Hill Heat

Daily Kos I am working hard on EPW to make the bill as strong as possible—I want the Clean Air Act to regulate coal emissions, I want to make sure we get funding for mass transit (New York uses 1/3 of all mass transit in America), we need green taxis and green jobs funding, and it’s important that agriculture has a place in the offsets market. I plan to support the bill assuming it’s a progressive approach to lowering carbon emissions and creating jobs through the new green economy.

1Sky The Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act preserves Clean Air Act authority to regulate the nation’s oldest and dirtiest coal plants. These protections are critical to New Yorkers, as we are on the receiving end of air pollution from many of these plants – contributing to acid rain, harming natural resources such as the Adirondacks, increasing contamination in our waterways, limiting the number of fish we can eat, and increasingly growing asthma rates that raise our health care costs.

1Sky Wake up, America – your kids are in danger!

1Sky This is a choice between planetary stewardship, or a rise in the earth’s temperature that is devastating to human civilizations… 20% by 2020 is not an overly aggressive goal… in fact, you could argue that this bill is not moving fast enough. The IPCC says that in order to have a reasonable probability of [averting dangerous climate change,] developed countries should decrease their emissions [by even more].

1Sky What we are dealing with is not a political compromise. We are dealing with science!

I very very strongly believe that it is time that these power plants are held accountable! They have dodged around the law for too long, and their corporate lobbyists have won against our children’s lungs, and I for one am fed up with it! So I for one will stand firm on the Clean Air Act, and I hope many of my colleagues will support me on that.