The Energy and Commerce Committee’s Energy and Power Subcommittee has scheduled a vote on H.R. 910, the Energy Tax Prevention Act of 2011.

H.R. 910 is designed to stop the EPA from updating clean air safeguards to protect public health from dangerous carbon pollution.

This bill repudiates EPA’s scientific finding that pollution endangers health, and removes EPA’s authority to require energy efficiency at power plants and refineries.  

Remarks of Rep. Edward J. Markey 
Energy and Commerce Committee’s Energy and Power Subcommittee
Markup on H.R. 910, the “Energy Tax Prevention Act of 2011”
3/10/11

Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to a bill that overturns the scientific finding that pollution is harming our people and our planet.

However, I won’t physically rise, because I’m worried that Republicans will overturn the law of gravity, sending us floating about the room.

I won’t call for the sunlight of additional hearings, for fear that Republicans might excommunicate the finding that the Earth revolves around the sun.

Instead, I’ll embody Newton’s third law of motion and be an equal and opposing force against this attack on science and on laws that will reduce America’s importation of foreign oil.

This bill will live in the House while simultaneously being dead in the Senate.  It will be a legislative Schrodinger’s cat killed by the quantum mechanics of the legislative process!

Arbitrary rejection of scientific fact will not cause us to rise from our seats today. But with this bill, pollution levels will rise. Oil imports will rise. Temperatures will rise.

And with that, I yield back the balance of my time. That is, unless a rejection of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity is somewhere in the chair’s amendment pile.