00:00And next is Senator Whitehouse.
00:03Thank you very much, Chairman. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin recently made perhaps the most idiotic
00:10and dangerous statement ever made by an EPA administrator, saying that concern about climate
00:17change amounted to climate change religion. I believe every single one of the states of my
00:22Republican colleagues has a state university that actually doesn't just believe in climate science,
00:27but teaches climate science. And the idea that we're now at a place where that lie is being
00:35propagated from the top of the EPA is really appalling. Why do I raise that here? I raise
00:40that here because we are on the edge of an insurance crisis that has already manifest in
00:45Florida, where unpredictable climate risk makes insurance unavailable to homeowners, which makes
00:53mortgages unavailable to homeowners, which crashes property values, and according to the chief
01:00economist for Freddie Mac, cascades out into the economy in a 2008 style recession. And that, he
01:06said, just about the coastal risk. We now have wildfire risk as the evil sibling standing up.
01:13Until we have people who are willing to recognize this risk, then I'm going to be no votes on people
01:19who have responsibility here for our economy. What's particularly evil is that behind all this
01:26is a long and powerful and semi-covert scheme by the fossil fuel industry to exert improper
01:32political influence in Congress, spend dark money, and mislead the American public. Second,
01:38Elon Musk's muskrats are getting into data wherever they can. Good career people are being fired when
01:45they try to protect data systems. Data is money for the big tech bros who are backing Trump. This is
01:56very likely their payback to get access to Americans' private information. We've got to do
02:01a better job of defending the data systems from these muskrat envoys of the tech bro empire.
02:09And last, the Corporate Transparency Act, a law enforcement and national security measure
02:14supported by President Trump and his administration in the first Trump administration, has now been
02:21undone by Treasury. And I'd like to offer three documents and ask unanimous consent that they be
02:27put into the record. One is my statement for the record with respect to this. The other is a letter
02:33to Treasury Secretary Scott Besant, dated March 10th, about this matter. And the third is a cursory
02:39response that we got the following day from the Office of Legislative Affairs at Treasury.
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