates 79,000 acres as new wilderness while only opening up 6,000 acres for recreation.

President Obama said he is going to use the Gulf disaster to push a new energy bill through Congress. How about using the Gulf disaster to fix the Gulf disaster?

We forced Richard Nixon and the Congress who established, and thanks to your leadership, we supported you and we got the Environmental Protection Act and Agency.

As a member of the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus, I'm committed to finding consensus on legislation to address our environmental and energy challenges.

The environmental movement will never be able to come remotely close to matching the corporations and their auxiliaries dollar for dollar in influencing the electoral and policy-making processes…. Accordingly, campaign finance reform ought to be at the very top of the environmental movement's legislative agenda.

Environmental regulation looked like it was going to be under serious attack, and they were giving all of those speeches about getting government off people's backs.

There are instances: [Henry David] Thoreau read [John] Wordsworth, [John] Muir read Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt read Muir, and you got national parks. It took a century for this to happen, for artistic values to percolate down to where honoring the relation of people's imagination to the land, or beauty, or to wild things, was issued in legislation.

The environmental agenda before the Congress includes laws to deal with water pollution, pesticide hazards, ocean dumping, excessive noise, careless land development and many other environmental problems. These problems will not stand still for politics or for partisanship.

In celebration of this Earth Day, I encourage all Members of the House to support legislation aimed at investing in the improvement of water quality in our Nation's lakes, rivers, streams and estuaries.

We've got this proposal which has been languishing in the legislature, the Water Legacy Act, which is derived from a Republican task force on protecting the Great Lakes. Yet nothing has been done on it.

And I would begin with the EPA, because there is no other agency like the EPA. It should really be renamed the 'job-killing organization of America.'

For over 30 years the Endangered Species Act has suffered from many fundamental flaws, the most notable being a blatant disregard for property rights,.

We need to accept the seemingly obvious fact that a toxic environment can make people sick and that no amount of medical intervention can protect us. The health care community must become a powerful political lobby for environmental policy and legislation.

What we know is that the environmental movement had a series of dazzling victories in the late '60s and in the '70s where the whole legal framework for responding to pollution and to protecting wildlife came into law. It was just victory after victory after victory. And these were what came to be called 'command-and-control' pieces of legislation.

The Fishable Waters Act shares the same intent of the Clean Water Act by proposing to fulfill goals that have not yet been met to restore and maintain the biological integrity of the nation's waters. The intent of the bill is to enhance the Clean Water Act instead of undercutting it.

We, the people, gave the marching orders to our democratically-elected officials and instructed them. We wanted out of Vietnam and we got out of Vietnam. We wanted women's right to choose and we got women's right to choose. We got the EPA, we got the Clean Air Act, Water Act, we got rights for workers in the workplace to be protected from dangers. We accomplished pretty much all of what we wanted when we had the courage of our convictions. That is the missing ingredient.

I have a very strong record on the Environment in the United States Senate.

The Superfund legislation set up a system of insurance premiums collected from the chemical industry to clean up toxic wastes. This new program may prove to be as far-reaching and important as any accomplishment of my administration. The reduction of the threat to America's health and safety from thousands of toxic-waste sites will continue to be an urgent but bitterly fought issue-another example for the conflict between the public welfare and the profits of a few private despoilers of our nation's environment.

All of us can make changes, but the changes that are most needed are not light bulbs and windows but laws and policies and treaties. So, yes, we are in a phase of this (climate protection) struggle where civic and political action is at the top of the list.

We should make it a crime even to attempt to pollute. Our children should grow up next to parks, not poison.

It will be controlled when the people of America, through their elected representatives, demand the right to air that they and their children can breathe without fear..

Nixon was a good president on the environment. Gerald Ford was good.

Society has to be structured such that there are checks and balances, so that it can't be manipulated, for instance, for the profit of just some multinational company who's going to get rich on trying to legislate the environment.

The result was, when Congress convened in January 1971, everyone was now an environmentalist. They had seen a new force, college students, who favored the environment.