Washington, DC - U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA), Chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, today made the following remarks regarding the Republican plan to introduce a resolution blocking the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) finding that greenhouse gas pollution endangers public health and public welfare.

Senator Boxer said: "The Republican proposal to overturn EPA's global warming endangerment finding is a threat to America's families who deserve to have their health and communities protected.

The endangerment finding is clear - it says in part that greenhouse gases "endanger both the public health and the public welfare of current and future generations."

The endangerment finding indicates that greenhouse gas pollution poses many risks, including the risk of illness and death from factors such as high temperatures, increased air pollution and extreme weather events.

Debating over policy about unchecked global warming is fair, but repealing an endangerment finding based upon years of work by America's leading scientists and public health experts is radical in the extreme.

I am urging my colleagues to distance themselves from these dissenters and not to interfere with the independent work of scientists and public health experts from both the Bush and Obama administrations.

Republicans are using scare tactics and false economic arguments to support this effort - the same scare tactics that were used to oppose every major environmental law, including the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. Each of these laws has been successfully implemented while America has led the world in economic growth.

Time has disproven the special interest argument that a clean and healthy environment harms the economy - it is just a scare tactic that has been debunked."

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