In Iowa, Rick Santorum talks coal, water pollution - Video, Transcript

Rick Santorum fielded a voter’s question about water pollution at a December 31, 2011 New Years Eve rally in Ottumwa, Iowa. Here’s video and transcript documenting what the former Senator from Pennsylvania and 2012 Republican presidential candidate had to say on the issue:

Voter: I’m concerned with a candidate who has some kind of an environmental policy.

60 miles east of here is a town in Middletown, Iowa, we have an army ammunitions plant that manufactured nuclear weapons and large ammunition, and 207 test wells out of 208 there are contaminated with ground pollution.

An 18-month environmental cleanup has now turned into a cleanup that’s supposed to last until 1946 and could be ongoing from that.

I’m curious what we’re going to do, because we only have so much water, and that water has to take care of all us.

And I’m concerned we’re already at the point of too little too late.

What are we going to do protect our water resources in this country?

Rick Santorum: I must admit, one of the things I learned in politics a long time ago, when you don’t know the answer to a question, you admit it and you don’t keep talking and prove to people you don’t know the answer.

I don’t that specific, this is the first I’ve heard of this situation and I apologize, so I can’t really comment on what’s happening there.

I can say that one of things I’m proud of, I happened to have worked on a bill in 2006 that broke a logjam between, not Democrats and Republicans, but the East and the West having to do with reclamation of abandoned coal mines, and the tremendous amounts of groundwater and other pollution that was coming from these abandoned mines.

Most of the coal mining as you know is now done in the Western states and the way that abandoned mine reclamation is funded, it’s based, it’s funded on a tax on coal from the state from which it comes.

Well obviously most of the abandoned mines are not in the West, they’re in the East.

And yet, all the tax revenue now is being raised in the West, and so, of course the Western producers didn’t want to send their money East, they wanted to use it to clean up their own situation or enhance the environment in that area, and that was a logjam for a long, long time.

But I worked with Mike Enzi and the Senator from Wyoming and we put together a comprehensive bill that now we unlock that monies and now a lot of that Western revenue is going to come and cleanup a tremendous amount of water in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, and other place there was a lot of coal mining, which there is not as much today.

So if you’re looking for someone with a record of being able to work not just across party lines, but across national lines to get things done, we were able to do that.

Rick Santorum: Endangered Species Act is "poorly crafted legislation"

Rick Santorum described the Endangered Species Act as an example of "very broadly worded legislation that allow regulators to run amok" while responding to a question at the December 3, 2011 Huckabee Presidential Forum, which aired on Fox News:

Pam Bondi, Florida Attorney General: Senator, in Florida it’s been very frustrating because -- as you’ve probably heard – I’ve had to sue the EPA to stop them from imposing absolutely unsustainable water standards on my state, and it would be devastating to businesses in Florida.

The Obama administration, they have pursued numerous environmental policies that affect all of us in different ways that would impose staggering costs on the American people. 

What principles would you follow in deciding whether to approve any environmental regulations? 

Rick Santorum: Well, I would say this.

What we have seen is a radical environmental policy put forth by this administration, but it’s based upon some very poorly crafted legislation that is place right now.

You know, you have an Endangered Species Act, which is at the heart of the problems that we’ve dealt with in Pennsylvania. 

Look at the Central Valley of California. 

And we’ve seen these policies because you have poorly drafted – not poorly drafted, deliberately draft – pieces of legislation that are overly broad.

The former Senator from Pennsylvania and 2012 Republican presidential candidate also made it clear that he'd like to see the Endangered Species Act rewritten:   

Rick Santorum: What I believe we need to do -- and I’ve made this a proposal on the road – we have reauthorizations of all these acts that come forward. And a lot of the cases, they just straight reauthorize them because you can’t, you can’t – they don’t want to refight the war again.

But what I’ll say as President is, “I won’t enforce an Act. I won’t sign a straight reauthorization, and just won’t continue to enforce an Act that hasn’t been reauthorized.” 

We will force the Congress to go back and take these very broadly worded statutes that allow regulators to run amok and we will fix them and have Congress make the decisions as to what the laws are, not the regulators.

Santorum’s comments came just three days before today's hearing - "The Endangered Species Act: How Litigation is Costing Jobs and Impeding True Recovery Efforts" - held by Republicans in control of the U.S. House of Representatives Natural Resources Committee.

According to the Center for Biological Diversity, the Endangered Species Act has been a great success, as evidenced by the fact that “99.9 percent of species protected by the Act have been kept from extinction, and where measured, 93 percent of protected species are moving towards recovery.”

Watch video of Santorum's remarks starting at 18:25: