Department of the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2012

Floor Speech

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Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of this amendment and strong opposition to this bill. The Interior appropriations bill that is before us today is a radical assault on public health, on clean air and clean water, and on our environment.

This bill wouldn't create a single job. Instead of creating jobs and protecting the public health, this bill gives polluters and other special interests license to do just about anything that they want. This might be the single worst bill in this House for our public health and the environment since the days of Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay.

In this bill, the House Republicans are undermining the Clean Water Act, creating loopholes in the Clean Air Act, and gutting the Endangered Species Act.

But that's not all. This legislation makes it harder for our States and cities to improve their crumbling water and wastewater systems through the State clean water and drinking water revolving funds.

The legislation blocks the Environmental Protection Agency from protecting us from mercury, soot, and power plant pollution. Under this bill, the EPA will hardly be allowed to do anything about dangerous pollution that threatens our public health.

The legislation blocks the new vehicle standards that will save consumers at the gas pump and would reduce the amount of oil that we import as a Nation. If that wasn't bad enough, the bill decides to prohibit the State of California from setting its own clean vehicle standards.

The legislation also includes an "extinction rider,'' one of the most aggressive threats to the Endangered Species Act in my career here that would freeze all of the efforts to protect imperiled species across the country.

One of the most offensive aspects of this bill, out of a very long list, is the 80 percent cut to the Land and Water Conservation Fund. For nearly 50 years, the Land and Water Conservation Fund has taken oil and gas drilling fields, a finite resource, to invest them in a continuing protection of our resources on land, not taxpayer dollars--these are taken from the oil companies that drill in the offshore--and they use that money to preserve the national parks, the wildlife habitat, trails, and working ranches and forests.

With this cut, Republicans are breaking the decades-long promise that has been a bipartisan consensus across this country, the promise that we will use these oil and gas royalties to protect important American places for future generations.

Outside of the Republican Conference in the House of Representatives, I don't know anyone in this country who wants to end our commitment to use these fees on Big Oil to protect our parks and recreation areas. These are our public lands. These are the lands that America's families use every summer, use at different seasons and different parts of the country all of the time. These are the public spaces that make us the envy of the rest of the world. These are the public systems that countries from all over the world send people to understand how did we save them, how do we protect them, how do we manage them. We set the standard for the world. As it was said earlier, one of America's best ideas. But now all of that is threatened under the cut to these funds for the Land and Water Conservation Fund.

Mr. Chairman, these are a few of my reasons; but there are many, many more why I would strongly oppose this legislation and the very bad, bad ideas that it contains. I would hope that this Congress would reject this legislation out of hand.

I yield back the balance of my time.

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