Copenhagen, Dec 18, 2009

U.S. Representative (Massachusetts) Edward Markey appeared with Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Chairman Harry Waxman, and others at a press conference at the Bella Center in Copenhagen.

Text transcription of Markey’s statement:
“The planet is running a fever, there are no emergency rooms for planets, we must find a way of putting in place the preventative measures that will protect the planet and the people who live on it against the most catastrophic consequences of this dangerously warming planet. That’s why the Speaker has created a select committee on energy independence and global warming a few years ago. That’s why Mr. Waxman and I, working with the Speaker beginning in January of this year once President Obama was sworn in, made it first … legislation to pass through the Congress in June of 2009.”

“But it didn’t really begin there, it began when Speaker Pelosi took over three years ago. So far in the last three years, we have increased the fuel economy standards of vehicles which we will drive in the United States from 25 to 35 miles per gallon by the year 2016. We have changed the direction of our biofuels policy towards billions of gallons of cellulosic fuel. Tough new standards for appliances, for buildings are the role that we have now set for our country. It is comprehensive, it is across the board.”

“Within the Waxman-Markey bill. Mr. Waxman and I, working with the Speaker, the other members of Congress, we worked very hard, we put in the funding for international deforestation efforts, the money for international adaptation efforts, the money that would insure that offset programs, that would insure that across the world the United States would be participating in creating incentives for new ways to deal with the way in which God’s lands are treated. So all of this is part of the legislation, and that legislation makes it possible for us to meet the commitments which Secretary Clinton made today in Copenhagen. And combined with private sector efforts which will also be unleashed. Because much of what we are proposing in the United States will be market based. It is going to be something that creates a technological revolution that will make it possible for us to say to the rest of the world, ‘we want to work with you, we want to partner with you’, because the alternative is unacceptable. Otherwise we will, rather than helping, we will be hurting each other on the planet, and that is something which we cannot contemplate by the year 2050. Our goal is to work with the world in order to make it possible that children will have to look to history books to find that there ever was such a thing as global warming. We thing we can accomplish that if we work together. If every country in the world steps up to accomplish that goal, the United States will do its fair share and Secretary Clinton and the Speaker today reflect the commitment that our country is willing to make.”

Report by James George