Papal Encyclical on the Environment

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. MARKEY. Madam President, on Thursday, Pope Francis will officially release a historic encyclical on the environment. An encyclical is a personal message from the Pope to Catholic bishops and the 1.2 billion Catholics around the world on a topic that he feels requires urgent attention. It is an opportunity for the Pope to bring together accumulated teachings in a comprehensive way. This will be only Pope Francis's second papal missive, and it has garnered enough attention that the conservative Heartland Institute traveled to the Vatican this spring to respectfully inform the Pope that there is no global warming crisis.

Earlier this week, my colleague Senator Inhofe agreed with the Heartland Institute and told them that Pope Francis should ``stay with his job and we'll stay with ours.'' Well, I disagree with Senator Inhofe. Pope Francis is doing his job, but it is Republicans in this Chamber who are not doing theirs.

To those critics who say that Pope Francis shouldn't be speaking out on this, I will give them a very simple history lesson. Pope Francis is not the first to speak out on climate change and environmental protection. He will join a chorus of previous pontiffs who drew attention to the crisis of climate change and its impact on people, especially the poor and the children of our planet.

In 1971, Pope Paul VI warned that human actions that harm nature may make the future intolerable. Pope John Paul II first raised the greenhouse effect as a moral issue in his landmark 1990 World Day of Peace message. Two decades later, Pope Benedict XVI shined a light on environmental refugees in his World Day of Peace message and committed the Vatican to going carbon neutral, including installing a massive solar panel energy system on one of the largest buildings in the Vatican.

As the leader of more than 1 billion Catholics around the world, many of whom are suffering from the worst consequences of global warming--disease, displacement, poverty--it is the Pope's responsibility to speak out on behalf of the people he leads. And that is exactly what he will be calling all of us to do.

The same people who want to deny Pope Francis's right to speak out on climate change are the same people who deny the science of it. But our understanding of human influence on climate change rests on 150 years of wide-ranging scientific observations and research, and it is informed by what we see today with our own eyes and measured by our own hands.

Here is the reality. Global temperatures are warming, glaciers are melting, sea levels are rising, extreme downpours and weather events are increasing, the ocean is becoming more acidic, and last year was the warmest year on record. Increasing temperatures increase the risk of bad air days, in turn increasing the risk of asthma attacks and worse for people with lung disease. We have a public health crisis.

We are already feeling the cost of climate disruption. The Government Accountability Office added climate change to its 2013 high-risk list and found that climate change ``presents a significant financial risk to the Federal Government.'' GAO could just have easily said it presents a significant financial risk for all of America. But the United States is not tackling this climate change alone. Efforts are underway in countries all around the world. We are seeing academies of science in country after country all coming to the same conclusion.

What can we do here in the United States to answer the call of the Pope? Here is what we can do. We can make sure the wind and the solar tax credits do not expire. That is what is happening in this Congress. We can continue this incredible revolution in wind and solar and other renewable sources. That is going to die in this Congress unless we renew them.

We can ensure there is a dramatic increase that continues in the fuel economy standards of the vehicles we drive--the cars, the SUVs, the trucks--that dramatically reduces greenhouse gases. We can ensure when President Obama propounds his clean powerplant rules, which will reduce by 30 percent the amount of greenhouse gases going up into the atmosphere by the year 2030, that they are not repealed on the Senate Floor.

We are the greatest innovation country in the history of the world. Science and technology are the answer to our prayers. They are going to give our country the ability to give the leadership and hope to the rest of the world when we answer the prayer of Pope Francis. The poorest in the world are going to be those who are most adversely affected by the richest countries in the world.

We can, in fact, save all of creation by engaging in massive job creation--the new vehicles we drive, the new energy technologies we create, the new technologies that will reduce the amount of greenhouse gases going up from powerplants. We did it once with the Clean Air Act of 1990, and we can do it again.

So while Pope Francis preaches to the world, the world turns to us for leadership. We cannot preach temperance from a barstool. We cannot tell the rest of the world they should change their habits unless we take the leadership in creating the new technologies that we deploy here and then see deployed around the rest of the world.

We can transform the way energy is in fact produced across this entire planet within the 21st century. That is what the Pope is asking us to do--not to sacrifice but to innovate, not to give up but to invest in those technologies that will transform this planet.

President Kennedy called upon us in 1961 to put a man on the moon by investing in new metals and new propulsion technologies, so that we could ensure that the Soviet Union did not impose its communistic regime across the entire planet. We invented the new technologies for peaceful purposes. And when our astronauts stepped foot on the moon, that American flag that flew was the return on investment of that generation. This generation of Americans is now being asked to make the same kind of commitment to a new generation of energy technologies that can reduce greenhouse gases dramatically, give leadership for the rest of the world, and answer the call from Pope Francis.

Those who say it is not Pope Francis's business to speak out on something that is obviously created by human beings and that can be solved by human beings are wrong. It is his place. He challenges us to put on the books of the laws of this country the kinds of standards that unleash the green energy revolution, that create jobs by the millions, while ensuring that we reduce the greenhouse gases going up and endangering the planet.

I thank the Chair for the opportunity to be recognized, and I say in conclusion that it is just an incredible moment when the Pope speaks on an issue of this importance. I am not saying action will be easy, but if we harness the ambition of the Moon landing, the scope of the Clean Air Act, and the moral imperative of Pope Francis's encyclical, we can leave the world a better place than we found it. We have the tools to do it. Now we need to forge the political will.

I yield the floor.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source