Leadership Quote by Steve Buyer

Policy as performance: Steve Buyer’s line is less a personal credo than a stamp of bipartisan legitimacy on a technocratic win. The wording is engineered to make an environmental regulation feel like common sense rather than ideology. “Strongly support” signals loyalty and certainty; it’s a preemptive rebuttal to the standard conservative critique that clean-air rules are job-killing red tape. By attaching himself to the “Bush Administration,” Buyer borrows executive authority and inoculates the policy against partisan suspicion from the right, framing it as responsible Republican governance, not a concession to environmentalists.

The quote’s power is in its numbers. “More than 90 percent” and “more than 95 percent” are not just statistics; they’re rhetorical armor. Big, round reductions promise moral clarity (we are cleaning up) while sidestepping the messy details: compliance timelines, refinery upgrades, cost pass-throughs, and the regulatory bargaining that makes “clean diesel” possible. The audience doesn’t need to understand particulate matter or ultra-low sulfur diesel to feel the scale of the improvement. Percentages convert pollution into a solvable engineering problem, not a political fight.

Context matters: early-2000s “clean diesel” rules were a pivot point, enabling modern emissions controls and addressing soot and smog while keeping diesel economically viable. Buyer’s subtext is pragmatic: we can protect public health without rejecting industry, and we can do it under a Republican banner. It’s environmentalism translated into a language the market-oriented center-right can applaud.