Copenhagen, December 18, 2009.
Republican Representative John Sullivan’s made a statement at the Republican’s press conference at COP15. Like the other Republican panelists, Sullivan repeatedly uses the word “scheme” to describe cap and trade. He also describes climate change science as fraudulent, part of a culture of corruption. He blames developing nations’ failure to agree to emission cuts for the climate treaty failure. Video excerpts of his statement:
Text transcription of excerpt:
“I’m John Sullivan, I’m from the state of Oklahoma, and I agree with my colleagues here that the Waxman-Markey bill, the cap and trade scheme, is not going to work. You know like chairman Barton said, it barely got through the house, it’s being bogged down for the reason is our economy is suffering in the United States. Unemployment is very high, people are losing jobs, and if this bill in its current form went into effect, we would lose about four point seven million jobs in the United States of America, and that’s just unacceptable to the American people. Also setting up some kind of scheme to auction off credits with the wall street debacle that’s gone on, it’s just also unacceptable…”
“This conference is very exciting to me, I’ve never been to a world conference and I think it’s exciting to be here, I’ve learned a lot. But you know I hope everyone else will learn something from this. I don’t think anything beneficial is going to come from it, that some kind of treaty will be signed, I don’t think that can happen. Because anything that we do right now has to involve developing nations as well. They have have to be responsible for emissions that they put out, and they’re not wanting to. And right now too, they’re basing it on science that’s fraudulent. There is culture of corruption that’s going through the scientific community that’s not being addressed right now that should be. And we certainly should not be basing any treaty on corrupt data that this culture of corruption is permeated through. So I think that we all should learn from this, go forward back to our respective countries, and come up with different ways to address this issue.”
Report by James George