Today one of my Republican colleagues introduced a proposal to brazenly overturn sound scientific work done by our nation’s leading public health experts and prohibit the Environment Protection Agency from doing its job to protect the health and welfare of the American people. This extremely damaging proposal is a political stunt designed to effectively strip the EPA’s power to curb harmful air pollution.  

Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s (R-Alaska) proposal takes the form of a “Resolution of Disapproval” under the Congressional Review Act. It is so extreme that it would legally overturn scientists’ very conclusion, based on decades of scientific study, that greenhouse-gas emissions threaten public health and the environment, and it would have the effect of prohibiting the EPA from making the same conclusion in the future. It could block any action by the EPA to protect our families, our communities, and our economy from greenhouse-gas pollution.

This resolution represents an irresponsible attempt to take away the power of an independent agency whose sole purpose is to protect the health of our families, friends, and neighbors and the environment we live in.

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.  President Nixon — Nixon! — signed the EPA into law because even Republicans recognized that unchecked pollution was poisoning our people. 

This resolution is a return to that polluter-first approach that even President Nixon found intolerable. 

Decades of scientific research has proven that carbon pollution is harmful to human health and causes global warming. The EPA’s endangerment finding — as required by the Clean Air Act — found that carbon pollution endangers the health of millions of American families and future generations. This resolution would block the EPA’s ability to regulate unsafe air pollution and would continue to allow our nation’s considerable contribution to global warming to go unchecked. What’s worse, this resolution aims to politicize an independent agency and prevent it from protecting the health of our citizens and our communities.

While supporters of this misguided resolution try to tout its supposed positive impact for our economy, it would actually harm our economy by helping maintain our dependence on foreign oil, hamstringing EPA’s ability to promote clean energy options, and negatively impacting our nation’s clean energy jobs industry. This resolution encourages big polluters to continue polluting, and discourages one of the fastest-growing industries in America: clean energy. Continuing on the path of spending billions of dollars a day to import foreign oil rather than make significant progress transforming our energy economy and developing American-made renewable energy is a deeply flawed approach. 

Plainly put, this dangerous resolution has the best interest of big energy industries in mind, not the health and welfare of the American people or our environment, and not the clean energy job creation we urgently need right now. Because this extreme resolution only needs a simple majority to pass, we need you to speak out. Please consider calling your senators and urging them to put the health of our citizens before politics and vote against this harmful resolution.

The past few months the political debate inside and outside the beltway has largely been centered on health care reform, but I wanted to take a moment and turn the discussion to the big battle looming on the horizon.  

Congress is gearing up to take on another critical challenge we’re facing; transforming our energy economy and addressing the grave threat of climate change. As a member of the Environment and Public Works Committee, I’ve been working with my Senate colleagues to craft a bill that will create clean energy jobs, reduce air pollution and liberate our country from depending on dirty coal and foreign oil.

The House passed an energy bill earlier this year and we in the Senate are building on those efforts.  The Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act, introduced by Sens. Kerry (D-Mass.) and Boxer (D-Calif.), will significantly invest in renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies such as wind, solar, and biomass as well as invest in public transportation.  These investments are critical if we want to strengthen America’s energy independence, reduce harmful air pollution and create clean energy jobs in local communities.

Specifically, the Kerry-Boxer bill will stimulate even more investment in clean energy by creating a pollution reduction and investment program that would go beyond what the House proposed, to cut pollution 20 percent by 2020.  And the bill will go even further to strengthen national security and reduce oil dependence with a plan to help cities and states plan for cleaner and more efficient transportation infrastructure, like public transit systems.

In Sen. Boxer’s chairman’s mark of the bill, we continue this approach, by increasing direct investment in renewable energy and energy efficiency and creating new direct investment in public transportation and other transportation infrastructure that reduces oil dependence and global warming pollution. We also create an incentive program for forest and agriculture land-owners to undertake projects that reduce emissions beyond that achieved by the pollution reduction program and offsets under the bill.

I should add that after this bill passes out of the Environment and Public Works committee, it will be joined with provisions to create a national Renewable Electricity Standard. I am determined to make that provision better than what has been proposed to date.  

All of the things I mentioned in the bill add up to a major change in our nation’s energy policy. They put us on a path to building industries and creating clean energy job, weaning our nation from foreign oil, and reducing pollution in order to avoid the catastrophic effects of global warming.

As we continue on a path forward to fight climate change and invest in innovative technologies, we will constantly be challenged by the influential fossil fuel interests.  Just like we’re witnessing with efforts to reform health care — there are powerful lobbyists doing everything in their power to water down and block effective climate change legislation.  

We cannot let them control the message in the media and we cannot let them control our future.  I will do everything in my power to speak out and explain to my colleagues that as much as the special interests try to portray this issue as complicated and confusing, we face a clear and simple choice.

It’s a choice between clean air or dirty air.

It’s a choice between creating jobs here in America or shipping those jobs overseas.

It’s a choice between strengthening our national security or remaining addicted to foreign oil.

I know you all have lives to lead — children and parents to care for — deadlines to meet — and I can’t thank you enough for speaking out, organizing together and pressuring your Sens. and Representatives.  I know many of you have spent countless hours fighting for health care reform, but I hope you’ll find the energy to join me and shine a light on the choice Congress has when it comes to passing climate change legislation.  Your activism and passion is truly appreciated and I know we’ll need you once again to tackle this enormous challenge.