Rep. Levin Calls for Climate Action at COP26 in Scotland
Glasgow, Scotland – U.S. Representative Mike Levin (D-CA) is currently taking part in a Congressional delegation to the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow, Scotland, where he is participating in bilateral meetings and other engagements with global leaders on key climate priorities. Today, he participated in several discussions where he highlighted California’s leadership on climate change and underscored his longstanding commitment to aggressive climate action.
See below for a transcript of his remarks at a press conference with his colleagues this morning:
I'm Mike Levin. I represent the great state of California in the Congress. Do we have any Californians? There you go, so we've got a few, Joe [Neguse]. You've got Colorado in the house but we've got a few more Californians.
You probably know California is leading the way on a lot of these initiatives. We've got a path to zero net carbon in the state, a clean energy standard, we led on cap and trade, and we've got a path to all new cars being zero emission cars by 2035. I'm very proud of all of that.
My story is a bit unique in that I represent a Congressional district that for the last two decades before my service was Republican, in fact it was pretty deeply conservative and when I decided to run for Congress, you have to pick a ballot designation, and I chose 'clean energy advocate.' And I, much like Sean [Casten], have been involved in the clean energy industry for about 10 years. And when I chose clean energy advocate I remember there was a reporter who wrote a story and the headline was 'candidate gambles his campaign on climate.' And my response to that is that it was a ludicrous headline because it would be a gamble not to talk about climate, not to talk about the preeminent challenge of our time.
So, for the last three years in Congress, both on the Select Committee for the Climate Crisis and the House Natural Resources Committee - Water, Oceans and Wildlife Subcommittee, Energy and Mineral Resources Subcommittee - I have dedicated myself along with my colleagues to how we can reduce our carbon emissions from the way we move people, the way we move goods, the way we build buildings, the way we generate electricity, the way we grow food. We have to do it all and we have to do it fast.
So I'm excited to be here not only because of all the policies that my friends have just shared but also because we can hold our heads high again. Two years ago, we were in Madrid, and the United States Government, under the past administration, was talking about how they could export fossil fuels to the developing world. Today we're here to say: 'no more, we can do better than that.' We all have to achieve significant reductions in emissions if we're going to have any chance at combatting what is the greatest challenge that our society maybe has ever faced in the history of the planet.
So I'm excited to be in the fight with all of you. [...] And thank you to the Sierra Club as well, I got to thank the Sierra Club for all their great volunteers.
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