Wonderful speech on the new contract on the environment: 22 years ago today, thousands of Americans took to the streets across the country, held rallies and marches, gave speeches, and put issues of common concern to the people on the national agenda.

, the United States Environmental Protection Agency.

Many of you were not yet born at that time, and it is necessary for you to review the dramatic changes and progress that have taken place in our country since the first Earth Protection Day.

Within two years, our country established the Environmental Protection Agency and passed bills to prevent air pollution, water pollution, and the protection of endangered animals.

We also prohibit the use of D.D.T.

For our generation, this is a smart and far-sighted move.

Twenty years later, our social resources and the serious threats facing our planet have made all our previous efforts in vain.

We once restricted the dumping of waste into rivers, but now used needles are washing up on river beaches.

We once did not allow lead in gas cans, but now concentrated lead is found where urban children live and play.

We once required toxic waste to be stored in designated locations, but now, very little waste is being cleaned up.

We once thought acid would kill trees, but we didn't realize how quickly it spreads.

This has led to the disappearance of large tracts of domestic forests and tropical rainforests abroad.

We stopped building nuclear power plants, but now they are everywhere.

We saw with our own eyes oil-stained beaches, gray skies, and polluted rivers.

We must be fully aware of its potential dangers.

In particular, the distant ozone hole is invisible to the naked eye, but the light that passes through the ozone layer can cause people to suffer from cancer.

The question for your generation is: Can the environmental movement that started 22 years ago continue to move forward?

Are our proposals timely?

Decades have passed and our thinking has changed a lot.

Today’s children teach their parents how to sort trash so it can be recycled.

Colleges like Drexel are also teaching environmental engineering to young people.

The thinking of most Americans has changed, but the thinking of our current leaders remains the same.

For more than 10 years, we have had no national energy strategy, no environmental protection strategy, and no economic strategy to adopt new technologies that can make energy more efficient and protect the environment to occupy the future market.

Over the past decade, climate change, ozone depletion and other global environmental issues have posed an urgent threat to our survival.

Reliance on imported oil has been the foundation of our energy policy, and imported oil now accounts for half of our trade imbalance.

The collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War created new markets and made environmental governance a new and urgent matter.

We have an unprecedented opportunity to protect the planet and grow our economy.

The Bush administration has been passive, unprincipled, or expedient on environmental issues, as on many other issues.

Under George Bush and Ronald Reagan, presidential competence on environmental issues became a danger.

Let me be clear, I don't think President Bush is determined to destroy the environment.

But his ideas were formed in another era, when the world faced other threats and economic growth and environmental protection were mutually exclusive.

As the governor of a poor state, I have spent the past 10 years working to increase jobs and make up for lost time.

I know many people's interests are being harmed by the longest recession and the lowest economic growth rate in nearly 50 years.

In the 1980s, I also faced the short-term trade-off between employment and the environment.

And the back-and-forth effect is exacerbated by cuts in federal aid in some areas and the lack of a clear policy that drives a wedge between states.

Against this backdrop, the small state chose to increase employment when the federal government did not provide adequate employment opportunities in environmental protection and governance.

Over the years, I have learned something that George Bush and his advisers did not yet understand: the false choice between economic growth and environmental protection should be abandoned.

Today, it is impossible to have good economic growth without a good environment. We must not sacrifice the environment to achieve economic growth.

Our competitors know you can’t do one or the other.

The average labor productivity of German workers is 25% higher than that of American workers. One reason is that they only need half the energy required to produce the same amount of products in the United States.

Japanese companies have a 5% competitive advantage in the global market also because they have higher energy efficiency.

Our competitors are accelerating the development of new environmentally friendly technologies that will position them to capture future markets.

As we move toward the 21st century, the United States alone does not have a long-term strategy for stable economic development.

The Bush administration does not understand that making the wrong choice between environmental protection and economic growth is not only harmful to the environment, but also detrimental to economic development.

George Bush gave Quayle a competitive commission to lead, effectively giving major environmental polluters a backdoor through the White House to undermine environmental regulations they didn't like that would further pollute our rivers and air.

The most disturbing thing is that they call it competition.