Opening Statement By Rep. Mark Udall

Thank you, Chairman Lampson, for bringing this bill up for markup today.

This February, I, along with Representative Bob Inglis, introduced H.R. 906, The Global Change Research and Data Management Act of 2007.

The debate about whether climate change is occurring and about whether human activity has contributed to it is over. As our population, economy, and infrastructure have grown, we have put more pressure on the natural resources we all depend upon.

The fires, droughts, severe storms and other natural events that we experience every year exact a tremendous toll on our society.

We must reduce the human and economic costs of these events by making our communities more resilient and less vulnerable to their impacts.

For all of these reasons, we need the U.S. Global Change Research Program to produce more information that is readily useable by decision makers and resource managers in government and in the private sector.

People throughout this country and in the rest of the world need information they can use to develop response, adaptation, and mitigation strategies to make our communities, our businesses, and our nation more resilient and less vulnerable to the changes that are inevitable.

The USGCRP has significantly advanced our scientific knowledge of Earth’s atmosphere and climate and has provided us with a wealth of new data and information about the functioning of our planet. We need to continue to expand this knowledge.

However, we need to increase the output of information to decision makers that will assist them in developing adaptation and response strategies to the effects of global change.

I believe that we must move to reduce greenhouse gas emissions if we are to avoid future increases in surface temperature that will trigger severe impacts that we cannot overcome with adaptation strategies.

However, this bill does not regulate greenhouse gas emission levels or mandate any specific policy approach for addressing climate change.

We will need economic and technical information as well as information about system responses and climate responses to different concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to design cost effective policies to achieve emission reductions and avoid dangerous impacts of future climate change.

The USGCRP should be the vehicle for providing this information. H.R. 906 will improve the outreach and information exchange aspects of this Program and make the information that it provides more useful.

Again, I thank my colleague, Rep. Inglis for working with me on H.R. 906. I ask our colleagues to support this important legislation.